With each new year there is further growth in the field of virtualization and new products/features are released. When it comes to showcasing the announcements, there is no better platform than VMWorld.

This year however, the focus is slightly different from my perspective – for e.g. There will be no major product release announcements and no big bang approaches – vSphere 6 was launched last year so it makes sense that Vmware might actually improve feature set and add new functionality. I am specifically seeing the adoption of Cloud channel into a more sustainable approach of hybrid infrastructure deployments. The likes of which include working with NSX, storage volumes (vVOLs), automation enhancements, and possibly replication enhancements. The focus as usual will also be in the field of EUC – with Horizon going maintstream.

I am personally looking forward to attending a few special sessions – one of which is and will always be about Performance. The Performance series sessions are always popular because technology keeps changing and the performance measurement tools and feature set also evolves. A critical piece of the Performance measurement is going to be around scripting – and PowerCLI has plenty of potential to do a lot for many organizations. It would be nice to see if some of the functionality that PowerCLI or PowerShell provides is embedded within the upcoming vSphere update or not. It has been a long lasting demand of VMKware customers to have some PowerCLI scripts as part of the graphic interface.

Now, HTML 5 has definitely helped ease the frustration with the web client but the client was always a winner. I am not sure what part of the client software was disliked by Vmware product engineers that they forced users to adopt web client. Maybe maintaining multiple client instances was a pain and I can fully understand if that was the case.

The conference is never complete without the ritual Hands on Lab (HOL) sessions. If you are a techie attending VMWorld but do not participate in the HOL sessions then there is something you lose out on – because later on, our work keeps us so busy that there is no time to do the labs. I have always made it a point to run through some important labs and ensure that I receive the practical understanding of some technologies or functionality. The  amount of effort that supports the labs is mind boggling and high end infrastructure really facilitates the labs. So for the lab setup effort – a big thank you to VMware engineers.

Of particular highlight is the ‘Meet the Experts’ sessions – these get full very quickly so booking the sessions early is important. As usual, the townhall sessions by the likes of Duncan Epping, Rawlinson Rivera, Chad Sakac, Chris Wahl are very interesting. We can actually ask questions directly to them and some very creative and deepful insights can be offered by the panel.

I am personally passionate about storage as much as I am about virtualization. To go to Vmworld and not talk about storage is a real loss personally speaking so I am going to learn about some new vendors out there and check out what is happening in the storage world. It’s not that we don’t know about it but everyone has new announcements at Vmworld so booth hopping is very helpful.

On Sunday, I will be starting with the labs, playing for the v0dgeball charity event, and then capping it off with a dinner followed by attending the VMUnderground event.  The rest of the week is crazy so I will follow-up with blog posts on sessions and other key topics of interest to me and as I acquire more knowledge on them.