Weblog of Mark Vaughn, and IT professional and vExpert specializing in Enterprise Architecture, virtualization, web architecture and general technology evangelism

Tag: VMWorld

VMWorld 2012 Voting

It is that time again, and I am asking that you take a minute to vote on my submissions to VMWorld 2012. This year, I am focusing on End User Computing/VDI topics. I have worked on a number of VDI projects over the last year, and wanted to share some of those experiences with the community. In particular, I wanted to focus on VDI in education. Having worked on both commercial and education implementations of virtual desktop environments, there are key differentiators that can seriously impact the success of VDI in educational deployments.

My first session is “Tyler ISD: One Year Later” (session 2812). Tyler Independent School District is a large K-12 school district in East Texas, and a well respected leader in educational technology. John Orbaugh, the Tyler ISD Director of Technology, serves on a number of technology boards and committees, as well as presenting at conferences and other technology events. Just over a year ago, Tyler began deploying Phase One of a very aggressive VDI project. In Phase One, 2,500 VMware View seats were deployed on a VCE Vblock. Over the last school year, some conditions changed, software conflicts were discovered and rapid growth led to performance concerns. In this session, John and I will discuss these issues, their impact, how they were addressed, and how they impact future phases of their VDI initiative that will take their user count from 2,500 to over 15,000. This is a great session for anyone thinking about or preparing to deploy VDI within an educational environment.

My second session is “VDI in Education” (session 2872). In this session, Chris Reed and I will discuss the many nuances involved in designing and deploying VDI within an educational environment. Chris and I have each worked on a number of VDI project in both commercial and educational environments. For this session, we will focus on how educational deployments differ from commercial deployments, and how even higher education may differ from a K-12 deployment. This will address all aspects of the project lifecycle from technology selection, to budgeting and funding considerations, through to technical design and final implementation. Each step along the way has unique challenges when applied to educational institutions, and knowing how to effectively account for these challenges can improve the effectiveness of your future deployments.

Another session that I would recommend is Steve Kaplan’s session “Virtual Desktops: The Gateway to the Cloud” (session 1446). Steve is a very gifted speaker and is extremely knowledgeable. Steve has authored several books and speaks at large conferences and technology events all over the United States.

How To Vote:
To vote, go to: http://www.vmworld.com/www.vmworld.com/cfp.jspa. You will have the option to sign in either using an existing VMWorld account or to create a new VMWorld account.

Once signed in, click on the “Filter Options” button above the sessions on the right-hand side. Simply type the word “vaughn” into the “Keywords” field and click on the Submit button. There you will find my sessions (#2812 and #2872). Please click on the “thumbs up” icon to register a vote for these sessions.

While you are there, I would also recommend the sessions with Chad Sakac of EMC and Vaughn Stewart of NetApp. I am in the vExpert program with both Chad and Vaughn, they are not only experts in storage but also excellent presenters. You leave one of their sessions entertained, well informed, and almost unaware of the fact that they work for competing storage vendors.

After that, go back to the filter options and type “Kaplan” into the Keyword field to find Steve Kaplan’s session and vote for that as well. In fact, you can type “Presidio” into the Keyword field and find sessions from myself, Steve Kaplan and some of our other colleagues at Presidio. Your votes are greatly appreciated, and I will see you at VMWorld!

vExpert 2010

First, I am humbled and honored to have been a vExpert in 2009. As the year went on, and I got to know more of my fellow vExperts, I was in awe of the people that I was sharing this title with. In fact, it inspired me to work even harder and to put more effort into be an active member of the virtualization community.

That being said, I am amazed to once again receive the vExpert award for 2010. I look forward to learning from my fellow vExperts, as they are a truly talented group of people. I have yet to meet a vExpert that was not both highly talented and eager to assist. In fact, that is why they are vExperts.

Some of you may be asking, what is a vExpert? VMware describes it like this:

The VMware vExpert Award is given to individuals who have significantly contributed to the community of VMware users over the past year.

The criteria for vExpert selection are value to the community, technical merit, effectiveness, professionalism, reach and effort. The group is full of authors, bloggers, technology leaders and a wide range of highly skilled individuals. Again, I am humbled to have been grouped with these people.

Being a vExpert led me to become more involved in sharing my opinions and contributing to discussions via twitter. I also launched this blog site and began writing for Tech Target. In these pursuits I received a lot of input and advice from fellow vExperts like Steve KaplanDavid Davis and Scott Lowe. Those names stand out, but so many others have contributed to helping me grow. John Troyer, the driving force within VMware that launched the vExperts and a number of other programs, worked very hard to add value to this program last year. John is promising even more from the coming year and I cannot wait to see what that will look like.

To all of my fellow 2009 vExperts, thank you so much for your encouragement and assistance, it was an honor to share that title with you. To my fellow 2010 vExperts, congratulations! I am honored to be in your company and I look forward to getting to know you better as the year goes on.

VMWorld 2010 – Please Vote

Public voting for VMWorld 2010 will be live through May 26, so please make sure you stop by, review the submissions and vote for the ones that you would like to see. This year, VMware received a record number of submissions, and will be using a model of fewer high quality sessions with more repeat opportunities to attend. With more people competing for fewer slots, your opinion is even more important. To vote, go to:

http://www.vmworld.com/community/conferences/2010/cfpvote/

As a shameless plug, here is a rundown of the sessions that I am involved in. I have presented at the last 3 VMWorld conferences, and am very passionate about the topics I have submitted this year (due to a flaw that only shows one presenter per session, my name will not appear as presenter on some of these tracks on the voting site).

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Tech & Architecture – PC8279 From Guessing to Knowing: An Effective Architecture
http://www.vmworld.com/community/conferences/2010/cfpvote/hapcloud

This is a great session that I have worked on with Michael Mannarino from VMware’s Professional Services Organization. We will walk you through a sound approach to designing an environment where decisions are based on defensible data and where every business requirement is mapped to a design element. As organizations prepare to expand virtualization further into their environment, or even to develop cloud computing strategies, they not only need to be able to solidify their requirements and practices, but they must know how to measure and enforce compliance. By breaking available resources (memory, cpu, storage, etc) into units of allocation, this approach assists organizations in better understanding how business requirements impact the ratio of raw capacity to usable capacity.

  • Mark Vaughn
  • Michael Mannarino

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Tech & Architecture – TA8351 Linux P2V Hurdles and How To Overcome Them
http://www.vmworld.com/community/conferences/2010/cfpvote/tarchitecture

This session breaks down the tools available for Linux P2V migrations, and the caveats to each one. In the Linux world, there are a number of “gotchas” in the P2V process, and many failures are actually near misses that can be quickly repaired in a few easy steps. I have 14 years of Unix/Linux experience and over 4 years of experience with Linux on VMware.

  • Mark Vaughn

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First American Virtualizes WebLogic Server in Production – Lessons Learned and Best Practices
http://www.vmworld.com/community/conferences/2010/cfpvote/eapplications

Between Troy and myself, we have over 24 years of java experience, with a large portion of that on the WebLogic Server. In addition to being a VCP3 and VCP4, I am also a WebLogic Certified Administrator. Troy is both an administrator and developer with a very deep knowledge of java from any angle. In this session, we evaluate an environment that has run on WebLogic Server for over 10 years, with more than 3 years of that being on VMware.

  • Mark Vaughn
  • Troy Washburn

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Tech & Architecture – TA7363 Ask the vExperts
http://www.vmworld.com/community/conferences/2010/cfpvote/tarchitecture

The Traditional panel of leading Virtualisation experts who will be quizzed and squeezed for their knowledge. There will be 4 to 5 panellists and a moderator to lead the session and questions will be asked from the floor. The format will be free flowing and and virtualization topic will be covered. As per the successful panel as VMworld 2009, requests for questions will be issues prior to the conference to enable fillers during quiet times. Not all personal will be at both conferences

  • Tom Howarth (submitter)
  • Chad Sakac
  • Scott Lowe
  • Cody Bunch
  • Jason McCarty
  • Ken Cline
  • Mark Vaughn

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Virtualization 101 – V18354 Virtualization Advice From vExperts
http://www.vmworld.com/community/conferences/2010/cfpvote/v101

A panel of industry experts will discuss virtualization technologies, cloud computing, business strategies, architectural design considerations and overall best practices related to virtualization. Discussion topics will include: the business case for virtualization, virtualization technologies and their strengths/weaknesses, design challenges in a virtualized environment, and horizontal vs vertical design of a virtualization platform. This session will also include opportunities for quesitons from the public.

  • Mark Vaughn
  • Simon Gallagher
  • Joachim Heppner
  • David Convery

VMWorld 2010 Content Selection process

The process of selecting sessions for VMWorld 2010 is rolling along, and registrations is now open for both the US and European conferences. With virtualization and cloud computing being the hot technologies on every business’ radar for 2010, it is no surprise that this year brought in a record number of submissions for the VMWorld 2010 Call for Papers.

Changes

For anyone familiar with the content selection process for previous VMWorld conferences, there are three changes to be aware of this year. First, there will be no registering for sessions. The process of registering for sessions has always ended in popular sessions being overbooked, with people waiting in lines with the hopes of snagging some space to stand in the back of the room or simply being turned away.

This brings us to the second change, fewer unique sessions. With a record number of submissions and no registration for sessions, why lower the number of unique sessions? Good question. The goal is to have higher quality sessions, and more repeats to insure everyone gets a chance to attend them. Hopefully, this will lead to fewer lines and more opportunities to catch the sessions that matter the most. If you are like me, you have been in the situation where some time slots on the session agenda had nothing of interest for you, while other time slots had multiple items and you could only pick one. With the new approach, I hope that I will not be faced with those difficult choices this year.

The final change is one I think everyone will like. In each track, a percentage of sessions have been allocated for selection through online voting. Track Owners will be soliciting feedback from the Content Committee and selecting their portion of sessions, then the remaining submissions will be opened up to the public for online review and voting. I think this is a great idea, giving people a chance to provide input on what they want to attend at VMWorld.

Process

Here is a quick breakdown on the process for selecting this year’s content.

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CORRECTION: final emails will now go out week of June7, not June 2 as originally stated.

April 9 – Call for Papers Ends
Originally set for April 2, the Call for Papers was extended to April 9. This process is for the non-paid sessions at VMWorld. Vendors and partners can purchase sponsorship packages that come with paid sessions for promoting their services, but this process is for the non-paid sessions, so all content is supposed to be focused on business and technical value instead of selling products or services. To allow the Track Owners more control over their tracks, filtering of marketing content and incomplete submissions are only lightly applied at this point.

April 19-30 – Content Committee Voting
The Content Committee is selected from a cross-section of customers, partners and VMware employees. This committee will review, rank and leave comments for a particular track(s) of content. Each submission is ranked on a scale of 1-5. If necessary, they can also work with the Track Owner to request additional information from a submission owner to better understand their content and the message they hope to convey.

May 3-7 – Initial Session Selections
At this stage, the Track Owners will use the feedback from the Content Committee to aid in selecting a predefined portion of their total conference sessions. After Track Owners make their initial selections, another round of filtering will take place. Submissions that are too heavily geared towards marketing, that are incomplete or that fail to line up with the conference tracks are eliminated. This leaves a selection of good content for the public voting.

May 14-26 – Public Voting on vmworld.com
Remaining sessions will be made available for public voting on the vmworld.com website. If you do not already have an account here, you can set one up for free. You will be able to review session content and vote on what you think would be the most valuable material for VMWorld.

May 31-June 4 – Final Session Selections
The public votes will be tabulated and used to fill the remaining track sessions for VMWorld 2010.

Week of June 7 – Notifications Sent to Submitters
Good or bad, this is when submitters will learn their fate. You cannot cheat and assume that if you content was not available during the public voting that it was selected in Initial Session Selections (I already checked on that), because of the two filtering steps that take place prior to the public voting. The week of June 7 will truly be your first chance to find out the fate of your submission.

Let The Games Begin

I personally reviewed 275 submissions in the “Private Cloud – Management” track. I found very few that were not good, and many that were great. I do not envy the Track Owners that have to narrow this list down, but I do look forward to a second chance to vote during the public voting. I am excited about the changes, and I cannot wait to see the final session list. I think these changes will make for a better experience, I just hope my submissions can make it through this more difficult selection process.

NOTE: I updated this post to reflect that final notices will be sent to submitters the week of June 7, not on June 2 as originally stated. Public voting also moved to start on May 14.

For more information on VMWorld, follow @vmworld on twitter, visit the VMWorld website or visit the VMWorld Community Discussion page.

VMWorld Session Submission Tips

I have seen some inquiries on twitter and message boards asking for tips on submitting a paper for VMWorld 2010. As a presenter at the last few VMworld conferences, and a former contributor to the content selection committee, I came up with these tips.

Disclaimer: Several of my presentations were spawned through beta participation, with me providing the user perspective. In that sense, I did not have to submit proposals for my presentations in 2007 and 2008. In other words, I am sure that there are others with more experience than me at submitting a paper for a conference session, to VMWorld or any other public conference, so please take this as a starting point for the conversation. I hope others will contribute more tips so this list will grow in value. I have already incorporated one or two points from Chris Harney and Joachim Heppner that were offered in another discussion thread.

  • Most important – PICK A TOPIC THAT YOU ARE PASSIONATE ABOUT.
  • Review VMware’s “Call for Papers Guide
  • Don’t hit them with 30 slides, but 2-4 that cover your main points in bullets. It is expected that you will “beef up” the slide deck later if accepted.
  • Be sure to address the benefits some one would walk away with after attending your session
  • Plan out your submission, don’t just log in and fill out bios and descriptions.
  • Put in a very good description, trying to be brief and to the point. You may want to work on a few drafts of your description to get it right.
  • If you are a vendor, find a user to partner with. If you are a user, find another user or a vendor to partner with. This adds value and can potentially combine two sessions into one that will draw more people.
  • Have a catchy title (a little cheese can be tolerated here, just make sure it helps catch attention and does not turn people off). Reviewers are looking through hundreds of submissions, you may lose them if your title does not catch their attention.
  • Highlight any previous speaking experience in your bio, give them some assurance that you will be able to present well.
  • If you have never presented before, team with someone else that has. Best way to get experience without getting thrown to the wolves…it also lends experience to help get approved if you don’t have that on you own.
  • Don’t just say you want to discuss a topic (i.e. “virtualization”), show how you will add value and bring something new to the conversation
  • Look to Gartner/Forrester/other analyst top 10 market priorities and try to hit some of those topics. No guarantees, but that is an indicator of what people are looking for. DO NOT LET THIS LIMIT YOU – some of these topics are overhyped and talked to death.

There you go, my short list of submission tips. Please leave comments, I know there is more/better advice out there to be given.