VMworld 2017 Content Catalog

The VMworld Content Catalog is now available to view. You can see it here and whether you’re a registered attendee, or looking to see what’s on the schedule, the Content Catalog will help you get an idea of your schedule!

The catalog is for getting an idea of the tracks and session types you might find interesting but you cannot create you your schedule yet. The schedule builder is where you will build out your schedule, hence the name, but this will not be available until July.

I have gone through the list and there is plenty to keep you busy but I thought I would offer some recommendations that are broken down by Market Segment.

Enterprise
200 to 40,000 VMs in 24 Months: Building Highly Scalable SDDC on Hybrid Cloud: Real-World Example
This session will provide a technical in depth review of how a real world large scale enterprise customer successfully designed and built a highly scalable hybrid cloud environment with the capability to scale up to 40,000 workloads in a short period of 24 months. 

Accelerate the Hybrid Cloud with VMware Cloud on AWS
VMware Cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS) brings VMware’s enterprise class software-defined data center software to the AWS cloud, and enables customers to run production applications across vSphere-based private, public, and hybrid cloud environments. Delivered, sold, and supported by VMware as an on-demand service, customers can also leverage AWS’s breadth of services including storage, databases, analytics and more. With the same architecture and operational experience on-premises and in the cloud, IT teams can now quickly derive value instant business value from use of the AWS and VMware hybrid cloud experience. Learn how VMware Cloud on AWS can power your business!

Automating Disaster Recovery Operations in the SDDC with SRM, vRealize Automation, and NSX
VMware Site Recovery Manager is the industry-leading solution for application availability and mobility across sites in vSphere-based private cloud environments. In this session, SRM Product Management together with Product Engineering will deliver a technical deep-dive on the benefits and integration capabilities in using SRM and vRealize Automation together with NSX. We will demonstrate how vRA natively utilizes SRM to allow customers to access Disaster Recovery protection services at time of workload provisioning and how Disaster Recovery operations are accelerated using NSX.

Build enterprise class secure and scalable Hybrid IT solutions with VMware and HPE using HPE Simplivity and HPE ProLiant platforms 
To build enterprise class Hybrid IT environments, users seek improved operational efficiency and automated policy-based provisioning to unify virtual and physical environments and deliver a cloud-like experience. Key areas of focus to deliver XaaS (Anything as a service) are: workload & data mobility, security & compliance, performance, ease of management being a few. In this session, you will learn how to build scalable Hybrid IT solutions and integrate your virtual and physical environments. We will discuss how HPE SimpliVity’s Data Virtualization Platform (DVP) can optimize data efficiency and migration between datacenters or clouds. You will also learn how to leverage tested blue prints to build private clouds leveraging existing datacenter investments and new technologies by integrating virtual and physical environments efficiently.

Deploying vSAN with VMware Private Cloud
VMware's internal private cloud is responsible for providing cloud infrastructure required by various groups within VMware to quickly deploy their workloads for production and development/test. It's required to provide enterprise-class reliability, availability and the ability to scale to thousands of VMs. This private cloud utilizes the full SDDC stack and vSAN is the software storage subsystem within the stack that provides infrastructure storage to the VMs/workloads within this cloud. This session will describe in detail the architecture of VMware's private cloud and will explain how vSAN is able to help the storage scale to support thousands of VMs including the benefits archived so far. For customers planning to deploy vSAN or SDDC stack in large-scale cloud deployments, this session will provide great information to get started.

SMB
A Base Design for Everyone’s Data Center: The Consolidated VMware Validated Design
Would you like to build a true software-defined data center (SDDC) but not sure if you have the resources for it? The team will explain new advances in the VMware Validated Design (VVD) that allow scaling options from moderate data center deployments of a handful of hosts, that if required can grow to a deployment used by some of VMware’s largest customers. Build your next data center with confidence and deep integration across VMware’s full SDDC stack. The new Consolidated VVD, known as the “1-pod” option, means organizations of any size can take advantage of cloud scale operations and management. We’ll dive into what makes this unique, how to scale and grow, and the design objectives and design decisions that will make you successful.

Deploying Security in a Brownfield Environment
This session will cover how VMware NSX can be deployed in an existing data center environment to address security use cases. The focus of the session will be on operationalizing the NSX distributed firewall and service insertion, best practices for creating a distributed firewall policy, and guidelines for migrating from an existing physical firewall to NSX. In this session, you will learn about how some of the new NSX 6.3 security features such as Application Rule Manager and Endpoint Monitoring can enable you to move your existing data center to a zero-trust model.

How to Upgrade to vSphere 6.5 with Zero Downtime
VMware IT upgraded its infrastructure of 140+ VMware vCenter servers, 3000 VMware vSphere servers, and 220,000 virtual machines from vSphere 6.0 to version 6.5, along with VMware NSX, VMware Site Recovery Manager, VMware vRealize Automation, VMware vCloud Director, and storage and backup solutions. We will review use cases for NSX, Site Recovery Manager, vRealize Automation, and backup solutions that are integrated with vSphere. We will also discuss the product deployment sequencing required before upgrading to vSphere 6.5 along with our challenges and some lessons we learned. We will discuss the architectural and technical considerations of one of the largest deployments of vSphere. Finally we will reveal how we automated much of the upgrade using the new upgrade APIs.

Manage Health, Performance, and Capacity in Your Data Center Using vSphere with Operations Management
VMware vSphere with Operations Management is the world’s most trusted virtualization and management platform and delivers unprecedented availability, efficiency, and performance for infrastructure and applications. It is designed so you can deliver value to your business from day 1, get better insights into your IT environment, and improve efficiency with automation while you retain control. During this session, we will provide details on how you can benefit from vSphere with Operations Management and why you absolutely, positively, must have it. We'll also give you a demo of the latest features and capabilities through various scenarios and use cases.

Healthcare
Case Study: Rapid City Regional Hospital Leverages VMware NSX to Provide Enhanced Security Around Their Electronic Medical Records System
The security concept of zero trust is changing the way that organizations think about protecting their data within the data center. Rapid City Regional Hospital (RCRH) is undertaking a process to switch out their current electronic medical record (EMR) platform and move towards the EpicCare EMR system. When they began planning the foundation for the infrastructure, security around healthcare records was a critical need for their business in order to protect their patient data. Using the VMware NSX platform and micro-segmentation—a technique that allows an organization to operationalize the zero-trust security posture easier and more cost effectively, RCRH was able to reduce the attack surface of their EpicCare EMR system faster and easier than traditional hardware approaches.

Deliver a dynamic virtual workspace with VMware Horizon and HPE’s Composable Infrastructure built on HPE Synergy & VMware Cloud Foundation
While advances in VMware Horizon technologies such as JMP, customers can deploy virtual desktops dynamically, there is still the need to provide this flexibility at the physical and virtual infrastructure level. In this session, we will cover technical architecture and use cases showcasing seamless delivery of VMware Horizon with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) with HPE Synergy platform. HPE Synergy composes compute, storage and networking into shared pools that, when combined with the workload domains within VMware Cloud Foundation, can be allocated on-demand to meet business requirements. We will also introduce architecturally how customers can deploy VCF with HPE Synergy to significantly speed up the infrastructure configuration process allowing a software driven approach for on-demand resource allocation.

Implementing NSX in a Healthcare Environment
Join us as we sit down with Jason Miller from Rapid City Regional Hospital, Nick Aguilar from Nebraska Medical, and VMware NSX Systems Engineer Geoff Wilmington to discuss their experiences with deploying NSX. Learn from our panelists as they discuss how they are protecting their environments with micro-segmentation and the organizational challenges they overcame for a successful implementation.

vSAN ReadyNode and Build Your Own Hardware Guidance 
VMware vSAN is a core building block of the software-defined data center and the leader in hyper-converged infrastructure. Over 200 vSAN ReadyNode options and numerous choices for building your own are available. In this session, we will provide insights into how vSAN is designed to handle different types of hardware platforms and the design principles used to qualify combinations of I/O controller, boot devices, cache, capacity tier devices (hard disk drives and solid state drives), and backplanes in the form of ReadyNode models. We will discuss in detail what you can (and cannot) change in a ReadyNode. We will talk about what new generation hardware looks like and its certification on vSAN. We will conclude by providing our partners and customers with a "cookbook" that simplifies selection of hardware for vSAN deployment.

Education
NSX Service Insertion: Platform for Advanced Networking and Security Services
VMware NSX provides a platform for bringing the industry’s leading networking and security solutions into the software-defined data center. By taking advantage of tight integration with the NSX platform, third-party products can not only deploy automatically as needed, but also adapt dynamically to changing conditions in the data center and beyond. This session will cover the NSX Service Insertion architecture for both network and guest introspection and address the use cases enabled by this functionality.

Sharing High-Performance Interconnects Across Multiple Virtual Machines: Machine Learning and Scientific Computing Use Cases 
Virtualized devices offer maximum flexibility: sharing of hardware between virtual machines, the use of VMware vMotion to handle migration and take snapshots. However, when performance is the most critical requirement there are other options. VMware Direct Path I/O delivers excellent performance, but only for a single virtual machine. Single root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV), on the other hand, offers the performance of passthrough mode while allowing devices to be shared by multiple virtual machines. This session introduces SR-IOV, explains how it is enabled in VMware vSphere, and provides details of specific use cases that important for machine learning and high-performance computing. It includes performance comparisons that demonstrate the benefits of SR-IOV and information on how to configure and tune these configurations.

vSAN Customer Panel
Lee Caswell, VP of Products, Storage, and Availability at VMware, will be hosting a panel discussion of VMware vSAN customers who have successfully deployed hyper-converged infrastructure in their environment for a variety of workloads. This customer panel will help you discover why they chose VMware hyper-converged infrastructure solutions, including the factors they considered as well as how they architected their vSAN environments.

State/Local Government
Digital Workspace and Security Transformation with VMware Workspace ONE and Hybrid Cloud
Follow the footsteps of VMware’s R&D, IT, and field CTO ambassadors from the Professional Services organization to get real-life insight into how mobility and identity use cases can be successfully deployed and scaled on the hybrid cloud via VMware Workspace ONE. The VMware PS design approach covers the planning, designing, deployment, and measurement process for successful IT and business outcomes. This session is relevant to a variety of industry verticals, including but not limited to financial, healthcare, education, point-of-sale, services, high-tech, manufacturing, hospitality, and others.

Honey, Where Are My Keys? Understanding and Avoiding Common Issues with Virtual Machine Encryption
Security measures should prevent unauthorized individuals from accessing your data, so how do you avoid mistakes that could also prevent authorized users from accessing data? In this session, we will provide some key troubleshooting methodologies to help you avoid common issues with implementing and managing virtual machine encryption.

VMware Validated Designs and Reference Architectures for the Software-Defined Data Center
Now it its fourth major release, the VMware Validated Designs for Software-Defined Data Center are a comprehensive and extensively tested blueprints for building and operating an SDDC. The designs synthesize all the elements of a complete SDDC into a standardized design that delivers a holistic data center–level approach to deploying and configuring the complete SDDC. It includes a wide range of use cases, along with detailed guidance on how to efficiently operate the SDDC. Group discussions guided by a VMware expert are a good way to come together with peers to discuss a key VMware topic selected by the group. Come to this session prepared to dive in, engage, and share best practices.