vSphere Tech Sessions at VMware Explore

Breakouts, Tutorials, and Meet-the-Experts

With Explore in Las Vegas approaching, and the catalogue now live, I wanted to draw your attention to some of the vSphere-specific technical session we’ll have at the show.  Make sure to add them to your favorites after registration to get the latest and most detailed technical information, specific to vSphere and vSphere announcements.

Yes, these are the tech sessions – all delivered by VMware employees telling you about our software!

General vSphere Tech Sessions

These are the top sessions about 'core vSphere', our latest announcements, best practices, tips and tricks and more.

10 Big New Benefits of vSphere That You Absolutely Need to Know [CEIB1139LV]

Yes, this is the VMware vSphere session you’ve been looking for. vSphere is the enterprise workload platform that ushers in the era of heterogeneous computing by bringing DPUs into the fold along with CPUs and GPUs—making the future of modern infrastructure accessible to all enterprises. vSphere unleashes key innovations to help customers supercharge workload performance, accelerate innovation for DevOps teams, improve operational efficiency and IT productivity, and bring the benefits of the cloud to their on-premises infrastructure. Join us to get the latest and greatest on what’s new with vSphere. We will give you an overview of the top capabilities of vSphere that matter most for you, as well as technical details with the newest demos, and cover 10 new and exciting things about vSphere that you absolutely need to know.

Himanshu Singh, Director, Cloud Platform, VMware

Ken Werneburg, Director of Technical Marketing, VMware

 

60 Minutes of NUMA - A CPU is not a CPU anymore [CODEB2761LV]

Recently both AMD and Intel made their flagship Server CPUs available, the AMD EPYC and the 4th generation of the Intel Xeon Scalable Processor. Both follow a similar paradigm of the multi-chip, multi-tile module design, impacting kernel scheduling and workload sizing to work around the application expectation of a CPU subsystem. Besides the traditional deep dive of NUMA scheduling, we will discuss the new vSphere 8 functionality solving the age-old question, how many cores per socket? We will show real-life data on NUMA-locality's importance for a Machine Learning\HPC application that runs on GPUs. We will look at the latest CPU architecture developments, such as the Sapphire Rapids' new onboard accelerators, which can help you guide your data center hardware refresh. Join me as we dive into this exciting and critically important space.

Frank Denneman, Chief Technologist, VMware

 

vSphere Automation Solutions – PowerCLI vs. Terraform [CODEB2862LV]

vSphere automation has always been a hot topic for customers that support large virtual environments. Automation through scripting, mostly by using PowerShell and PowerCLI, has been the preferred automation option for our customers for a long time. Lately, Infrastructure as code (IaC) solutions like Terraform have gained popularity among virtual infrastructure administrators. Join this session to learn the differences between the two automation models, the advantages and disadvantages of each one of them, and start getting the best of both worlds. We have prepared some interesting demos for specific tasks that you can complete with PowerCLI and Terraform. These demos will help you understand the specifics of each automation tool better.

Kamen Nikolov, R&D Manager, VMware

 

How to Architect and Accelerate Oracle on VMware Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Environments [CEIM1817LV]

Bring your questions and concerns to this ask-me-anything session about running business-critical Oracle workloads on a VMware platform. This includes migration from a non-VMware platform to a VMware platform, configuration, performance tuning, best practices, licensing, workload challenges, design, and so on. Have a deep dive with the VMware SME on hybrid cloud and multi-cloud environments.

Sudhir Balasubramanian, Sr. Staff Solution Architect – Oracle Lead, VMware

 

Keep the Attackers Out: Infrastructure Security Hardening and Auditing [CEIB1975LV]

Protecting IT infrastructure components from attacks and ransomware is different than protecting workloads. There are ways to use the security features built into VMware vSphere+ to harden an environment against attacks while also keeping it easy for IT staff to do their jobs and make compliance audits faster, too. Join us as we talk about these design and implementation strategies from a technical perspective, from the hardware all the way up to the workloads.

Bob Plankers, Staff Technical Marketing Architect, VMware

Joshua Solomin, Sr. Product Line Manager, VMware

 

Ask Me Anything About vSphere [CEIM2640LV]

Meet the expert(s) on VMware vSphere in general. Get your questions answered on all things upgrade and lifecycle, certification management, configuration management, VM encryption, vSphere vMotion, vSphere with VMware Tanzu, and more.

Féidhlim O’Leary, Senior Technical Marketing Architect, VMware

 

Easy vSphere Lifecycle and Configuration Management with vSphere and vSphere+ [CEIB2638LV]

In this session, you will learn how VMware vSphere Lifecycle Manager makes updating and patching operations easier and simpler with a desired state image for your on-premises hosts and clusters. With a few clicks, you can apply full-stack firmware updates with a recommended image or simply apply host configurations cluster-wide with vSphere Configuration Profiles. By utilizing vSphere Lifecycle Manager as a service, you can further enhance your vSphere lifecycle management experience by showing current states of your entire vSphere inventory whether they are in data centers or edges. You will learn how to plan, prepare, precheck and roll out updates to your entire fleet from a single pane in vSphere+. You can apply desired configurations to multiple clusters and VMware vCenter instances, and view drifts across your fleet through the new configuration as a service with vSphere+.\

Rupesh Shimkhada, Product Manager, VMware

Shanthala Gorur Ashwath, Product Line Manager, VMware

 

Modernize with Confidence: Harness the Strength of the VMware Cloud Platform [CEIB1621LV]

This session talks about how to modernize your applications with VMware’s best practices and deploy an enterprise-ready Kubernetes runtime to empower the delivery of modern, containerized apps across on-premises, public cloud, and edge environments.

Christian Rauber, Staff Solutions Architect, VMware

KK Wong, Staff Solutions Architect, VMware

 

AI & ML on vSphere

Accelerating Machine Learning in the Data Center [CEIB1521LV]

Machine learning (ML) is an exciting new area and the fastest growing technology in the world. ChatGPT and large language models (LLMs) have brought ML into the mainstream. However, LLMs place very high demand on your infrastructure and require constant refactoring and the ability to scale. To be successful, an agile infrastructure is required. VMware streamlines and automates the deployment of GPU-accelerated ML workloads on both Kubernetes and VMs with bare-metal performance. The VMware platform shortens time to value for ML applications by providing agility and reducing operational complexity, allowing you to move from development to production quickly. Come see the latest innovations that will streamline and accelerate production ML in your organization.

Justin Murray, Staff Technical Marketing Architect, VMware

Shawn Kelly, Sr. Staff Solutions Engineer, VMware

 

Machine Learning Accelerator Deep Dive [M1849LV]

In this Meet the Expert session, you can ask all your questions about deploying machine learning workload and the challenges around accelerators. When do I use CPU resources, what about NUMA relation, when do I use passthrough, and what benefit has NVIDIA AI Enterprise? What's the difference between MIG and time-sliced, and how can I avoid cluster defragmentation in certain scenarios? Join me as we dive into this exciting and critically important space.

Frank Denneman, Chief Technologist, VMware 

 

vSphere+ and Cloud Connected Services for vSphere

10 Amazing Innovations in vSphere+ to Accelerate Your Cloud Transformation [CEIB1138LV]

You trust VMware vSphere to run your business-critical workloads, whether on-premises or in the cloud. Your on-premises apps get the benefits of economics, locality, performance, latency and more, but they can benefit significantly from innovations available in the cloud. Moreover, in a distributed environment, your IT teams have to manage in siloes, which can be challenging and inefficient. And your developers and DevOps teams need all the support they can get to drive up productivity and velocity to market. Join this session and learn how VMware vSphere+, the multi-cloud workload platform, can help transform your on-premises infrastructure and your business by delivering the benefits of cloud services without disrupting your workloads.

Dave Morera, Staff Technical Marketing Architect, VMware

Glen Simon, Product Line Marketing Manager, VMware

 

Lifecycle Management Across Clouds: The VM Service and Cloud Consumption Interface [CEIB1068LV]

VMware’s approach to modern applications uses the Kubernetes API for VMware vSphere to expose compute, networking and storage along with services to manage the lifecycle of VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid clusters and virtual machines (VM Service). The Cloud Consumption Interface abstracts the Kubernetes API across vSphere clusters and VMware vCenter instances by providing cloud-level constructs, such as projects and regions, enabling developer automation without the need to understand the underlying infrastructure. This deep-dive session will explore how VM Service provides alignment with developer automation to build custom VM images and deploy VM instances configured natively through Cloud-init. We will also show how VI admins can pool infrastructure resources into cloud regions, then assign devs to projects to enable advanced automation in a true cloud experience.

Michael West, Staff Technical Marketing Architect, VMware

Jeremy Wolf, Product Line Manager, VMware

 

Unveiling VMware Cloud: Expert Insights on the Why, What and How [CEIM2689LV]

Customers who are curious to understand more about VMware Cloud can talk to experts to understand the why, what and how of the solution.

Chandra Prathuri, Sr. Director of Product Management, VMware

Siddharth Pande, Sr. Director of Product Management, VMware

 

Tutorial

Extreme Performance Series: Performance Best Practices [CEIT1319LV]

Are users complaining of poor application performance? Demanding more resources to compensate? Do you know where to start looking for issues? Are you confident you have the right configuration in place? Attend this breakout session, delivered by VMware’s most experienced performance gurus, to answer these questions and more. This session will explain the most important performance practices that need to be applied across the stack, from application to hardware. Based on real customer case studies, the goal of this session is to empower you to identify the most common performance issues and remediate them by applying best practices. Leave with the tools, methodologies, configurations and confidence you can provide maximum performance to all your users and their applications. #xPerfSeries

Mark Achtemichuk, Performance Specialist, VMware

Valentin Bondzio, Sr. Staff TSE, VMware