Talk Nerdy to me & Updates at VMworld

It’s that time of year again. It’s VMworld time! Hopefully you’ve taken advantage of the fact that it’s free!!! Yup, it costs your nothing, zero, zip, zilch to attend. So, if you haven’t registered, get over to VMworld.com and get registered. If you don’t register I won’t talk nerdy to you!

This year VMworld is a virtual event again and that’s fine. I want everyone to be safe. Until our friends can join us that probably the best way to do a conference, and I want my friends from all over the world to be able to join in person. So if it’s another year of sitting at my desk in zooms till the wee hours of the morning, I’m ok with that and hopefully you’ll join us.

Aside from getting together with friends there are many things I really enjoy about VMworld. Of course there are the labs and all the new announcements. There is also just the sheer volume of knowledge that is being shared, and I know what you’re thinking… “You’ll go back and catch the videos later.” After all it all per-recorded content.

Let’s talk about both going back to watch later and content being per-recorded. We both know that you’re not going to find the time to go back and watch conference content later. I still have conference content from VMworld 2013 that I haven’t caught up on yet. You probably won’t go back and catch up on them either. So what I do, is block that time off in my calendar, set my IM status to do not disturb, and plan to avoid answering calls or emails. I explain to folks this is my (and their) opportunity to keep up to date and relevant in the field of virtualization.

Now let’s talk about per-recorded sessions. It’s true that some sessions are being per-recorded this year, like vBrownbag Tech Talks, others aren’t. I’ve only seen a few tech talks where there has been time for questions and where anyone has questions to ask. Most of the time you watch the session and then catch the presenter when they walk off stage. Having sessions live versus recorded is really minor to me. I plan on watching even if I know they are per-recorded. Won’t you join me?

In fact a few weeks ago I per-recorded session VMTN2835, it’s a vBrownbag session where I talk about new updates to my VDI by day compute by night script. (I’ll link to my update blog once VMworld is under way.) If you’re interested in working with vGPUs in PowerCLI it’s definitely something to catch.

There are several advancements that have been made that I talk about in the session. For example I talk about changes in 7.0 U2 and their impact to the scripts as well as how those have been addressed in these latest set of scripts. If your organization is even sort of interested in getting more use out of your VDI environment, you probably want to catch this session. Besides you already know where to find me afterwords to ask questions.

I’m guessing those updates aren’t the VMworld updates you were expecting… I wouldn’t want to spill the beans on anything cool in the works for VMworld. Regardless, there are going to be some really good updates coming out of VMworld.

Along those lines, something you may want to start brushing up on is AI/ML in virtual environments. Yeah you can run AI/ML workloads as VMs, it works, I’ve been evangelizing it since 2017… As a mater of fact NVIDIA had a big announcement about NVIDIA AI Enterprise platform for running AI in a virtual environment a few days ago. (BTW, just in case you missed it and in the interest of full disclosure, I work for Dell.)

If you’re really into running AI workloads in a virtual environment (and who isn’t?) Join me for my live VMworld {Code} session, CODE2778, where I’ll talk nerdy about using python to automate the creation of AI/ML VMs with vGPUs. We’re going to construct python code that will allow admins to create VMs with vGPUs. One of the things that is common with AI VMs is the need to have multiple vGPUs in a single VM. Not only will we delve into how to add multiple vGPUs, we’re going to talk about the other things you need to be aware of for multiple vGPUs to work. Sounds like a VMworld session you don’t want to miss.

That said, if you code, and I’m sure you do, you don’t want to miss VMware {code} at VMworld. Which is an entire program track geared towards programmers. Last years VMware {code} conference was stellar and from talking with the {code} team, this year is going to be just as good. If you want to see all of the {Code} sessions in the VMworld Content Catalog expand the “session type” option and then select “VMware {code} .

You maybe curious what are my picks for sessions to catch at VMworld. You probably guessed VMware {code} session and here are some of my other picks that I don’t want to miss.

Just in case you can’t guess, there’s a lot of stuff happening around AI at VMworld this year. My list is evidence of that. Searching the catalog there are, at the time of this writing, 23 sessions that have NVIDIA in their abstract or title. I think this is the most number of sessions I’ve seen around NVIDIA and GPUs.

Hopefully all of this is a pretty good reason to attend VMworld this year. It looks like there are going to be a lot of top quality sessions and a chance to learn a lot of new information. Hopefully you will see me in some of the social areas and are able to say hi. I look forward to seeing you there. Now go register if you haven’t!

May your servers keep running and your data center always be chilled.

August 27, 2021