Take Five With Tom Fenton

Take Five: 5 Must-See VMworld 2021 Sessions

From Project Monterey to the future of VM provisioning (Kubernetes), Tom Fenton shares the top five technologies he's interested in learning more about during the online-only VMworld event in October.

• By Tom Fenton
• 08/17/2021

VMworld 2021 will be held online Oct. 5-7, 2021. Although I love attending live events -- getting to meet up with old friends and make new ones -- having the event online allows those who haven't been able to travel to VMworld in the past to attend more easily; it is free, so cost is no longer a prohibiting factor.

There will be more than 800 sessions, and a multitude of vendors will be displaying their wares virtually. If you've been to VMworld before, you know the benefits of attending the show. If you have yet to attend, this is a great no-cost way to get a flavor of what VMworld has to offer, and to learn more about a VMware or related technology.

With that said, I combed through the content catalog to find my five must-see VMworld sessions. These sessions focus on the technologies I find most interesting.

• TAKE 1
  EUS3057S - Top 5 End-User Challenges and How ControlUp Can Help You Solve Them -- This is a must-attend session for me as I, along with my fellow ControlUp coworker, Trentent Tye will be presenting it! A few months ago, ControlUp took a survey of Horizon administrators to determine their biggest challenges, and in this session, we will discuss how ControlUp's family of products can help you solve these issues. I am most excited to talk about the challenge of the last 50 feet of connectivity, and Trentent has really interesting and useful demos on automated remediation.

• TAKE 2
  MCL1401 - Project Monterey: Present, Future and Beyond -- Project Monterey was announced at VMworld last year during the keynote and is a game changer for VMware as it allows another layer of abstraction in the datacenter; in this case, by virtualizing components such as SmartNICs and DPUs. I am very excited to see what plans VMware has for it.

• TAKE 3
  MCL1833 - 10 Things You Need to Know About Project Monterey -- This may seem similar to my #2 on this list, but the speaker in this session will demonstrate and discuss actual use cases for this technology.

• TAKE 4
  APP1564 - The Future of VM Provisioning -- Enabling VM Lifecycle Through Kubernetes -- I found this session especially enticing as it is about a new service built into VMware vSphere with VMware Tanzu and how Kubernetes APIs can be used to deploy, configure, and manage VM-based workloads.

• TAKE 5
  VI2477 Experts' Views on the New World of NVMe over TCP and Storage Services -- I have been bullish on NVMe over TCP for the last couple years, and this roundtable discussion with VMware and Dell employees should give me more insight into this interesting technology.

The General Pass for VMworld is free and includes general and breakout sessions, keynotes and Hands-on Lab (HOL) interactive simulations. If you want to participate in HOL guided workshops, Tech+ tutorials, and other special offerings, you will need the Tech+ Pass, which is $299.

Both the General and Tech+ passes with provide you with a 50 percent discount on VCTA certification exams, so this is an ideal time to up your certs and validity your VMware creed. You can sign up for your free VMworld pass here.