This year in a change to the normal schedule, we mere mortals are being allowed a chance to chose some sessions for VMworld. Can you feel the power of democracy at work. Now many who follow me on twitter @tom_howarth will be aware of my position on Cloudworld 2010, I personally believe that there is way too much focus on what is in reality just a marketing term. Anybody remember ASP in the ‘90’s and the Dot.com bubble ( just a little bit of history repeating…. ) sorry I digress, back to the task at hand 
Voting for what you want to see/hear at VMworld, first my election pitch.
Please vote for these sessions, I know they have Cody’s moniker on them or Adam Carter of HP, but they are mine and Cody’s submissions, I really do not understand why they have cocked that up, it must be easy to see who submitted the session :O
Title: Brownbag VCDX and VCP
Session Id: V17958
Abstract: The Brown Bag series, are an online VCP and VCDX study group providing support, advise and guidance to those on the journey. each session has a specific focus on a topic from either the Design exam or Enterprise exam blueprints. We prepose to run our session based on the new vSphere based exams
Type: Breakout Session
Track: Virtualization 101
Speaker Detail: Speaker: Cody Bunch Company: Rackspace
next
Title: Ask the vExperts
Session Id: TA7363
Abstract: “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”
Type: Panel Session
Track: Technology and Architecture
Speaker Detail: Speaker: Cody Bunch Company: Rackspace
and finally
Title: Storage superheavyweight challange
Session Id: TA8623
Abstract: Panel session to discuss all things Storage, panelled by some of the best known storage experts from the major vendors, including Chad Sakac (EMC) and Vaughn Stewart (NetApp)
Type: Panel Session
Track: Technology and Architecture
Speaker Detail: Adam Carter Company: Hewlett Packard
Now that is the self promotion over and done with. A little bit about voting strategy, many people have already stated this, but the fact remains, this voting is becoming a popularity contest, this is not how it should be, you should vote for those sessions that catch your eye. However this voting has like our recent UK general election become one of how visible and popular the candidates are, not about substance, that said, lets stop and think about that for a moment,
Why Exactly are the popular candidates popular?
My take: they are on the whole popular because they have interesting things to say, that said there are those that are popular purely because they are vocal, and actually do not bring that much to the party, :S difficult choices indeed, how do I decide? well voter that is between you and your conscience.
To help you along I have picked out a couple of interesting looking sessions based on their abstract, I hope I have not been swayed by the popular tag but nobody is perfect.
Virtualization 101:
- V18061:- Jon Hall’s – VMware Certified Advanced Professional Certifications Are Here
- V18268:- Eric Siebert’s – Deep Dive on Virtualization – How stuff works in virtualization
- V18364:- Maish Saidel-Keesing – ESX server deployment System
Technology & Architecture:
- TA6944:-Luc Dekens’ – PowerCLI is for administrators!
- TA8101:- Scott Lowe’s – Virtual Storage and VMware vSphere: Best Practices and Design Considerations
- TA7962:- Nick Weaver’s – Network Segmentation in a Virtualized Environment ñ Best Practices and Approaches
- TA8103:- John Arrasjid’s – Ask the vExperts
- TA8581:- Thomas Bryant – What is Normal? Performance baselining and remediation in VMware environments
- TA7305:- John Arrasjid – Preparing for the VCDX Panel Defense
- TA7886:- Simon Seagrave – Building a Successful vSphere Lab
Desktop Virt
- DV7580:- Eddie Blackwell’s – View 4 & ThinApp: Defense In-depth Against Malware, Viruses, & Rootkits
- DV7906:- Ken Cline’s – Spectacular failures, the top reasons why desktop virtualization projects wind up in the recycle bi…
- DV7122:- Ruben Spruijt – Best practices in Virtualizing Terminal Servers and Desktops VRC
Enterprise Applications
- EA7898:- Yavor Boychev’s – PowerCLI & Onyx
- EA7726:- Scott Drummonds’ – Crossing the Performance Barrier
- EA7723:- Steve Jin – Re-architecting Enterprise Applications for vSphere
- EA6706:- Chris Skinner – Implementing Certificate Authorities for vSphere 4
- EA8590:- Vaughn Stewart – Performance validation of running virtualized Exchange, SQL, and Oracle on traditional and deduplicated storage
Security
- SE8041:- Amir Ben-Efraim – Understanding and addressing the security and compliance challenges for the private cloud
- SE8266:- Prashant Gandhi – Securing the Virtualized Data Center with Nexus 1000V
- SE7709:- Marcelo Soares – Security solutions and VMsafe integration
Business Continuity
- BC7803:- Duncan Epping’s – Planning and Designing an HA Cluster That Maximizes VM Uptime
- BC7773:- Mike Laverick – VMware Site Recovery Manager: Misconception and Misconfigurations
- BC7793:- Gabrie van Zanten’s – Disaster Recovery the Dutch way: Cheap
- BC8645:- Scott Herold’s – Backing Up Your Virtual Environment, Best Practices
Management
- MA6840:- Maish Saidel-Keesing’s – vCenter Migration – It’s a Snap with POWERCLI
- MA8137:- Ravi Soundararajan’s – vCenter Best Practices
- MA7725:- Ed Haletky – vGhetto Scripts and Client: The Power of the vSphere SDK
Hybrid / Public Cloud
- PC7724:- Steve Jin’s – Building Do-It-Yourself PaaS Platform
- PC7561:-Ed Haletky – Digital Forensics within the Cloud