What Does Stratodesk Have Planned for VMworld 2016? 

As part of VMblog's live VMworld 2016 coverage coming up in less than two weeks, we're in the process of working up our schedules to make sure we can see and learn as much as possible when the show kicks off.  And we're extremely excited to visit the Solutions Expo this year.  But with so many vendors exhibiting, how do you know which booths to visit and who to get on your schedule?

One of the companies on our "must see" list this year is Stratodesk.  Perhaps you know them best by their polar bear logo?  These guys started back in 2010 with a focus on hardware agnostic thin client software and PC repurposing solutions.  The company partners with many industry leaders in the virtualization and server-based computing world, companies such as: VMware, Citrix, Dell, Cortado, HP and more.  The company's flagship product is called "NoTouch Desktop."  More about the company:

Stratodesk's signature product is NoTouch Desktop. Stratodesk's mission is to provide the most powerful and simple to use endpoint OS for VMware, Citrix and other VDI environments and a centralized endpoint management solution. NoTouch Desktop works on any kind of old and new desktop hardware (PCs, Laptops, Thin Client devices) and offer more security, better and easier client management, increased reliability and lower total cost of ownership to companies of all sizes. Stratodesk is led by an excellent management team, has a history and a tremendous track-record as a first-class supplier for enterprises as well as small business.

Read our exclusive pre-show interview with Stratodesk to learn what they have planned for the upcoming VMworld 2016 event.

What Does StorMagic Have Planned for VMworld 2016? 

As part of VMblog's live VMworld 2016 coverage coming up in a few weeks, we're in the process of working up our schedules to make sure we can see and learn as much as possible when the show kicks off.  And we're extremely excited to visit the Solutions Expo this year.  But with so many vendors exhibiting, how do you know which booths to visit and who to get on your schedule?

One of the companies on our "must see" list this year may be new to some VMblog readers -- StorMagic.  However, this company has been around for quite some time, founded in 2006 by two experienced storage entrepreneurs... they had a vision to find the simplest, most cost-effective way to manage storage infrastructure through software.  More about the company:

StorMagic delivers innovative software-defined storage solutions that empower organizations to virtualize their storage and deliver very significant improvements in flexibility, efficiency and performance. Organizations using SvSAN range from small enterprises with one location to some of the world's largest corporations with SvSAN installed in thousands of sites. We give our customers, large and small, the flexibility to customize and optimize their hardware architecture to meet their specific application and data needs. We make it simple for them to centrally manage and scale their data storage architecture, so that they can focus on running their business.

Read our exclusive pre-show interview with StorMagic to learn what they have planned for the upcoming VMworld 2016 event.

What Does Unitrends Have Planned for VMworld 2016? 

As part of VMblog's live VMworld 2016 coverage coming up in a few weeks, we're in the process of working up our schedules to make sure we can see and learn as much as possible when the show kicks off.  And we're extremely excited to visit the Solutions Expo!  But with so many vendors exhibiting, how do you know which booths to visit and who to get on your schedule?

One of the companies on my "must see" list is Unitrends.  They are a market leader when it comes to enterprise-level cloud-empowered business continuity solutions.  And if you want to get to know them better, you could always try out their free backup and recovery software being provided to the virtualization community.  Unitrends Free is free backup software that quickly deploys as a virtual appliance in VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V environments.  More about the company:

Unitrends delivers award-winning business recovery solutions for any IT environment. The company’s portfolio of virtual, physical, and cloud solutions provides adaptive protection for organizations globally. To address the complexities facing today’s modern data center, Unitrends delivers end-to-end protection and instant recovery of all virtual and physical assets as well as automated disaster recovery testing built for virtualization.

Read our exclusive pre-show interview with Unitrends to learn what they have planned for the upcoming VMworld 2016 event.

What Does SolarWinds Have Planned for VMworld 2016? 

As part of VMblog's live VMworld 2016 coverage coming up in a few weeks, we're in the process of working up our schedules to make sure we can see and learn as much as possible when the show kicks off.  VMworld is the leading virtualization event, and there is no shortage of great information coming out of the keynotes, the breakout sessions, the networking and more.  But every year, one of the key places to learn a lot in a short amount of time is the Solutions Expo where valuable vendors from the VMware ecosystem and beyond set up shop to display their wares. 

Over the years, VMworld has always had a large turnout of vendors sponsoring the event.  And the expo floor always seems massive!  With so many vendors exhibiting, how do you know which booths to visit and who to get on your schedule?

One of those companies on my schedule is SolarWinds.  They are known in the IT industry for providing powerful and affordable IT management software.  Virtualization administrators know or need to know about Virtualization Manager, a monitoring and management solution that helps with optimizing, identifying and remediating VMware and Hyper-V issues.  Definitely get them on your must see list to learn more about this virtualization management software and their other cloud and IT related tools that you might want to include in your toolkit. 

SolarWinds provides powerful and affordable IT management software to customers worldwide from Fortune 500 enterprises to small businesses, government agencies and educational institutions. We are committed to focusing exclusively on IT Pros, and strive to eliminate the complexity that they have been forced to accept from traditional enterprise software vendors. Regardless of where the IT asset or user sits, SolarWinds delivers products that are easy to find, buy, use, maintain, and scale while providing the power to address all key areas of the infrastructure from on-premises to the Cloud.

Read this exclusive pre-show interview with SolarWinds to learn what they have planned for the upcoming VMworld 2016 event.

What Does Veeam Have Planned for VMworld 2016? 

As part of VMblog's live VMworld 2016 coverage coming up in a few weeks, we're in the process of working up our schedules to make sure we can see and learn as much as possible when the show kicks off.  VMworld is the leading virtualization event, and there is no shortage of great information coming out of the keynotes, the breakout sessions, the networking and more.  But every year, one of the key places to learn a lot in a short amount of time is the Solutions Expo where valuable vendors from the VMware ecosystem and beyond set up shop to display their wares. 

Over the years, VMworld has always had a large turnout of vendors sponsoring the event.  And the expo floor always seems massive!  With so many vendors exhibiting, how do you know which booths to visit and who to get on your schedule?

Like many of you reading this, I've known and followed Veeam for many, many years.  But if you don't yet know or follow Veeam, do!  VMworld is the perfect opportunity to meet them up close and personal.  For most VMware admins, Veeam is probably one of those ecosystem vendors who popped up on the radar screen pretty quickly.  I've become friends with many of their team members over the years, and I've also had the pleasure and been fortunate enough to get to know Ratmir Timashev, one of the most passionate and down to Earth CEOs I've ever met.  Together, this team and company have transformed VMware backup into what they today call "Availability for the Always-On Enterprise."  Oh, and if you're looking for a VMware 2016 Party to attend, Veeam has been one of the premiere party events the last few years, hands down.

Veeam recognizes the new challenges companies across the globe face in enabling the Always-On Enterprise, a business that must operate 24.7.365. To address this, Veeam has pioneered a new market of Availability for the Always-On Enterprise by helping organizations meet recovery time and point objectives (RTPO) of less than 15 minutes for all applications and data, through a fundamentally new kind of solution that delivers high-speed recovery, data loss avoidance, verified recoverability, leveraged data and complete visibility. Veeam Availability Suite, which includes Veeam Backup & Replication, leverages virtualization, storage, and cloud technologies that enable the modern data center to help organizations save time, mitigate risks, and dramatically reduce capital and operational costs, while always supporting the current and future business goals of Veeam customers.

Read this exclusive pre-show interview with Veeam to learn what they have planned for the upcoming VMworld 2016 event.

VMworld 2016 is only weeks away.  In case you've signed up to attend but fell asleep somewhere along the way, please know that this year's VMworld Content Catalog is (and has been since July 19th) available!  So, if you haven't already done so, go get your schedulin' on.  

I've gone through the entire content catalog (a few times for different reasons) and selected a number of sessions that bubbled up to the top for me -- self-identifying them as what looks like highly relevant and educational sessions (in no particular order or ranking system).  These sessions cut across various aspects of the overarching world we live in -- virtualization, cloud, containers, DevOps, HCI, storage, NSX, etc.

Obviously, this list is pretty long and one person wouldn't be able to necessarily attend all of these as we talked about in the VMworld 2016 Survival Guide.  However, if you're on the fence and still looking around, you might want to consider a few of these sessions.  Take a look and see if any of these fit the bill for your schedule.

Enjoy the show! 

As part of VMblog's live VMworld 2016 coverage coming up next month, we're in the process of working up our schedules to make sure we can see and learn as much as possible when the show kicks off.  VMworld is the leading virtualization event, and there is no shortage of great information coming out of the keynotes, the breakout sessions, the networking and more.  But every year, one of the key places to learn a lot in a short amount of time is the Solutions Expo where valuable vendors from the VMware ecosystem and beyond setup shop to display their wares. 

Over the years, VMworld has always had a large turnout of vendors sponsoring the event.  And the expo floor always seems massive!  With so many vendors exhibiting, how do you know which booths to visit and who to get on your schedule?

Going back as far as 2003, I've personally had the pleasure of following the technology trends that the DataCore Software team has been setting.  DataCore has been a force in the IT industry, serving up storage, storage virtualization, Software-Defined Storage and now Adaptive Parallel I/O software solutions since 1998.  Most recently, they've been talking about harnessing today's powerful and cost-efficient server platforms to solve the IT industry's biggest storage problem, the I/O bottleneck.     

DataCore Software is a leader in software-defined storage. The company's storage virtualization software empowers organizations to seamlessly manage and scale their data storage architectures, delivering massive performance gains at a fraction of the cost of solutions offered by legacy storage hardware vendors. Backed by 10,000 customer sites around the world, DataCore's adaptive and self-learning and healing technology takes the pain out of manual processes and helps deliver on the promise of the new software defined data center through its hardware agnostic architecture. 

Read this exclusive pre-show interview with DataCore to learn what they have planned for the upcoming VMworld 2016 event.

In a few short weeks, somewhere north of 23,000 virtualization users are expected to converge on the streets of Sin City to take part in the annual virtualization reunion known as VMworld.

Yes, that's right.  VMworld 2016 has pulled up stakes from its traditional venue of San Francisco (thanks to renovation work being done at the Moscone Center -- literally, thank you, it's sort of time for a change of venue don't you think?), this year moving the convention to the Mandalay Bay Hotel and Convention Center in Las Vegas, August 28th - September 1st.

With the show fast approaching, I figured it was time to once again send out a sort of "survival guide" for those first time attendees or for those folks who might just want a refresher.  So here are a few tips and tricks to help make your VMworld event that much more successful if possible.  For those VMworld vets out there, keep me honest.  If I'm missing anything, please chime in or shoot me a note.

I've been to 13 VMworld events so far, yet each time I walk into the registration hall for the first time, it's like the very first time (only with 20,000 more people).

Let's begin!

As part of VMblog's live VMworld 2016 coverage coming up next month, we're in the process of working up our schedules to make sure we can see and learn as much as possible when the show kicks off.  VMworld is the leading virtualization event, and there is no shortage of great information coming out of the keynotes, the breakout sessions, the networking and more.  But every year, one of the key places to learn a lot in a short amount of time is the Solutions Expo where valuable vendors from the VMware ecosystem and beyond setup shop to display their wares. 

Over the years, VMworld has always had a large turnout of vendors sponsoring the event.  And the expo floor always seems massive!  With so many vendors exhibiting, how do you know which booths to visit and who to get on your schedule?

Over the last couple of years, I've had the pleasure of interacting with the Vembu Technologies team at different conferences like the local and regional VMUGs.  This year, I plan to meet with them at VMworld to find out the latest.  Not only do they have a great product, but they have a great personal story to go along with it.  And even more exciting, they are going to be launching something new as part of their Vembu BDR Suite that you'll want to check out at their booth.  

Vembu is a leading provider of a portfolio of software products and cloud services to small and medium businesses for more than a decade. Vembu’s vision is to make software and cloud services very affordable for the hundreds of thousands of small and medium businesses worldwide.  Their flagship offering is the BDR Suite of products meant for on-premises, offsite, cloud backup and disaster recovery across diverse IT environments including physical, virtual, applications and endpoints.  Since 2004, Vembu’s industry-recognized data protection solutions have delivered tangible value to more than 60,000 businesses worldwide through a network of 4000+ partners (MSPs/VARs & Resellers).  

Read this exclusive pre-show interview with Vembu to learn what they have planned for the upcoming VMworld 2016 event.

As part of VMblog's live VMworld 2016 coverage coming up next month, we're in the process of working up our schedules to make sure we can see and learn as much as possible when the show kicks off.  VMworld is the leading virtualization event, and there is no shortage of great information coming out of the keynotes, the breakout sessions, the networking and more.  But every year, one of the key places to learn a lot in a short amount of time is the Solutions Expo where valuable vendors from the VMware ecosystem and beyond setup shop to display their wares. 

Over the years, VMworld has always had a large turnout of vendors sponsoring the event.  And the expo floor always seems massive!  With so many vendors exhibiting, how do you know which booths to visit and who to get on your schedule?

This year, VMblog is looking forward to its first face-to-face conversation with the team from Velostrata.  The company calls themselves the "cloud workload mobility company" and I'm looking forward to learning more and seeing it in action in person at their booth during VMworld.  I know this technology is going to be smart, because it was founded by two industry veterans that I have come to respect over the years: Issy Ben-Shaul (CEO) and Ady Degany (Chief Product Officer).

Founded in 2014, Velostrata provides software solutions that give enterprises cloud workload mobility. Velostrata's founders realized that many of the issues that kept enterprises from adopting public cloud for production workloads centered around the risk, cost, time, and complexity of migrating storage. So, they asked the fundamental question, "why not decouple compute from storage?" And so was born the only company that can move production workloads to and from the cloud in minutes, instead of months, without the risk.   

Read our exclusive pre-show interview with Velostrata to learn what they have planned for the upcoming VMworld 2016 event.