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.

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?

Last year, VMblog had a great conversation with Zadara Storage and we're looking forward to a follow up discussion and a demo of their solution to see what's new.  Are you familiar with them?  If not, make sure you visit them at the show to learn more.

Zadara Storage offers enterprise Storage-as-a-Service (STaaS) through the award-winning Zadara Storage Cloud.  It can be deployed at any location (cloud, on-premise or hybrid), supporting any data type (block, file and object) and connecting to any protocol. The VPSA service provides enterprise SAN and NAS while the ZIOS service delivers private object storage. Zadara provides resource isolation, exceptional data security, and management control. Zadara is available via OPaaS (On-Premise-as-a-Service) and through a variety of partners including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and others.  

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

DockerCon 2016 is fast approaching, kicking off from June 19-21, 2016 at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle, WA. 

DockerCon is the community and industry event for makers and operators of next generation distributed apps built with containers.  The two-and-a-half-day conference provides talks by practitioners, hands-on labs, an expo of Docker ecosystem innovators and great opportunities to share experiences with your peers.

This will be VMblog's first DockerCon event, and we'll be covering it live and we can't wait!

To find out more about this upcoming event, we spoke with Docker executives ahead of the show.

[ Watch live coverage from VMblog during DockerCon 2016 on the Events page ] 

As part of VMblog's live Citrix Synergy 2016 coverage coming up later this month, we're getting our schedule ready to learn as much as we can, as quickly as we can.  Citrix Synergy is always packed with great information coming from various breakout sessions, networking sessions, keynotes and more!  But one of the places we always learn a lot is in the Solutions Expo where valuable vendors from the Citrix ecosystem setup shop to display their wares. 

But with so many vendors exhibiting at the show, how do you know who to get on your schedule? And which booths to visit?  

For years now, I've been visiting with the team at eG Innovations at Citrix Synergy, following up with them year after year to see how they have advanced their monitoring and management solutions.  And they always have something new and interesting to show me.  I've got them on my list this year, and you should as well.  In case you don't know, who are they?

eG Innovations is helping businesses across the globe transform IT service delivery into a competitive advantage and a center for productivity, growth and profit. Providing end-to-end visibility - from users to servers to networks and storage - our award-winning eG Enterprise Universal Insight technology provides organizations with a 360 degree view of their entire IT infrastructure. This single pane of glass view allows enterprise IT teams to collaborate easily and solve key user-visible problems. Unparalleled visibility also allows IT architects to determine how to right-size and optimize their IT infrastructures for maximum ROI.

Our patented automatic root-cause diagnosis technology is designed for dynamic, inter-dependent physical, virtual and cloud infrastructures where proactive monitoring and rapid diagnosis of problems is a challenge. Instead of spending hours of time analyzing the problem, with eG Enterprise, IT helpdesks and administrators can go from a user visible problem to an actionable event in just a few clicks. 

Are you going to Synergy?  If so, I invite you to get eG Innovations on your "must see" list.  Want to learn more?  Check out this interview to learn about what they have planned for the upcoming Citrix Synergy 2016 event.

As part of VMblog's live Citrix Synergy 2016 coverage coming up later this month, we're getting our schedule ready to learn as much as we can, as quickly as we can.  Citrix Synergy is always packed with great information coming from various breakout sessions, networking sessions, keynotes and more!  But one of the places we always learn a lot is in the Solutions Expo where valuable vendors from the Citrix ecosystem setup shop to display their wares. 

But with so many vendors exhibiting at the show, how do you know who to get on your schedule? And which booths to visit?  

One of my staples has always been Liquidware Labs.  I make sure to visit with these guys during Citrix Synergy and then follow up with them again at VMworld.  With only a few months in between the two events, they never seem to disappoint me as they always come prepared with something new.  Trust me when I say, they've got some really great technology that can make your Citrix environment that much better.

Founded in 2009, Liquidware Labs is an industry leader and pioneer in desktop virtualization solutions for next-generation physical and virtual desktops, including VMware View, Citrix XenDesktop, Red Hat and Microsoft Windows. The company's innovative and award-winning products include Stratusphere FIT and Stratusphere UX for desktop visibility; ProfileUnity with FlexApp and FlexDisk  for desktop portability; and Flex-IO which supports IOPS acceleration in non-persistent VDI environments.  Learn more about the Liquidware Labs Difference.

The company's executive team is comprised of veteran technologists who lead the discussion on VDI best-practices in the virtualization community.   

Are you going to Synergy?  If so, I invite you to get Liquidware Labs on your "must see" list.  Want to learn more?  Check out this interview to learn about what they have planned for the upcoming Citrix Synergy 2016 event.

It's hard to believe that in two weeks, 5,000+ fellow Citrix users will be descending upon the city of Las Vegas and taking over the Sands Expo thanks toCitrix Synergy 2016.

The fun of Synergy kicks off on May 22nd this year with the official kickoff happening May 24th and continuing through May 26th (although this is Las Vegas, so I have to think there will be quite a few people who extend their trip on either side, just don't tell their bosses).

Citrix has gone through its fair share of changes over the last 12 months.  So, what do they have planned for this year's event?  How do they top the previous event?  And what kind of new company and technology information should we expect to learn about at Synergy? 

To find out more ahead of the show, I spoke with Tim Minahan, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Citrix. 

[ Watch live coverage from VMblog during Citrix Synergy 2016 on the Events page | Before you leave, read VMblog's Citrix Synergy 2016 Survival Guide ]