In Part 1 of ‘Reading the Tea Leaves Before VMworld,’ I looked at some recent VMware acquisitions to make some predictions on what might be announced this week at VMworld.  In part 2, I’ll work through the VMworld Content Catalog and a few other sources to guess at what product specific features and upgrades we might expect.  So, without further ado, here’s What to Expect when you are vExpecting.

vSphere 5.1

It’s no secret that an updated version of the flagship vSphere product will be announced this week.  If history repeats itself, the version announced this week will pick up version number 5.1.  A few leaks (https://up2v.nl/2012/08/26/vmware-vsphere-5-1-will-support-64-vcpus-and-16-gbps-fibre-channel/ and https://www.vclouds.nl/2012/05/15/vmware-probably-going-to-release-vsphere-5-1/) have found their way to the Internet already with supposed details on the new release.  It’s hard to say which of those feature sets and changes might make it into the final release.  The VMworld Content Catalog gives us some ideas.  Here’s what I’ve found.

Fault Tolerance

Multiprocessor FT support as a tech preview (unsupported):

INF-BCO2655 – VMware vSphere Fault Tolerance for Multiprocessor Virtual Machines—Technical Preview and Best Practices This session will describe exciting new developments in implementing VMware vSphere® Fault Tolerance (VMware FT) for multiprocessor virtual machines. This new technology allows continuous availability of multiprocessor virtual machines with literally zero downtime and zero data loss, even surviving server failures, while staying completely transparent to the guest software stack, requiring absolutely no configuration of in-guest software. In this technical preview, we will outline the virtues of VMware FT, provide a detailed look at the new technology enabling VMware FT for multiprocessor virtual machines, offer guidance on how to plan and configure your environments to best deploy these capabilities, examine performance data and showcase a live demo of the technology in action.

vCenter

The vCenter Web Client will take on greater importance, but it doesn’t sound like the traditional vSphere Client will be retired just yet.

INF-VSP1353 – vCenter: A Technical Deep Dive The newest release of vCenter and the web client contains several new features – some of these are architectural changes, others include new user functionality as well as new ways of interacting with your virtual infrastructure. In this session we will take a technical deep dive in the major new features, the architecture changes, deployment scenarios and the impact it will have on you. Agenda Topics: vCenter Overview The vSphere Web Client Architectural Changes Deep dive into new technical features. Installation and Upgrade Scenarios Deployment Scenarios

INF-VSP2749 – Get Up and Running Quickly with the Latest vSphere Web Client Learn how the latest vSphere Web Client compares too and the benefits over the legacy C# client. Get up and running quickly with deployment and configuration best practices and become a pro at administration.

Auto-deploy enhancements, but no secrets being revealed in this session description:

INF-VSP1364 – Architecting Auto Deploy for Availability and Scalability Covers Auto Deploy installation, availability, scalability and performance. Learn how to architect a highly available and highly scalable Auto Deploy infrastructure to enable the rapid deployment of ESXi hosts. Introduces the latest features and improvements along with tips and recommendations to ensure success with vSphere Auto Deploy.

VM compatibility levels – is this what we’re calling VM Hardware Version now?  Not sure what else comes with the change from virtual hardware to compatibility, but it sounds more ‘software-defined’.

INF-VSP1367 – Upgrading vSphere An in-depth overview of the vSphere upgrade process; includes a detailed overview of the upgrade procedure along with tips and recommendations to ensure a successful upgrade with minimal disruption to your virtual machines. Covers pre-upgrade, upgrade and post-upgrade considerations to include guidance on upgrading VMware Tools and VM compatibility levels.

vMotion Enhancements: Nothing definitive in the content catalog, but I suspect faster and more concurrent vMotion operations.  With Storage DRS mentioned in this session description, maybe we’ll see a greater convergence of Storage vMotion and traditional vMotion into a single operation.

NF-VSP1549 – Insight Into vMotion: Architectures, Performance, Best Practices, and Futures vMotion and storage vMotion are key, widely adopted technologies which enable the live migration of virtual machines on the vSphere platform. These features enable critical datacenter workflows, including automated load-balancing with DRS and Storage DRS, hardware maintenance, and the permanent migration of workloads. Each vSphere release introduces new vMotion functionality, increased reliability and significant performance improvements. In this session we will present a deep dive into the latest vMotion and Storage vMotion technologies, including architecture overviews, best practices, and detailed performance studies. We will also present proposed vMotion future technologies, focusing on reference architectures and the enablement of VMware partner ecosystem technologies.

Networking

There’s a whole lot of sessions on new networking features in vSphere 5.  But I’m picking up on something  beyond just new features here.  There’s a lot of talk of VXLAN.  And vCloud.  And vCloud with VXLAN.  And vCloud and vSphere more integrated, with some VXLAN.  And a new product or package for networking and security called ‘vCloud Networking and Security’.  It feels like we’re seeing a melding of vSphere and vCloud and vShield, with a vSphere Distributed Switch on steroids to power it.  I wonder if VMware will be combining all of these products into a vSphere Premium package – one step above Enterprise Plus – with features to fully enable the software-defined-cloud-hybrid-datacenter?

INF-NET1590 – What’s New in vSphere – Networking The vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) is a key component of the vSphere platform. It abstracts virtual network parameters of individual hosts and enables centralized provisioning, administration and monitoring through VMware vCenter Server. In this session you will learn about new features and operational improvements that will make administrators’ lives easier when it comes to troubleshooting and managing the virtual network infrastructure. We will also discuss the improved scalability of VDS and demonstrate some key features.

INF-NET1932 – On-demand Virtual Networking with vShield Edge vShield Edge, now in its third year of existence, has grown into a highly available and programmable (via REST) solution for providing critical networking services in the cloud, such as server load balancing, firewalling, network translation, IPsec (site-to-site VPN), L2VPN & User SSL VPN, and VXLAN gateway functionality. Serge Maskalik, Director of R&D, who leads the team developing the Edge, will present a deep dive into this product, including a discussion on how they achieved parity for the performance characteristics found in physical appliances. He will explore and highlight how the x86 density trend, h/w offloads, scale out architecture and per-device & per-tenant resource isolation have been harnessed to enable multi-tenancy use cases and lowered the operational complexity due to the reduced fault domain in comparison to contextualized hardware-based systems. He will also explore the operational aspects of virtualizing the network edge, demonstrate workflows for deploying and operating Edges and discuss comparison to the typical end-of-row L3-L7 options. Finally, he also covers other NetSec Virtualization technologies, such as VXLAN, vShield App and Spoofguard. P2V your L4-L7 services!

INF-NET2161 – VMware Networking 2012: Enabling the Software Defined Network This session will focus on providing an overview of the networking functionality in the 2012 release across the vSphere platform, VDS, VXLAN, Edge and vCloud networking. This session will include product demos and will also highlight a real world use case of the full VMware stack.

INF-NET2162 – VXLAN Deep Dive VXLAN (Virtual eXtensible Local Area Network) is a multivendor Layer 2 over Layer 3 overlay technology driven by VMware and its partners. It provides the ability to deploy virtual workloads anywhere within or outside the datacenter without being limited by the network. The benefits of VXLAN for overlay networking, pod expansion and alleviating problems related to multi-tenancy (such as duplicate IP or Layer 2 addresses) are described in the VXLAN draft submitted to the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) by VMware and its partners. In this session, we will dig deep into VXLAN use cases with packet walk-throughs. We will also demonstrate a VXLAN use case using either VMware or partner technology.

INF-NET2163 – Troubleshooting and Monitoring Virtual Networks VMware vCloud® Networking provides multiple capabilities for troubleshooting and monitoring virtual networks, including overlay networks with capabilities such as port mirroring, NetFlow, SPAN, RSPAN, ERSPAN, SNMP, network health check, edge CLI, edge stats and so forth. In this session we will give an overview and demonstration of the troubleshooting capabilities of VDS including VXLAN.

INF-SEC1172 – Using VMware vCloud Networking and Security and vCenter Configuration Manager to Achieve Better that Physical Security for Business Critical Apps As customers progress along their journey towards 100% virtualization, they move beyond IT owned applications and onto applications required to operate the business. While virtualization provides for more dynamic, agile and flexible application deployments, a remnant of these initial implementations is a rigid, stagnant, and inflexible physical security architecture supporting these applications. These fixed, legacy implementations impede a customer’s progression towards a dynamic, flexible, agile, compliant, and secure infrastructure able to support the most critical applications. This session will examine how the vShield 5 suite of products and VCM can increase the security profile of Business Critical Applications like Exchange 2010 and other multi-tier applications. This interactive session will examine Reference Architectures that leverage multiple VMware products to bolster the protection profile of these applications. In addition, the session will cover using vApps and the concept of containerization to enable compliant, secure, and scalable multi-tier application deployments while reducing both OPEX and CAPEX for the customer.

INF-SEC1759 – Appeasing Your PCI Assessor Using vCloud Networking and Security to Segment and Secure Your Virtual Data Centers Come listen to VMware’s experts show you how to configure and secure your private clouds using the vCloud Networking and Security suite / vShield, to achieve PCI compliance. We’ll pay tribute to the old air-gap way of doing things, but show you how to focus on the new school way of achieving the same goals with less effort. So come with us and see how private cloud security has evolved to meet those PCI needs!

Storage

In the storage features, I’m seeing a few things:

1. The vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) is getting some love, and maybe new features with ‘Virtual Volumes’.  Hopefully the VSA is a bit more feature rich than version 1.0.
2. Lots of love for vSphere Replication, but not all the vSphere Replication talk is tied to SRM.  Could vSphere Replication be included in vSphere?  This could introduce some cool new options for high availability, backup, and recovery.
3. Software-Defined Storage.  Sounds like VASA is getting extended with much more granular management of VM’s placement on shared storage (and on a new and improved VSA?).  I like the idea of storage policies following a VM around my virtual datacenter.

GD14 – vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) and Virtual Volumes (VVols) with Suzy Visvanathan Join Suzy Visvanathan who will host this best practices group discussion on vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) and Virtual Volumes (VVols).

INF-STO1198 – vSphere Storage Features & Enhancements This session will describe all the key storage features in the latest release of vSphere. Attendees will see first hand the storage related functionality in vSphere to gain a deeper understanding of how best they can utilize these features to optimize their storage environments.

INF-STO2143 – Software-Defined Storage – VMware’s Storage Vision & Strategy This session will explain VMware’s software-driven approach to addressing storage challenges in the virtual world. We will provide a sneak preview of four exciting new storage technologies from VMware that are on the roadmap for increasing storage efficiencies in virtual environments. We will also discuss VMware’s new policy-driven approach to storage for managing end-to-end SLAs per virtual machine.

INF-STO2192 – Tech Preview of a Software-defined Storage Technology In this session, we will preview a new storage technology from VMware. This technology will leverage a new policy-driven storage management paradigm to automate VM data lifecycle management at cloud scale. With this technology, administrators will be able to virtualize and manage storage the same way they do that today for CPU and memory. We will discuss the use cases and benefits of this technology in virtualized environments.

INF-STO2223 – Tech Preview: vSphere Integration with Existing Storage Infrastructure In this session we will preview VMware’s technology direction in integrating vSphere tightly with existing storage infrastructure. We discuss VMware’s direction to enable VM and application granular data management natively on networked storage systems, as well as VM-granular vSphere-based data services. We’ll present the use cases and benefits of this approach to virtualized environments.

INF-BCO1436 – NEW vSphere Replication Enhancements & Best Practices In this session you will learn about our upcoming vSphere Replication enhancements. These enhancements make it attractive for customers of any size to utilize vSphere Replication for a variety of virtual machine replication use-cases. We will explain how this solution will work, the value proposition to you – the customer. We will also go into details around what your options are in terms of deployment and how the solution can be adapted and upgraded as your needs grow along with best practices learned from real customer deployments.

INF-BCO1505 – VMware vSphere Replication: Technical Walk-Through with Engineering VMware vSphere® Replication is a feature of data replication used by both the vSphere platform to protect virtual machines and VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager™ (SRM) to orchestrate the recovery of entire sites. In this session, VMware Engineering will take you through the full details of how vSphere Replication works: the identification and scheduling of data for replication, built-in fail-safes, networking aspects of vSphere Replication and ultimately how it is used by both vSphere and SRM. Follow along as we walk through the life cycle of protecting a virtual machine with vSphere Replication.

Data Protection

First VCB, then VAPA-powered VMware Data Recovery, now something better???  This wouldn’t be hard – I’ve had terrible luck with VMware Data Recovery.  I hope VMware is including something better for full-VM backup with a standard vSphere license.  I wonder if they’ve built their own product, or will license a 3rd party for this?

INF-BCO1361 – Backing Up Virtual Machines with VMware’s Next-Generation Backup and Recovery Solution – Everything You Need To Know This session is a technical deep dive on VMware’s next-generation backup and recovery solution. Details include: How the solution is deployed/installed/configured, technical details on how it works, and recommendations for successful backup and recovery of your VMware virtual machines using this new solution.

SRM

Again, vSphere Replication is getting a lot of talk, but as I said earlier it seems that vSphere Replication is part of vSphere, and SRM will leverage it.  And vSphere Replication with Enterprise enhancements – it needs to get much better than the v1 product for me to call it enterprsie-ready.  It also looks like SRM and vSphere Replication will be used to enable off-site DR to a third party (see the Sungard session below).

INF-BCO2147 – VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager – What’s New and Technical Overview Learn about features in VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM), including Enterprise enhancements to vSphere Replication. Get details on how SRM can be used to address Disaster Recovery needs in your virtualized data center.

INF-BCO2167 – DR to the Cloud with SRM and vSphere Replication – Discussion with VMware and Sungard Many organizations today do not have adequate disaster recovery protection for their applications. In most cases, disaster recovery is perceived as too expensive and complex. DR is a natural fit for the cloud, and VMware’s Disaster Recovery to the Cloud Services make disaster recovery broadly accessible for all applications and sites by providing simple, cost-efficient and automated disaster protection using SRM 5 and vSphere Replication. In this session, VMware and Sungard will present new services that are delivered using vCenter Site Recovery Manager and vSphere Replication. We will also discuss the future evolution of these services.

Other

A new reference architecture called ‘Optimized Virtualized Infrastructure (OVI) will be released.  The OVI will help customers put together their own private cloud using vSphere, SRM, vShield, and vCenter Ops.  This could be helpful!

APP-BCA1695 – Optimized Virtual Infrastructure for Business Critical Apps Optimized Virtualized Infrastructure (OVI) defines a solution stack for Business Critical Applications offering integrated and automated security, monitoring, and business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities. The OVI solution stack includes VMware vSphere, vCenter Site Recovery Manager, vShield and vCenter Operations Manager. OVI provides a single integrated solution stack to fulfill the requirements of the most critical workloads while simplifying and reducing complexity. Attendees will learn how the OVI solution stack components come together to meet the demanding requirements of business critical applications. We will introduce a reference architecture example for OVI including design considerations, and how architects and planners can use the OVI Architecture Toolkit to guide them in deploying their own Optimized Virtual Infrastructure.

vFabric Data Director

Some improvements coming in vFabric Data Director, including new support for Oracle databases.  I’ve enjoyed labs and demos of vFabric Data Director and hope to see it powering new generation apps and data.

APP-CAP2341 – Accelerate Database Virtualization with VMware vFabric Data Director Remember how VMware vSphere® changed infrastructure management? Together with vSphere, VMware vFabric™ Data Director can bring similar benefits and ease to virtualizing and managing your database infrastructure. From provisioning databases within minutes to automation of development database refresh to improved IT agility through database as a service, vFabric Data Director provides a complete database virtualization and life cycle management platform. The new release of the product also supports Oracle database. With an integrated set of capabilities, vFabric Data Director enables IT to improve operational efficiency by 50 percent through automation, policy-based management and self-service.

End User Computing

First is View.  We had a release of View 5.1 in May, so I’m not expecting any dramatic releases here.  But what I do see is ‘Horizon Suite’ and Desktop as a Service (DaaS).  Does this mean that Horizon and View are converging?  Will I be able to access my View Desktop through Horizon, and Horizon Apps through my View Desktop?  Sounds like a chicken-or-the-egg scenario, but in a good way!

EUC1351 – Directions in End-user Computing: The Post-PC Era This session will feature VMware’s CTO for End User Computing discussing VMware’s vision for the future and the myriad of industry developments informing it. Multiple devices and application platforms, mobile devices, Bring Your Own Device initiatives, Cloud computing, and next generation applications are combining to profound effect. In this talk expect to hear about the latest EUC products including View and the upcoming Horizon Suite, DaaS, and other surprises including sneak peeks and demos of technologies percolating in VMware’s labs.

And here’s where it gets good.  The Horizon Suite – Octopus, AppBlast, Horizon App Manager, Horizon Mobile, and maybe Zimbra integration (I saw some Octopus references in the Zimbra 8.0 beta virtual appliance a couple months ago).  Will we finally see Octopus – now being called Horizon Data, AppBlast, and Horizon Mobile as shipping products?  I say yes!!!

EUC1526 – VMware Horizon: Upcoming Attractions and Roadmap In this session you will get insights into future directions for VMware Horizon™ in terms of Horizon end-user and administration capabilities as well as integration with VMware View™, Octopus, AppBlast and other upcoming end-user computing solutions. This session will also include a product demonstration to give you an early preview of upcoming functionality.

EUC1822 – VMware Horizon Mobile: Mobility Management within the Enterprise VMware Horizon Mobile™ enables enterprises to securely customize and manage an employee’s corporate workspace in isolation from the employee’s personal environment on Android smartphones. This dual-persona solution provides greater security for corporate data and the ability to embrace employees’ preferred devices. Learn more about how VMware Horizon Mobile fits within an enterprise and hear participants discuss the product implementation in their own enterprise mobile environments. Company representatives will talk about their experiences with VMware Horizon Mobile during a product evaluation and share insights into enterprise mobility, product details and the really cool devices they got to use.

EUC1823 – What Makes a Mobile Workspace Better? Security and Technical Details for VMware Horizon Mobile VMware Horizon Mobile™ enables enterprises to securely customize and manage an employee’s corporate workspace in isolation from the employee’s personal environment on Android smartphones. In this session, attendees will learn what makes VMware Horizon Mobile more secure than other mobile enterprise solutions. Technical details on device security, workspace management and certificate administration will be covered, in addition to information enterprise deployment.

EUC2128 – Project Octopus: Personal Cloud / Team Cloud — Next Generation File Sharing from VMware Influenced by what they experience in the consumer market, end users expect to be able to collaborate seamlessly with integrated applications that can be accessed from any device, anywhere at any time. Increasingly, users are going outside of the organization to find solutions, creating difficulties for IT organizations chartered with providing security and compliance. Whether deployed on-premises or through a service provider, VMware’s Project Octopus improves the way people work in this post-PC era with a new data sharing application that advances our vision for combining end-user freedom with IT control. Octopus will enable users to access files from any device and share them with people both inside (other colleagues) and outside (vendors, customers, partners) their companies in a completely safe and secure way. Additionally, policies and provisioning are centrally managed via VMware Horizon Application Manager™, a centralized policy and entitlement engine that will broker user access to applications, virtual desktops and data resources. The result is a simple, seamless end-user experience when accessing work resources across private and public clouds on whatever device the user chooses. Octopus addresses the challenges that IT has today…users need a way to easily and quickly access their files on their tablets, smart phones, laptops and home desktops and do this in a way that’s safe and secure.

EUC2406 – Horizon Data: Technical Deep-dive and Beta Learnings VMware Horizon Data enables effortless file access and sharing from any device, and can be consumed on-premise or through a VMware service provider. This session will feature a technical deep dive into the architecture, deployment topologies and best practices, APIs, extensions and future plans for Project Octopus. Moreover, this session will detail the learnings from the ongoing beta and highlight areas where customer and partner involvement have altered the direction of the product.

vCloud Director

I already spoke a bit about vCloud Director in the vSphere 5.1 section.  As I said, it seems that there is some sort of convergence happening – if not in technology, than at least in packaging/pricing (see the partner session below) as a Cloud Infrastructure Suite.  The next version of vCloud Director (5.1) will have enhanced networking, a new vCloud Connector, and the vCloud Networking and Security product/packaging I mentioned earlier.  There’s also a new Cloud Management Platform (CMP) that appears to be a new frontend and backend for vCloud Director for deploying Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) as well as Platform as a Service (PaaS).  I wonder if the PaaS part might be a Cloud Foundry integration with vCloud Director?

And if Cloud Foundry is getting attention and integration with vCloud, then I am left thinking that Cloud Foundry is growing into a full scale public cloud offering with IaaS and PaaS.  Our little Foundry is growing up to be a full scale Iron Works (or CloudWorks as it were).  Could this be what Paul Maritz will be heading up in his new role at EMC?

Put it all together and you have servers and apps running natively on a cloud that is well connected, well secured, portable between datacenters (private and public), with a sexy new (and much needed) interface.

PAR3209 – VMware Cloud Infrastructure: Packaging and Pricing In this session we will cover the packaging, pricing and licensing for the VMware® cloud infrastructure products.

INF-VSP1196 – What’s New with vCloud Director Networking One of the most complex components of a vCloud Director implementation arises from the complexity that comes from flexible networking. Networking in vCloud Director is not a solution by itself. It needs to be looked at as a platform on top of which complex networking solutions can be built. The networking framework consists of many layers and components that need to be put together properly in order to provide a functional and secure networking solution. This session will go into details on the different networking layers, and how they are consumed in vCloud Director when building solutions. The session will also touch on how to scale virtual machines networking across the whole datacenter using VXLAN, in order to provide for scalable Virtual Data Centers.

OPS-CSM1449 – Tech Preview of the Next Generation of vCloud Connector Since its introduction in 2011, vCloud Connector has been instrumental to customers’ implementation of hybrid clouds. It gives them a single pane of glass to see, operate and copy VMs/templates across their private vSphere, vCloud Director and public vCloud environments. Come and learn how the next generation vCloud Connector will use innovative networking and synchronization technologies to make it even easier to move workloads from datacenter to public clouds and allow teams to collaborate more effectively across clouds.

INF-VSP3046 – What’s New with Cloud Infrastructure Suite: From Management Application to Integrated Applications and Extensible Platform vCenter, the management heart of vSphere, is primarily a closed application with a large API for integration. The application ecosystem around vCenter (from VMware and partners) is fairly loosely integrated. This situation is starting to change. Over the next few releases, the collection of management applications from VMware will transform into a fully integrated Cloud Infrastructure Suite. This talk will address how the suite will unify the aspects of Install/Uppgrade/Patch, UI, API and Operational services across the applications. We will describe the infrastructure building blocks underpinning the suite, and introduce how partners in the ecosystem will be able to create deep integration with these infrastructure blocks and so with the Cloud Infrastructure Suite. Ben Verghese – VP, Chief Management Architect, VMware, Inc.

OPS-CIM2892 – Making IaaS and APaaS Available to the IT Masses: Rolling Out Self Service for the Cloud Enabling end users to consume cloud services requires proven automations and workflows. VMware will package its automation expertise with its Cloud Management Platform (CMP). The CMP will automate self service request fulfillment and management. Today’s business requires IT leaders to be more responsive to business initiatives, reduce costs, reduce time to market and improve IT’s ability to deliver whilst maximizing efficiency and reducing risk to existing services. Cloud supports these goals but we need to make it more consumable for IT end users. End users need simpler and more personalized experiences and administrators need more control and scale. Enabling end users to consume cloud services with speed and governance requires proven automated processes and workflows. VMware will be packaging its cloud automation expertise as content with CMP. CMP will automate personalized IaaS and APaaS request fulfillment and management by providing scalable policy and template based tools for managing cloud provisioning. VMware’s CMP allows organizations to quickly realize the benefits of cloud. Starting with and expanding upon the out of the box content, CMP allows easy configuration of organizational specifics such as policies. This solution translates end user catalog requests into execution requirements for the underlying cloud infrastructure.

SPO2069 – Solving the Application Provisioning Nightmare: Integrating vSphere and vCloud Director with Your Application Delivery Networking Services In this technical deep dive, we present a new integration between vSphere, vCloud Director, and Application Delivery Networking services. This integration unifies and simplifies the deployment of applications and their associated supporting infrastructure. While virtualization enabled IT to provision applications in minutes instead of days, the more complex process of provisioning and configuring the necessary infrastructure still takes considerable time, effort, and manual coordination. That problem can be addressed by leveraging new APIs in vSphere and vCloud Director. These APIs allow tight integration with your application delivery controller, and unify the deployment and configuration of applications and their network services. Service templates can be defined and assigned to applications based on characteristics, business requirements, and SLAs. Much of the complex, error-prone, and time-consuming work previously required to deploy production applications can now be automated. This significantly improves IT’s agility and efficiency. Highlights: • The architecture: abstraction of resources, dynamic configuration of underlying infrastructure • How this model complements existing IT processes and expertise • Example use cases illustrating rapid deployment of an application in the dynamic datacenter

TEX2225 – Cloud Infrastructure Suite Roadmap (TAP only) This is the Cloud Infrastructure Suite Roadmap session, exclusively for Technology Alliance Program (TAP) partners. In this session, you‘ll learn about the upcoming most critical vSphere features, integration opportunities, beta programs, and developing your joint solution during beta – so you can be ready to go to market with GA announcement. The roadmap will cover management, network, storage and security related critical features focusing on several key technology advances to help our customers virtualize a more diverse set of applications on a vSphere based platform. Interact with VMware PMs and get all your questions answered in this session.

So there you have it – some VMworld session descriptions where if you read between the lines you find that there is bound to be some cool new products, services and features announced this week!  We’ll see in the General Sessions, press releases, and breakout sessions which of my predictions are right and which are totally whack.  If you’re not at VMworld, join in the action and hear the announcements in real time on VMware Now: https://info.vmware.com/forms/18162_VMwareNow_REG?src=WWW_VMwareNow_US_HPHero2_PreReg