VMware Explore, wait what🤔?

The end of an era here or just a bit of rebranding? To clarify, VMworld is no more and we're about to experience our very first VMware Explore conference. That's right, its all about to happen from the 29th of August to the 1st of September at the Moscone Cente in San Franciso. That means the opportunity to grab your self an early bird registion is well past and this little puppy is going to set you back a cool $2,195 USD! Mind you, organising travel might be a challenge this close to the event......🛬 and of course you'll still be able to access on-demand content free of charge.  The old favourites will still be there, the Solutions Exchange, Hands-on-Labs, and the VMware Communities booth so plenty of opportunity to meet or catchup with interesting and knowledgeable people!

OK, so why VMware Explore and what happened to VMworld?? VMware call it an evolution of VMworld. Essentially it's the same conference but with a focus on the wonderful world of "Multi-Cloud" ☁️🌥 (not to be confused with the multiverse - different 'players', and not quite so exciting depending on your point of view 🤓). VMware wants to become the defacto "center of the multi-cloud universe", not only from a product offering point of view but also as THE multi-cloud conference for the IT industry.

This is not exactly a new direction for VMware, we've been heading down this path for quite some time - think modern applications, micro-services, kubernetes and Tanzu. VMware Cross-Cloud Services has been around for quite a while as well and is a suite taylored perfectly to help with building, operation, and management of applications across multiple public clouds (AWS Cloud, Azure Cloud, Google Cloud, IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud, Alibaba Cloud, yes ...... all the clouds)!

The vision, the nirvana, our IT holy of holy's ........ a world where consuming a range of services and applications from multiple different cloud vendors as and when you need them might be just round the corner, or possibly still a few blocks away 😳. This is the future VMware wants to cement its place in and be your hub to manage and integrate the lot. Of course, like always there will be a bunch of product announcements, talk about futures and timelines - exciting stuff 🤗

Like previous conferences there's an absolute mountain of interesting content, check out the content catalog yourself, not all of it will be available online but certainly a good chunk will.

So, where to start with such a massive content catalog?? I'd suggest getting the low down from one of the industies most recognised figures, Duncan Epping. Duncan creates his own list very year and is always a great place to start! After that I'd go directly to the content catalog site itself and start filtering based on your interests. Pick a 'track' for example like Mulit-Cloud, Networking, or Cloud & Edge Infrastructure and maybe even the technical level (300) to get the real jucy ones! If that does't take your fancy just pick a product and go for gold.

For me the following sound like winners:

• 10 New and Exciting Things About vSphere That You Absolutely Need to Know [CEIB1574US]
• Delivering Modern Machine Learning and Data Science Use Cases with NVIDIA AI on vSphere [CEIB1566US]
• Core Storage Best Practice Deep Dive [CEIB1382USD]
• 60 Minutes of Virtually Speaking Live: Accelerating Cloud Transformation [MCLB2804US]  – great podcast by the way
• Technical Architecture and Advantages of VMware Cloud for Your Workloads [CEIB1429USD]
• Extreme Performance Series: vSphere Advanced Performance Tutorial [CEIT1097US]
• Continuous vCenter Availability [CEIB1602USD]
• Project Monterey Behind the Scenes: A Technical Deep Dive [CEIB1576US]
• AI/ML/Analytics-as-a-Service Offering Design for Cloud Providers [CEIB2190USD]
• The Future of IT Infrastructure Is Here – The Evolution of Project Monterey [CEISB2916US]
• Get Started with Containers and Kubernetes using vSphere with Tanzu [KUBB1941USD]
• Low-Code Network and Security Automation [NETB2292US]
• Need to Migrate Thousands of Workloads? No Problem! [MCLB1251US]
• Explore VMware Cross-Cloud Services [MCLK2539US]

There's just way too many sessions to choose from and not enough time. Enjoy and good luck! ✌🏼