Next week is VMworld 2016 (US) and I wanted to put the word out that I’ll be presenting again this year. In previous years I’ve had the honour to share the stage with Mr Scott Lowe, as we discussed Infrastructure Design with a holistic approach across the datacenter. This year is a little different, as apart from anything else, I’m now a VMware employee working on a specific product. However the great news is I’m back to talk about high-level design topics in #SDDC9025 “VVD 101: Build Your Cloud the Right Way, First Time”.
Before I explain why you want to attend this session more than any other session next week, let me explain a little bit about the product that I’ve been involved in at VMware.
VMware Validated Designs
So about 4 months ago I joined VMware, staying on the Product Management side of things, to an engineering team focussed on something called VMware Validated Designs, or VVD for short. This is a pretty amazing team of technical folks including plenty of well known vRockstars personalities and VCDXs.
I could spend some several hundred lines of blog post explaining the what and the why of VVDs, but something amazing happened last month which is far more instructive. TL;DR it is the BEST up-to-date design documentation for your datacenter. Bar none.
Although VVDs were lightly mentioned at VMworld 2015, the team released version 2.0 last month and we made it openly available to everyone. For FREE! Yep, you can now download this previously professional-services-only toolkit and implement it yourself, DIY-style. If you’re even moderately interested in the design process and datacenter solutions, then these are the docs you’ve been looking for. There are lots of good, sensible, reasoned arguments why you want to use this guidance (some of which my colleague and I will talk about during my VMworld session), but I think the interesting point right now is to grab the documents and take a look yourself.
There’s several ways you can get them, but the easiest if you have a myware.com account is to grab them here as they are all bundled into a single tarball archive.
Alternatively you can pick-and-mix by going to the documentation center.
Another great resource is to jump on over to the VMware community site we’ve just refreshed, and join in the discussion. Among other things, you’ll find Ryan Johnson’s awesome VVD poster over there which helps sets the stage for the design.
VMworld 2016
Love talking about datacenter design? Sign up for the VVD 101 session, spaces are limited. Although this is an introductory session and we won’t be digging down into the technical nuts-and-bolts level, we will be talking about design level goals. We will be explaining how a VVD can improve your datacenter design and why it’s the best design approach. I’ll be revealing some of the hidden work that the VVD team do behind the scenes to solve problems so you don’t need to. And we’ll be talking about the future direction of the VVDs programme and announcing some breaking VVD news.
There are a lot of other VVD based sessions on next week, many looking at specific technical areas. Check out the link to Blaine’s post below for a good set of links.
Come and grab me at any point during the week for some snazzy VVD laptop stickers and to discuss the VVD approach.
Related external VVD blog posts:
Kill Your Combinatorics Before They Kill You by Blaine Christian
Announcing the VMware Validated Design for Software-Defined Data Center 2.0 by Ryan Johnson
VMware Validated Design for SDDC 2.0 – Now Available by Jonathan McDonald
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