In just a few days friends, colleagues, teachers, luminaries and thought leaders will be converging on Las Vegas for the biggest and best virtualization conference in the world. If you’re in the same shoes as me, VMworld 2018 just isn’t in the cards. Hearing that Tony Hawk , Run DMC, The Roots and Snoop would be a part had me a bit bummed. However it was when I heard that Malala would be participating in the general sessions, that I turned that attitude around.

It was then that I realized there is still a wealth of ways to experience VMworld, even when you’re 2,638 miles away from Las Vegas, not that I’m counting or anything.

General Sessions

Like I alluded to above, it was seeing that Malala would be participating in the general sessions that helped turn my attitude around. The reason for this is that VMware makes an effort to broadcast the General Sessions live.

If you haven’t been to a major conference, these sessions are the reason why a lot of people refer to conferences as a “show”. It’s time for the heavy hitters, for the big production and for news to drop. The general sessions that I’ve attended tend to follow a pattern:

Day 1 State of the Union. Let’s highlight our successes, broad industry trends and how we are positioned to respond or better yet, led those trends.
Day 2-N  Thought leaders. Talk about growth, and what the future holds. Not everything that you see at a tech conference will become reality. I feel like it’s these days where you see organizations testing the water to see how ideas and roadmaps feel among the various stakeholders.
Last day  Honestly these are my favorite sessions. The show’s almost over, some folks have already left town and honestly the people who are left are likely kind of burnt out. VMworld always saves something cool for those brave and/or hardy folks who are left standing on the last day.

Now unfortunately that final cool session is only for attendees. It’s probably a good reason to start working on your budget justification to attend next year… For the Monday and Tuesday sessions however, you’ll want to set a calendar reminder to tune in at 9:00AM PT for the general sessions live on VMworld.com

vBrownBag Tech Talks

The vBrownBag talks are one of my favorite parts of VMworld. If you’re reading this blog, you already know about the #vBrownBag crew, but if by some chance you don’t know… vBrownBag is a community of passionate people who want to share and facilitate sharing within the IT Infrastructure community.

The other cool part about vBrownBag is that they produce Tech talks. These are short community sessions ranging from just a few minutes up to a half hour in length. You can check out my 2017 session on life as a SMB in a big Enterprise world or PowerCLI for examples. (Go easy on me, I was nervous about my other sessions). The whole point of vBrownBag is sharing and the very cool people who produce the Tech Talks do a damn fine job at it. If you want to follow along live, you can check out the action on vbrownbag.com or if you are unable to participate live all sessions are posted to the vBrownBag YouTube channel, usually within an hour or so.

Community members coming together to share with each other. For everyone involved it’s a labor of love and how can you beat that?

VMware {code} Power Sessions

I am super excited about this new offering! And maybe a touch bummed that I’m not going to be participating… But just because I won’t be presenting, doesn’t mean that I won’t be following along. Similar to what the vBrownBag folks are doing, the VMware community team will be hosting expert-led presentations from community members, but with a focus on DevOps and developers. All the action will be live streamed via the {code} facebook page. You can check out the entire line-up by searching for CODE sessions in the content catalog.

VMTN

Since we’re talking about community, let’s not forget about VMTN. The VMTN page is always a hotbed of activity during VMworld. I’m not sure why it’s a secret, but nevertheless it is kind of the secret sauce to staying in the know during the show. If you wanted a place to participate in contests, watch live streams, chime in with all of your community friends, then you might want to head over to the VMTN page.

Bloggers

Holy crap! How can I forget the bloggers! While writing a blog post! Shame!

In my mind the blogosphere (is that still a term?) is the lifeblood of our vCommunity. It’s where passionate people go to talk about the things that matter most. Where we share our successes, our trials and all of the cool things we learn about! What better place to do that than at the VMworld. VMware has a really strong blog presence that’s only gotten stronger over the past year or two. I’m obviously partial to the PowerCLI blog, but next week I’ll be keeping an eye on the official VMworld Blog. If you can’t make the general sessions, this is where the news will drop. I’ll just leave that there…

Beyond the official blog, there are dozens of people blogging about nearly everything that happens at the show. As someone who’s live blogged a general session, I can tell you that the only reason someone would blog from a show is to share with others. Here’s a good place to start if you’re looking for some of the fine folks who’ll be attempting to document everything that happens in Vegas next week. Well, not everything…

Beam me up … me

Sorry (not sorry), horrible dad joke there.

Did you know you can drive a robot at VMworld? Seriously. Ok, not a robot, but a BEAM. Don’t know what a BEAM is? It’s basically FaceTime mounted on a remote control car. You can register to drive one of these super awesome RC devices around the VMTN space. How awesome is that?!?

I’m sure that there are more ways to experience VMworld if you’re not there, but honestly I’m tired just writing this, let alone trying to sample all of the above options. No matter which way you go, there is definitely no fear about being able to make the most of VMworld from afar.