VMware Explore 2024 Barcelona – My Favorite Sessions

The annual VMware Explore event in Barcelona never disappoints, and 2024 was no exception! With so many exciting sessions covering cutting-edge developments in virtualization, cloud, and networking, choosing a handful of favorites is no easy task. However, a few sessions stood out to me for their insights, innovation, and potential to transform how we approach modern IT challenges. Here are my top picks from VMware Explore 2024 Barcelona.

This year’s focus was on empowering organizations with robust, scalable private cloud solutions, with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) front and center. As enterprises continue to embrace the flexibility of multi-cloud environments, VCF has become a cornerstone, providing a solid foundation for private cloud infrastructure with enterprise-grade security, performance, and control. This year’s sessions reflected this focus, offering deep dives into VCF’s latest features and exploring how VMware’s private cloud solutions are shaping the future of cloud computing.

• Security Mindset: Building Secure Private Cloud with VMware Cloud Foundation and VMware vDefend Firewall
  Speakers: Chris McCain, Stijn Vanveerdeghem, Lee Hagler
  With the growing landscape of malicious threat actors and the continued sophistication of attacks, security cannot be relegated to one group within the IT organization. Every part of the IT structure must adopt a security mindset. From architects to developers, security must be top of mind, and built into all parts of the enterprise architecture. This session will showcase how to use the VMware vDefend Firewall to quickly and easily buy down risk against common attack methods and tools to create a more secure private cloud with VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). This session will allow attendees to better understand the anatomy of an attack and why the vDefend Firewall is a powerful tool for mitigating the standard practices of today’s attack chain. The session will include demos that show how easy it can be to protect the private cloud.
  
• Security Reference Design for VMware Cloud Foundation
  Speakers: Pooja Patel
  Attend this session to learn how to design security for VMware Cloud Foundation management and workload domains. This session will include best practices for segmentation using VMware vDefend Distributed Firewall, policy management across multiple VMware Cloud Foundation instances, and IDS/IPS and threat prevention design.
  
• Build Private Clouds with VMware Cloud Foundation Networking: Plan, Design, Deploy and Operate
  Speakers: Nimish Desai, Luca Camarda
  Network and security virtualization is the key to accomplishing the cloud dream of agile, elastic, and on-demand infrastructure. The most prominent organizations in the world adopted VMware NSX as a core building block to implement their cloud platform. We will cover design choices based on customers’ use cases and requirements. Use cases will include private cloud scaling and performance, security as a service, multi-tenancy, disaster recovery, and multi-site. This session will provide a holistic view of the private cloud design process, starting from the base physical infrastructure, to its logical consumption, to its operational aspects. This topic is vast, but we will provide a taste of NSX’s potential based on our experience working with small and large customers across the globe.
  
• VMware Cloud Foundation Infrastructure Design with NSX
  Speakers: Nimish Desai
  VMware Cloud Foundation is what allows our customers to transform their data centers into true self-service on-premises private clouds. This modern, automatable and holistic approach to the private cloud allows customers to build and scale faster than ever to solve their toughest challenges. To unlock the full potential of VMware NSX within VMware Cloud Foundation, encompassing high availability, performance, and operational efficiency, meticulous planning of physical and logical networking infrastructure tailored to your specific private cloud requirements is imperative. Join me as we delve into diverse design patterns aimed at optimizing the placement of NSX components, ensuring you harness the complete networking and security capabilities of NSX for your private cloud deployment.
  
• Deploying VMware Cloud Foundation with Validated Designs and Solutions
  Speakers: Kris Inglis, Gary Blake
  In this session, learn about validated designs and solutions for VMware Cloud Foundation. A collection of prescriptive, best-practice-based design patterns for implementing VMware Cloud Foundation for any environment and any use case. These design patterns address the desire for standardized cloud infrastructure while demystifying how VMware Cloud Foundation can be deployed to address your specific requirements and constraints. Eliminating risk, from deployment through operations, while maintaining a focus on the desired outcomes for your cloud.
  

VMware Explore Barcelona 2024 presentations now available – William Lam

VMware Explore 2024 Barcelona was a treasure trove of insights, innovation, and inspiration. Each session left me more excited about the future of IT and VMware’s role in driving change. These sessions have inspired me to look at new ways to tackle the challenges of modern IT and adopt more efficient, secure, and scalable solutions. If you’re considering attending VMware Explore in the future, I highly recommend it—there’s truly no better way to get an inside look at the future of digital transformation. Let me know about yours if you have attended to Explore 2024!