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Direct playback & download URLs for VMworld EU 2016 sessions

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I had several folks ping me on when I would be publishing a nice consolidated list of VMworld Europe 2016 breakout sessions like I did for VMworld US. I took a look at the VMworld EU site last night and it looks like only 71 sessions have been published so far. In any case, I worked a bit of magic and was able to generate a list of playback URLs for the published session thus far. You can find the list on my Github repo: https://github.com/lamw/vmworld2016-eu-session-urls

UPDATED (11/01/16) - Just updated Github repo to include direct download URLs, grab them while you can 😀

Note: Similiar to the VMworld US based sessions, Media Site could make further changes which may render the URLs invalid or requiring additional authentication. I will try to update them as they change but so far, they seem to work without any issues 🙂

Few #migrate2vcsa VMworld sessions & HOL worth checking out

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One thing that I had noticed at VMworld last week was that there was a lot of excitement and buzz coming from our customers/partners around migrating from a Windows based vCenter Server to the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA). I am pretty sure it had nothing to do with the awesome #migrate2vcsa stickers that my buddy Emad had created.

migrate2vcsa-sticker
or the killer #migrate2vcsa apparel ...

In all seriousness, I do think our customers are genuinely excited about this upcoming migration capability and the value of the VCSA over the Windows vCenter Server. This is especially true for simplified lifecycle management from deployment (Day 0), configuration (Day 1), patching and upgrade (Day 2) of the VCSA. Customers not only benefit from the operational aspect of the VCSA, but it also allows them to reduce their overall Windows licensing footprint for both the vCenter Server as well as the backend database which is usually a Microsoft SQL Server or an Oracle Database. I do understand that this is not the goal of all customers, but I also know of many customers who do appreciate this additional CapEx savings.

At VMworld this year, there was a ton of coverage across a variety of topics for the VCSA including Migration, Deployment, Management, Operations and most dearest to my heart, Automation which spans all of these areas. I thought it would be useful to share some of the content in the form of publicly available VMworld sessions that you can view regardless if you attended VMworld or not. I know many of you have been asking about the VCSA Migration Tool and all I can say is check out the resources below and stay tune for an update real soon 😀

#migrate2vcsa Sessions:

#migrate2vcsa HOL (simulation):

I just found out about this, but it looks like our Hands-On-Labs folks also built a nice VCSA Migration simulation HOL (http://docs.hol.vmware.com/hol-isim/HOL-2017/hol-1710-vcsamigration.htm) that you can try out which gives you a sneak peak at a Tech Preview of the VCSA Migration Tool. You simply follow the instructions to the right and it walks you through the simulation and highlighting what you need to perform via the orange colored icon. I thought this was a very neat solution for folks to get an idea of how something works without having to sit through hours of content. migrate2vcsa-hol

Lastly, here are some of the general vCenter Server / VCSA sessions that are also worth checking out.

General VCSA Sessions:

Direct playback & download URLs for all VMworld US 2016 sessions

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Thanks to Duncan Epping who shared the awesome news the other day in which ALL VMworld US 2016 sessions are now freely available to the general public regardless if you attended VMworld or not! This is definitely fantastic news and kudos not only to the VMworld team for doing this but also having it done right after a US holiday. To access the playback videos, you simply just need to register at http://www.vmworld.com/en/sessions/2016.html. Once you have done that, you will be taken to the page shown below with all the VMworld sessions since 2010.

UPDATE: With a bit more hacking around, I have now also created a second list of all the VMworld sessions with their respective download URLs. Please have a look at the Github repo for more info https://github.com/lamw/vmworld2016-session-urls

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Although the site allows you to search and filter the content, I personally prefer just a simple list of the titles and direct playback URLs. In the past, I have scraped the VMworld site to build such a list and figure I do the same this year. Luckily, this year it was not as difficult as it was in the past as it looks like some of the data is JSON encoded which makes it trivial to parse into the format I want.

With that, I have published all 539 sessions with direct links to the playback URLs on the following Github project: https://github.com/lamw/vmworld2016-session-urls which you can easily bookmark and hopefully allow Google to also index for searchability in the future. Enjoy!