VMware Explore (VMworld) and how it has helped me over these years

I just registered for the biggest event of the year – VMware Explore 2022 US happening at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California from Aug 29 – Sept 1, 2022. I am a big fan of VMware Explore event but have never attended in-person and this will be my first in-person experience at the event. VMware explore gives more insight into the latest offerings, technical deepdives, meet the experts, certifications, HOLs and most importantly connect and network with the vCommunity. I am super excited to participate in the vExpert celebration party where I won the award for the best English blog last year.

How VMware Explore helped my career

I still remember the first session I watched online, it was back in 2019 called NSX-T Next Generation Reference Design by Nimish Desai. An excellent session for 1 hour which gave me a ton of knowledge on NSX-T 2.4 design. I spend the entire week learning from the other NSX sessions too:

NSX-T Design for Multi-Site and Disaster Recovery (by Dimitri Desmidt)
NSX-T Design for Small to Mid-sized Datacenters (by Amit Aneja)
NSX-T Deep Dive: Load Balancing (by Dimitri Desmidt)
NSX-T Deep Dive: Policy API (by Geoff Wilmington)
What’s New with NSX-T Micro-Segmentation (Stijn Vanveerdeghem)
NSX-T Design and Operations for PKS ( by Joel West and Luciana Marchesini de Padua)

These sessions gave me a foundation to start my NSX journey and today my current role at VMware helps customers to transform their traditional infrastructure to modern software defined and microsegmented NSX networks. My first VMware Explore experience also motivated me to start my own blog VxPlanet.com and write around NSX-T topics which eventually helped me to earn the most prestigious vExpert, vExpert NSX, vExpert AVI and Influencer 100 titles.

These titles were highly valued and welcomed by all my previous and current employers.

I am super excited to hear about the announcements, peer with other vExperts in the community, vExpert party and much more.

My favorite sessions from previous VMware Explore

I mostly watched the sessions from the Networking and Security track and here were my favorite 10 sessions from 2019, 2020 and 2021:

Zero Trust Architecture for the Data Center ( by Jacob Rapp and Sergio Pozo) – 2021
Deep Dive on Logical Routing in NSX-T (by Francois Tallet and Nicolas MICHEL) – 2021
Create Virtual Security Zones with NSX Firewall (by Ganapathi Bhat) – 2021
Innovations in Ransomware Defense for Today’s Multi-Cloud Environments ( by Ambika Kapur and Chad Skipper) – 2021
Large-Scale Design with NSX-T – Enterprise and Service Providers (by Nimish Desai) – 2020
Enabling Global Data Center Security through NSX-T Federation (by Ganapathi Bhat) – 2020
NSX Federation: Everything About Network and Security (by Dimitri Desmidt) – 2020
NSX-T Next Generation Reference Design (by Nimish Desai) – 2019
NSX-T Deep Dive: Policy API (by Geoff Wilmington)
NSX-T Design for Small to Mid-sized Datacenters (by Amit Aneja)

Favorite VMware Explore Experience

The best VMware Explore experience I had was during the VMware Explore event in 2021 where my blog was selected as one of the best English blogs during the vExpert celebration party. The selection was based on the voting from the vExpert community

As I have now registered for the in-person event this year, I am sure this will be more exciting and will be the best experience I have at VMware Explore.

My favorite sessions this year

From the VMware Explore US content catalog, here are my favorite 10 sessions under Networking & Security and Tanzu Portfolio that I added to my favorites in session builder: