We are down to the wire – last two days to vote for the sessions you would like see at the upcoming OpenStack Summit in Paris.

There are a large number of categories that you can choose from as you can see below:

You will need an account to cast your vote.

It is quite interesting to see that some of the sessions are targeted at how you can migrate your workloads away from VMware and onto OpenStack, something that I think people will be looking into a lot more in the near future.

I also have a few sessions that you can cast your vote – if you so choose..

OpenStack Design Guide Panel

In July, 2014 The OpenStack Foundation brought twelve members of the OpenStack community together at VMware HQ in Palo Alto, California to produce the OpenStack Design Guide in just 5 days.  This panel brings many of these authors together for an open discussion about how to architecture an OpenStack cloud.

Bring your real-world questions and be prepared to talk OpenStack architecture with a panel of experts from across multiple disciplines and companies. We'll be drawing on real architecture and design problems taken from real-world experiences working with, and developing solutions, built on OpenStack. Following a brief introduction, panelists are ready to field questions from both the moderator and audience members and provide ongoing discussion the design process for architecting cloud solutions based on OpenStack.

Cisco's Media Solutions journey to the cloud with OpenStack

This session will go over how the Video Service provider group has added focus to deployment of its platform to support OpenStack. How this has evolved over the past year, the challenges that came up along the way and how these challenges were addressed - and solved.

Moving from a VMware Centric Architect to an OpenStack Architect

I have been designing VMware clouds and architectures for the past 4 years, and have now moved my focus to OpenStack. The change was not a simple one. There are terminology differences, architectural differences, differences in use cases. Differences in considerations regarding storage design, networking, automation, deployment - across almost every single aspect of the solution.

In this session you will learn what kind of change in mindset is needed, how to adapt to different architectural constraints, requirements and technical decisions.

Automated Deployment of OpenStack on Cisco UCS and Nexus

The Cisco OpenStack Installer provides automated deployment of OpenStack core components, as well as monitoring, storage, and high availability components. The release schedule of Cisco OSI parallels the community release. Where possible, Cisco OSI provides unmodified OpenStack code. Every new release of Cisco OSI follows the latest community stable release; however, in some cases Cisco might provide more recent patches that have been accepted into the OpenStack stable branches, but have not yet become part of an OpenStack stable release.

The Cisco OSI code update policy is to contribute code upstream to the OpenStack project and absorb patches into Cisco OpenStack Installer after they have been accepted upstream. Cisco deviates from this policy only when patches are unlikely to be reviewed and accepted upstream in time for a release or for a customer deadline (in such cases Cisco applies the patches to the repositories, submits them upstream, and replaces the local change with the upstream version when it is becomes accepted). Cisco also uses and contributes to modules from other upstream sources including Puppet Labs on StackForge.

In this hands on lab you will learn how to deploy OpenStack with the the Cisco OSI - knowledge that you will be able to take back with you to your organization and utilize for your own deployments.

Bringing Operators, Users and Developers closer together

This session proposal came as a result of a conversation on a blog post with Stefano Maffulli with regards to the acceptance of non-developers into the OpenStack world.

What tools are needed to interact with the developers - and the "developly challenged" people who are now starting to interact with wider OpenStack community. Because of the plethora of tools and the substantial on-ramp and learning curve in order to adapt - non-devs are finding it hard to contribute-voice their concerns or help.

This session will go over the tools used today, which tools should be used and when - and what we can expect in the future

Remember – you are the one who decides what content you want to see – your vote counts!

Yep, that is 21 days. I do not think there is any need to introduce VMworld to the readers of my blog.

I would like to share with you some (and by no means a comprehensive list) of the activities I will be partaking in during VMworld.

Opening Acts 2014 — Panel Agenda - Sunday August 24th

I will be a panelist in the Architecture & Infrastructure Panel.

Opening Acts will be a series of group/panel discussions over the course of a few hours on Sunday afternoon. Whiteboards will be present, but no slides or PowerPoint.

It is an honor to give back something to the VMunderground crew!

vBrownbag – vExpert Daily Live Podcast – with Michael Letschin

I be on the live podcast on Monday and Wednesday morning at 10:30. This will be a live discussion about the announcements of the day, the vibe and what is happening at the show.

And last but not least my speaker debut at VMworld…

Automating Host, Guest and Application Deployment in the Software Defined Datacenter with Cisco - NET3160-SPO

Automation is an essential component of the Software Defined Datacenter, without an automation solution this is destined for failure. We want to automate it all, from the deployment of the hardware, the hypervisor, the operating systems, and the application. This session will go through a customer story inside Cisco where an automation solution was implemented using PowerUCS, PowerCLI, Razor and Puppet to ensure a successful deployment from end to end. The session is technical, will provide a detailed architecture and methodology used in this customer, and how the solution reduced the deployment time from a number of days to a matter of hours.

You can expect a deep dive session here on Wednesday afternoon at 14:00-15:00. I will be one of only 4 Cisco sessions at the show with demos and some awesome integration between a great number of technologies.

I can’t wait!

Embedded below you can find the recording of my session
"OpenStack in the Enterprise - Are you Ready?"

You are welcome to go over the blog post I wrote about the event.

The full playlist of all the sessions can be viewed here

I have already submitted a few sessions for the upcoming summit in Paris.