It is that time of the year again to start looking forward to VMworld 2021. Due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic VMworld 2021 will again be “fully virtual” again.

The upside to a virtual event is that you don’t need to walk across a big conference complex to get from one session to another. You can follow the conference from the luxury of you own chair and desk. Poor your own drink of choice, sit back and relax and take in all the information on VMware latest and greatest from your own home. Because VMworld 2021 will be fully virtual, like last year that will make it easier for people to attend since you don’t need to arrange travel (flight/hotel) to attend VMworld.

Here are my 10 picks, they are in random order with a wide variation of topics:

1. The Accidental VDI Admin: Carl Webster’s Analysis of Horizon 8 [EUS2460] 
   This session is presented by the newly appointed Field Chief Technology Officer at Flexible IT Carl Webster. Carl has tested Horizon 8 and he wrote a series of blog about his experience. Hear the tales of testing, building and tearing down a homelab!. Follow up to one of last year’s most popular sessions.
2. Automate and Improve Day 2 Operations with vSphere Lifecycle Manager [MCL1274]
   In Niels Hagoort’s and Jatin Purohit’s session, you learn about the features and capabilities of vSphere Lifecycle Manager, including newly added support for NSX-T and Tanzu. Information and examples to help you get started further automating vSphere Lifecycle Manager with PowerCLI.
3. App Modernization Deep Dive with VMware Cloud on AWS and VMware Tanzu [MCL2290] 
   Session by William Lam. Many are struggling to begin with app modernization, you’re are not alone. Learn to leverage Tanzu and VMware Cloud on AWS to discover, analyze and map dependencies. Convert applications to containers and ultimately deploy a modernized app on a API driven infrastructure.
4. Automated Problem Resolution in Modern Networks[NET2160]
   This session is presented by Martijn Smit. By attending this session you will get an overview of VMware’s networking portfolio and approach to self-healing networks in the datacenter, branch and cloud. Learn how VMware’s self-healing network capabilities solve problems straight away, using telemetry-driven and event-driven automation.
5. NSX-T Reference Designs for vSphere with Tanzu [NET1426]
   This session is presented by Raymond de Jong, Vijendra Singh and Ionut Pirva. In this session you will learn how to design a Kubernetes-ready platform using VMware vSphere with VMware Tanzu and VMware NSX-T. The presenters will share new reference designs and best practices for a scalable and high-available environment for container workloads on vSphere with Tanzu and NSX-T.
6. Simplify Network Consumption and Automation for Day 1 and Day 2 Operations [NET2185]
   This session is presented by Raymond de Jong. By attending this session you will learn why apps are the lifeblood of the business in today’s digital economy. You will see how seamless connectivity between your apps and networking technologies for end-to-end network configuration, compliance and automation with a single API call can be possible.
7. Deep Dive: Routing and Automation Within NSX-T [NET1472]
   This session is presented by Jerome Catrouillet and Nicolas Michel. By attending this session you will take a deep dive into the VMware NSX-T Data Center multi-tier routing architecture to help you interconnect your workloads.
8. A Modern Network: In-Cloud and Cloud-to-Cloud Connectivity as a Service [NET2692]
   This session is presented by Umesh Mahajan and Nikola Zarecki. The modern network simplifies the cloud journey with a common network fabric across data centers and clouds. Within the cloud – VMware NSX and VMware Tanzu Service Mesh automate connectivity, observability, scale and security for modern apps running in multi-cluster environments across traditional and microservices architectures.
9. 7 Key Steps to Successfully Upgrade an NSX-T Environment [NET1915]
   This session is presented by Nand Kishore Vyas, Sushant Kamboj and Akarsh Mishra. The presenters will will talk about all the components attached to VMware NSX-T to make sure an upgrade is successful. During this session they will cover how you can validate all the other components, such as the hypervisor, to help you plan the upgrade in a much better way.
10. Live Coding: Terraforming Your vSphere Environment [CODE2755]
    This session is presented by Kyle Ruddy. During this session Kyle is going to show live how to make the process of getting starting with infrastructure as code in a VMware vSphere environment as easy as possible using HashiCorp Terraform, the standard for infrastructure as code.