With my first post for #Blogtober, I wanted to take a moment to thank the folks over at Tech Field Day for a great experience. But before we dive into TFD, a bit about Blogtober. If you're not familiar, it's a movement started by Matt Heldstab to encourage members of the vCommunity to generate more blogs, increase their visibility in the community, and share what they have learned at conferences. As of writing this post, there are currently 56 bloggers signed up for this years Blogtober, with VMUG contributing prizes to random bloggers. For a full list of the blogs participating, check out the Blogtober Website.
Now, on to Tech Field Day!
Last week I had the distinct privilege to participate in Tech Field Day 15 in Silicon Valley. Over the course of 3 days, we received demonstrations from 7 different vendors across the IT spectrum. What makes this a unique experience is that, in most cases, the delegates get the opportunity to pick the brains of the engineers, CEOs, or owners who are presenting their product. We have a 2 hour window to learn about the product and deep dive into the nuts and bolts of what makes it work.
The eleven delegates, myself included, came from a range of backgrounds and nationalities. Outside of the United States, Canada, England, Italy, and the Czech Republic were represented. This dynamic provided for some unique perspectives when it came to discussions with the vendors, and discussions among the delegates as we traveled between sites. Tech Field Day could not be a success without the hard work of the staff from Gestalt IT. Stephen Foskett was our ringmaster and the face of TFD. Off camera, Nikki made sure all of the delegates had everything they needed during each recording session and beyond. I owe many thanks to both of them, as well as the staff behind the scenes that I have not yet met. Kudos on a well ran event! As for the 7 vendors, keep an eye on ExploreVM.com for posts about each of them over the next two months. I'm looking to do a review of the each session and a deep dive into the products. I already have some post TFD follow up meetings with a few of the vendors to get more information, so these posts will have a lot of content. If you'd like to get caught up on Tech Field Day 15 before then, search #TFD15 on Twitter, or check out session recordings at the Tech Field Day YouTube Channel.
Final Thoughts.
I had originally planned on writing and posting this blog on Monday. Waking up to the tragic news out of Las Vegas took a lot out of me these past few days. Many of us in the tech industry are very familiar with the area that the massacre occurred. Even during the shooting, many of our colleagues were at the Mandalay Bay preparing for another conference. As far as I am aware, no one in the vCommunity was harmed during the shooting, but that is of little solace to the families of those 58 killed and 527 injured. Hundreds, if not thousands of people had their lives changed forever that day.
But, we can NOT let fear and hate win. I believe there is far more good in this world than there is evil. We saw it with the long lines of people waiting to donate blood on Monday. We saw it in the millions of dollars raised to help hurricane victims in Texas and Florida. And we see it every day in ourselves and our lives. Stand up to fear and continue to live your life. Keep helping those in need whether it be from natural disaster, a hungry family in your community, or as simple as helping a stranger in a store reach that top shelf. Let's continue to be the good, be the change in the world.
Now, back to your regularly scheduled technical content...
If you'd like to join the conversation about Tech Field Day 15, Blogtober, have
any podcast/blog ideas, or would like to be a guest, reach out to me on Twitter (@ExploreVM), Email, or on Facebook.
"You may say I'm a dreamer But I'm not the only one I hope some day you'll join us And the world will be as one"
This year I attended VMworld on a vExpert blogger pass. To document my experiences, I'm writing up a VMworld 2017 Recap in 3 parts: The Keynotes, The Sessions, and vBrownBag Tech talks. I also recorded a couple of podcast episodes during the conference, you can listen to them HERE.
Day One General Session
Day one kicked off with VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger taking the stage. After a short call to action for donations to help in the recovery efforts from Hurricane Harvey, Gelsinger dove into the progression of IT trends lately. Focusing on the decentralization of IT, automation, Internet of Things, and disruption for the improvement quality of life:
"We're not about bringing jobs back, We're about automating them away so that we can create higher value roles, and changing the industry...We're about creating higher value, higher paying jobs and changing the quality of life as a result" - Pat Gelsinger
He goes on to call out that apps are the technology reshaping customer experience. Using this as a segue, Gelsinger transitions to VMware's vision. This vision is "any application, on any device, on any cloud.". With technologies such as network virtualization, and edge, tech is "breaking out of tech" and reaching further with IoT. So how does this tie into VMware's vision? Workspace One.
Workspace One is VMware's offering to bring all of the pieces together in a way that's "consumer simple, but enterprise secure". Workspace One consists of three main pillars:
Apps and Identity
Consistent environment across all apps with Single Sign On and Mulitifactor Authentication
Management and Security
Consistent management and security with IT in control
Available either on premises or as-a-service (such as Horizon Air)
Desktop and Mobile
Airwatch
Compounding on the existing relationships VMware Airwatch has in the ecosystem, the next announcement was a partnership with HPI. President & CEO Dion Weisler appeared via video statement to announce that VMware's Unified Endpoint Management (by Workspace One powered by Airwatch) will be incorporated into HP's Device-as-a-Service offering. This is the first partnership for Workspace One/Airwatch and a major hardware manufacturer that does not focus on mobile devices. Press release here.
Next up Gelsinger yielded the floor to Sanjay Poonen, COO of Customer Operations to chat with Jennifer Manry about Capital One's use of mobile management and transformation.
Moving on to private cloud, VMware Cloud Foundation 2.0 is announced as part of the keynote. More can be read about Cloud Foundation HERE. Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) is also a big part of the announcements made on Monday morning. Per Pat Gelsinger, vSAN has hit over 10,000 customers and is picking up 100 new customers per week. He also stated that VXRail is now the number one HCI appliance at Dell EMC.
Finally came the information that I was most looking forward to, VMware Cloud on AWS went GA on Monday, August 28th. At this time it is only available in the Oregon availability zone. To talk about the partnership in further depth, Pat introduced Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS. VMC on AWS allows administrators to utilize the public cloud without having to re-architect their applications and datacenters by using the same VMware software and application they already know inside and out. Andy states that the road map for future product development will come from customer input. So as this partnership gains traction, look for growth in feature sets outside of just geographic locations.
Despite my overall excitement for what VMware Cloud on AWS can offer, there is one thought that still keeps popping up, it's
a fine line between enabling INTEGRATION to AWS vs MIGRATION to AWS over longer
term. As your VMs will be running vSphere inside AWS, it's not a true method of migration to Amazon, there is still a lot of development that must be done for true migration.
Sticking with the cloud theme, VMware's next product announcement comes in the form of the first seven pieces of VMware Cloud Services:
Workspace One
NSX Cloud
Network Insight
Cost Insight
Wavefront
Discovery
AppDefense
The goal of these services is to give consistent operations across all clouds with the following four pillars for VMware's Cloud strategy:
Consistent infrastructure across clouds
Consistent operations across any cloud
Rich network of VMware based global cloud providers
Delivering IT agility while reducing complexity and risk
The integration with all offerings of VMware and integration with NSX is being stressed highly this year. Gelsinger referred to it as the connective tissue that ties everything together, and it's central to what VMware is doing with private cloud, mobile, IoT, and soon, public cloud.
"NSX has become secret sauce behind most everything we do. And
maybe, what vSphere was to the first 20 years of VMware, NSX is becoming
to the next decade or two. It's that important" - Pat Gelsinger
The Monday general session wrapped up with a discussion on security. The question is how do we protect applications and data as we expand out into IoT and a mobile workforce with attack vectors increasing daily? VMware's answer is a three part strategy:
Secure Infrastructure, build security in natively
Integrated Ecosystem, work with key players to standardize solutions
Cyber Hygiene, return to the basics
"Fundamentally, we the tech industry have failed you the customer. It is simply too hard, too complex, and breaches are growing too fast. We need a new approach." - Pat Gelsinger
The "five pillars of Cyber Hygiene" are basic practices that we should all be doing already, but they are often overlooked or ignored in practice. On the national scale, there is now a big push to get back to practicing some of the security basics, which when ignored, have lead to many of the breaches in recent history.
VMware AppDefence has been introduced not only as a component of Cloud Services, but as another way to help secure corporate data. I will be breaking down AppDefense in a future deep dive post, but you can read more about it now from the VMware Press Release.
Day Two General Session
Day two keynote opened with Pat Gelsinger and Michael Dell sitting down for a fireside chat with questions submitted over the previous day by community members. The first topic brought up was VMware support. Gelsinger requested that we do submit feedback based on our experiences, and he is disappointed with the amount of concerns around GSS. To counteract some of these concerns, VMware has announced two new developments to help with support, including VMware Skyline. Skyline offers proactive and predictive recommendations to help with environmental stability and performance. The product page for Skyline is located HERE.
Personally, I am not a fan of fireside chats as part of a keynote, so you can watch the full session below.
After the fireside chat, Rob Mee, CEO of Pivotal joined Gelsinger and Dell on stage to announce Pivotal Container Service (PKS). Pivotal Container Service offers two new services for VMware & Pivotal users: a simple way to deploy and operate enterprise-grade Kubernetes, and more importantly, seamless mechanism to migrate to container-based workloads to run on-premises on VMware vSphere and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Google Cloud's Sam Ramji joined Mee on stage to discuss the future of containers. During the keynote it was announced that both VMware and Pivotal are now both platinum members of Cloud Native Computing Foundation.
VMware's CTO Ray O'Farrell took over the keynote to discuss the breadth of the VMware product suite and how they can be utilized to propel a company. This led to a video series about a fictitious pizza chain named "Elastic Sky Pizza" who's story line feels like a mashup of The Office and The Phoenix Project. Rather than deep dive into each product and segment of the videos, I've embedded the link below.
It is an interesting story to watch and to see how each VMware solution fits. However there was one trend I noticed on Twitter during the videos, the restrictive cost that would be incurred by a company trying to implement every VMware product mentioned.
Final General Session
The final keynote occurred on Thursday morning. This keynote had a major focus on the future of technology in medicine, what is currently being done with technologies like bio mechanics and 3D printing, as well as a look at how scientists are working towards incorporating feelings into AI. Unfortunately, it does not appear that this keynote is currently available online, so cannot include any clips or screen shots of this session.
Hugh Herr took the stage to discuss the severe frostbite he received while mountain climbing which led to the amputation of both of his legs below the knee. He also discussed his engineering of custom prosthetics that allowed him to climb again, and the advances in bionics that are allowing amputees range of motion and reactions in their prosthetic limbs which are more and more like the original limbs. Below is a link to a Ted Talk Herr gave on the subject.
The next presenter was Rana
El Kalioubi from MIT's Media Lab. Their current projects are around helping AI to understand human emotions. She dove into MIT's Affectiva project, which can be read about HERE.
The final presenter was Dr. Peter Weinstock from Boston's Children's Hospital. His session focused on how doctors are now using 3D models and simulations of patients bodies to practice complex procedures numerous times before actually operating on the patient. This is leading to higher success rates and changing the future of medicine.
If you'd like to join the conversation about VMworld 2017, have
any podcast/blog ideas, or would like to be a guest, reach out to me on Twitter (@ExploreVM), Email, or on Facebook.
I'm out at VMworld 2017 and chatting with community members about the various announcements and products. I will be embedding the sessions in this blog and uploading them to your favorite podcast providers.
In the first session I talk with Melissa Palmer (@vMiss33) about her new book "IT Architect Series: The Journey". You can learn more about here book at https://itarchitectjourney.com/.
If you'd like to join the conversation about the show's topic, have
any show ideas, or would like to be a guest, reach out to me on Twitter (@ExploreVM), Email, or on Facebook.
And as always, if you'd like to join the conversation, have
any show ideas, or would like to be a guest on the ExploreVM Podcast, reach out to me on Twitter (@ExploreVM), Email, or on Facebook.
The Summer is winding down, football season is closing in fast, and the days are getting shorter. It's that time of the year again: VMworld! Once again, I will be headed to the desert wasteland that is Las Vegas, Nevada to join a few (tens of) thousand(s) of my closest data center gurus for the conference of the summer! For the first time I will be attending as a blogger, which means I should be kicking out lots of content around announcements and products. Keep an eye here on the blog and Twitter for updates. I also have plenty of ExploreVM pins and stickers to hand out!
This year I will be presenting at the vBrownBag Tech Talks. These talks will be broadcast live Here, and posted to their YouTube channel shortly thereafter. The schedule for my sessions is as follows:
Two and a Half Free Tools to Help Troubleshoot vSphere
Problems
Monday 08/28 1:30-1:45 Pacific
From CNC to VCP: A Journey of Professional Growth
Tuesday 08/29 1:30-2p Pacific
I will also have my trusty Tascam audio recorder with me at all times looking to lock down some interviews for future episodes of the ExploreVM Podcast. If you see me at any time and would like to chat, feel free to stop me! I've also signed up for 2 blocks of time in the VMworld Community Podcast Booths and would welcome anyone to join me for some sessions:
Tuesday 08/29 @ 2:00 - 3:00p Pacific
Thursday 08/31 @ 12:00 - 1:00 Pacific
Finally, for those attending VMworld and will be in town Sunday, I am running vHoldem Sunday night. The location is currently in limbo as I need to find a casino willing to work with our numbers, but follow vHoldem on Twitter as well as the vHoldem Eventbrite Page for updates.
And as always, if you'd like to join the conversation, have
any show ideas, or would like to be a guest on the ExploreVM Podcast, reach out to me on Twitter (@ExploreVM), Email, or on Facebook.
Today on the ExploreVM podcast, we've got a special episode in a series I'm calling ExploreVM Live. The following session was recorded at a company meeting where I was giving a VMware 101 lesson for our engineers who work outside of data center technologies. It's a high level overview, but we do have some laughs, I hope you enjoy.
If you'd like to join the conversation about the show's topic, have
any show ideas, or would like to be a guest, reach out to me on Twitter (@ExploreVM), Email, or on Facebook.
Join me this week at the WIVMUG UserCon in Milwaukee, Wi. on Thursday, May 25th at the Wisconsin Center. This year I will be doing not one, but two sessions!
Lunch Keynote
I am honored to be part of the lunchtime panel that features VCDXs Sean Massey and Rebecca Fitzhugh, as well as Sarah Johnson, Technical Account Manager from FujiFilm Medical Systems. We will be discussing the many twists and turns of our careers and how you can continue to grow!
Community Session: Troubleshooting & Assessing the Health of VMware Environments with Free Tools
In this session, I will review some of the
tools I've used in both my home lab and professional life to assess the
health of VMware environments. I will also provide demonstrations and
real world examples on how these tools have helped me solve problems.
And the best part, these tools are free!
If you'd like to join the conversation about any of my sessions, have
any show ideas, or would like to be a guest on my podcast, reach out to me on Twitter, Email, or on Facebook.
The cloud is just someone else's computer. And as such, why can't we extend our virtualized datacenter to the cloud? Have no fear, VMware is here with just the solution. This episode we discuss VMware on AWS and Amazon Web Services with vExpert Chris Porter.
If you'd like to join the conversation about the show's topic, have
any show ideas, or would like to be a guest, reach out to me on Twitter (@ExploreVM), Email, or on Facebook.
When corporate data is lost, or worse, stolen by hackers, it can have disastrous results on a company's reputation and potentially lead to the closure of the business. With security breaches becoming more and more high profile, why do so many sys admins put security on the back burner? Conversely, why are security admins seemingly so hard to work with when all the engineer wants to do is get the project done. In this episode, we will take a look at bridging the gap between security and operations.
If you'd like to join the conversation about the show's topic, have
any show ideas, or would like to be a guest, reach out to me on Twitter (@ExploreVM), Email, or on Facebook.
VMware recently announced they were open sourcing two of their Software Development Kits. To learn more about what this means for developers and the FOSS community, I spoke with VMware's Alan Renouf about SDKs, APIs, and PowerCLI. Alan also has an important message about providing feedback and involvement.
If you'd like to join the conversation about the show's topic, have
any show ideas, or would like to be a guest, reach out to me on Twitter (@ExploreVM), Email, or on Facebook.
Below you'll find the slide deck from my most recent VMUG session, "Upgrading to vSphere 6 - Updated", from the North Central WIVMUG Super VMUG meeting on 11/03 at UW Eau Claire.This session was updated to include information about the VCSA migration tool.
I appreciate all of the feedback and questions I receive about my sessions. Please do not hesitate to contact me with any questions here or on Twitter (@ExploreVM).
As an aside, I've had some personal matters come up lately. This has taken up a lot of my free time which would have been dedicated to blogging & podcasting. I will be writing on this subject shortly, as well as getting back to creating more content soon! I'm also migrating ExploreVM.com away from Blogger to another platform, and have a new logo and stickers created! Ask me for a sticker next time you see me at a VMUG event!
My trusty Tascam DR-40 and I are out and about at VMworld 2016 and would love to speak with you! While out here in fabulous Las Vegas, I'm looking to gather content for the upcoming ExploreVM pod cast series.
Let's grab 5-15 minutes here at VMworld and chat about anything and all things technology! What trends are you seeing in your industry? Have you implemented any new solutions which have changed your environment for the better? Any IT horror stories? Whatever you'd like to share, I want to speak with you! If this sounds like something you'd like to contribute to, reach out to me on Twitter (@ExploreVM), or comment on this post. Let's get a chat scheduled!
I had the privilege of making my VMUG speaking debut at September's Chicago VMUG UserCon. It was an honor to be asked to speak at the same event as some of the people I've looked to for
information and guidance throughout my career. I am glad I've got my first session under my belt, as I'm scheduled to present at November's North Central WIVMUG Super Meeting.
My community session, co-presented with +Brian Kirsch, was on the use of virtualizaiton in the small business environment. You can find our slide deck here.
What I noticed, after attending numerous VMUG meetings, is that no one is really focusing on the small portion of the SMB market. When I say small, I'm referring to 200 or less employees, 1 - 2 ESXi hosts. There are plenty of great resources out there if you're working with a few hundred VMs, but what if the company only requires 5, 10, or 20 guests? Given that's the size of the market I have most experience with, and also, community resources for the admins of these smaller IT departments is largely overlooked, I decided that I could share my experiences and help others along the way.
Now, rather than write a lengthy blog post recapping our entire session, I felt I could better share my knowledge by breaking the session down into each topic covered.
Over the next few weeks, watch for posts on the following topics:
Virtualization Architecture for Small Business
VMware & Other Vendor Licensing in the Small Environment
Techniques for Small Business Virtualization
Tools for the Small Business VMware Admin
In closing, Brian offered the following thoughts:
"The success of the SMB is depended on the needs of
today and the growth of tomorrow. Architecture has to be planned out
carefully as growth is not hoped for but expected. It becomes a
question of how much growth and how quickly all while balancing costs
and profits. Understanding the various options and how they translate
into the future with design, storage and licenses is a complex
undertaking but having that established path which will translate into
less obsolesce. Technology for the SMB cannot be a throw away resource
as you grown, it has to be a carefully planned base that allows you to
expand at a moments notice without breaking your budgets." If you've got any questions, would like to chat, or would like to suggest any other topics, feel free to contact me via Twitter, @ExploreVM, LinkedIn, or in the comments section below.
A few weeks ago I had the opportunity to attend my first VMUG meeting. The Wisconsin VMUG chapter held a half day session at MATC's Downtown Milwaukee Campus. Frankly, I loved it. There were great presentations from Netech, Daniel Klemz, and Scott Harold, & a Q&A session. I enjoyed being around so many people with a passion for virtualization. Attending this event gave me a bump of motivation towards preparing for the VCP exam.
During the meeting, I was tweeting out thoughts and observations (my Twitter handle is @ExploreVM, if you don't follow me already!), and this tweet is one of my biggest takeaways from the meeting:
"The deeper I get into #virtualization, it becomes more evident that #CiscoUCS may have to be the next step in education"
While listening to Netech's presentation about FlexPod, I had a flash back to a tour of a data center I took a few months beforehand which uses a VCE block system. The common factor, both use Cisco UCS. Now, of course a deep understanding of the ESX hypervisor and the entire suite of VMware products is going to be my entry into the world of data center virtualization, but if I have any aspirations to manage a data center (which believe me, I do), and to become a well-rounded IT professional, learning the Unified Computing System is a likely next step.
The problem with that? Finding the training at a reasonable cost. A quick Google search yields 5 day training sessions and online training courses, but the cost of these courses ($3000+) is nearly prohibitive for a student attempting to further their education. Also, with any boot camp style training sessions, you have to wonder how much you are actually learning and retaining in a meaningful way. An ideal solution would be if the local technical schools or colleges would offer Cisco UCS courses.
Milwaukee Area Technical College offers a great VMware vSphere course taught by amazingly knowledgeable professors, and there has been rumors that the school is working on cloud and storage certificate programs, both of which I would love to attend and I feel help advance the school over other technical colleges in the area. At this point, I would like get on my soapbox momentarily, hoping some of the higher-ups at MATC are listening, and petition the school for a Cisco UCS course. It's becoming more and more obvious that business are implementing pre-configured, converged infrastructure virtualization solutions, and while the VMware vSphere training is an excellent start, adding UCS experience to your graduates portfolio would make them more competitive in the job market, along with increasing their overall technical capability.
Now, my blog may never get noticed by anyone of significance at MATC, but I will close with this, hoping someone is listening. I graduate in 6 weeks, and will be continuing my education at the Milwaukee School of Engineering in the fall, but if MATC adds the Cloud Certificate, Storage Certificate, and Cisco UCS programs, they have me not only coming back, spending my educational dollars at their college, but also touting the IT program to anyone who cares to listen to me.
