Category Archives: VMware

Random Short Take #57

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Welcome to Random Short Take #57. Only one player has worn 57 in the NBA. So it looks like this particular bit is done. Let’s get random.

  • In the early part of my career I spent a lot of time tuning up old UNIX workstations. I remember lifting those SGI CRTs from desk to desk was never a whole lot of fun. This article about a Sun Ultra 1 project bought back a hint of nostalgia for those days (but not enough to really get into it again). Hat tip to Scott Lowe for the link.
  • As you get older, you realise that people talk a whole lot of rubbish most of the time. This article calling out audiophiles for the practice was great.
  • This article on the Backblaze blog about one company’s approach to building its streaming media capability on B2 made for interesting reading.
  • DH2i recently announced the general availability of DxEnterprise (DxE) for Containers, enabling cloud-native Microsoft SQL Server container Availability Groups outside and inside Kubernetes.
  • Speaking of press releases, Zerto has made a few promotions recently. You can keep up with that news here.
  • I’m terrible when it comes to information security, but if you’re looking to get started in the field, this article provides some excellent guidance on what you should be focussing on.
  • We all generally acknowledge that NTP is important, and most of us likely assume that it’s working. But have you been checking? This article from Tony does a good job of outlining some of the reasons you should be paying some more attention to NTP.
  • This is likely the most succinct article from John you’ll ever read, and it’s right on the money too.

Random Short Take #56

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Welcome to Random Short Take #56. Only three players have worn 56 in the NBA. I may need to come up with a new bit of trivia. Let’s get random.

  • Are we nearing the end of blade servers? I’d hoped the answer was yes, but it’s not that simple, sadly. It’s not that I hate them, exactly. I bought blade servers from Dell when they first sold them. But they can present challenges.
  • 22dot6 emerged from stealth mode recently. I had the opportunity to talk to them and I’ll post something soon about that. In the meantime, this post from Mellor covers it pretty well.
  • It may be a Northern Hemisphere reference that I don’t quite understand, but Retrospect is running a “Dads and Grads” promotion offering 90 days of free backup subscriptions. Worth checking out if you don’t have something in place to protect your desktop.
  • Running VMware Cloud Foundation and want to stretch your vSAN cluster across two sites? Tony has you covered.
  • The site name in VMware Cloud Director can look a bit ugly. Steve O gives you the skinny on how to change it.
  • Pure//Accelerate happened recently / is still happening, and there was a bit of news from the event, including the new and improved Pure1 Digital Experience. As a former Pure1 user I can say this was a big part of the reason why I liked using Pure Storage.
  • Speaking of press releases, this one from PDI and its investment intentions caught my eye. It’s always good to see companies willing to spend a bit of cash to make progress.
  • I stumbled across Oxide on Twitter and fell for the aesthetic and design principles. Then I read some of the articles on the blog and got even more interested. Worth checking out. And I’ll be keen to see just how it goes for the company.

*Bonus Round*

I was recently on the Restore it All podcast with W. Curtis Preston and Prasanna Malaiyandi. It was a lot of fun as always, despite the fact that we talked about something that’s a pretty scary subject (data (centre) loss). No, I’m not a DC manager in real life, but I do have responsibility for what goes into our DC so I sort of am. Don’t forget there’s a discount code for the book in the podcast too.

Random Short Take #55

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Welcome to Random Short Take #55. A few players have worn 55 in the NBA. I wore some Mutombo sneakers in high school, and I enjoy watching Duncan Robinson light it up for the Heat. My favourite ever to wear 55 was “White Chocolate” Jason Williams. Let’s get random.

  • This article from my friend Max around Intel Optane and VMware Cloud Foundation provided some excellent insights.
  • Speaking of friends writing about VMware Cloud Foundation, this first part of a 4-part series from Vaughn makes a compelling case for VCF on FlashStack. Sure, he gets paid to say nice things about the company he works for, but there is plenty of info in here that makes a lot of sense if you’re evaluating which hardware platform pairs well with VCF.
  • Speaking of VMware, if you’re a VCD shop using NSX-V, it’s time to move on to NSX-T. This article from VMware has the skinny.
  • You want an open source version of BMC? Fine, you got it. Who would have thought securing BMC would be a thing? (Yes, I know it should be)
  • Stuff happens, hard drives fail. Backblaze recently published its drive stats report for Q1. You can read about that here.
  • Speaking of drives, check out this article from Netflix on its Netflix Drive product. I find it amusing that I get more value from Netflix’s tech blog than I do its streaming service, particularly when one is free.
  • The people in my office laugh nervously when I say I hate being in meetings where people feel the need to whiteboard. It’s not that I think whiteboard sessions can’t be valuable, but oftentimes the information on those whiteboards should be documented somewhere and easy to bring up on a screen. But if you find yourself in a lot of meetings and need to start drawing pictures about new concepts or whatever, this article might be of some use.
  • Speaking of office things not directly related to tech, this article from Preston de Guise on interruptions was typically insightful. I loved the “Got a minute?” reference too.

 

Australia VMUG UserCon 2021 – Call For Community Sessions

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The Australia VMUG UserCon 2021 is happening on the line on Thursday 15th July. There’s currently a call for community sessions underway. If you’d like to present, you can fill out this form. You’ll need to hurry up though, as sessions must be submitted no later than Sunday 30th May 2021.

Having presented at one of these events in the past, I can tell you that it’s a great way to share your ideas with a large number of people. If you don’t want to present, but just want to attend, you can find the registration link here.

VMUG Madness – May 2021

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It’s all happening with VMUG this May. Firstly, the SDDC Roadshow with Frank, Cormac and Duncan has been re-scheduled for 27th May. Details below, and you can register here.

Providing a platform for modern IT services with a VMware SDDC    

Abstract: Today’s business requirements are driving the evolution of IT at an extremely rapid pace. Never before have IT administrators introduced so many new services and solutions to their customers. Although ensuring availability, performance, and recoverability of these solutions is key, it cannot come at the cost of business or developer agility. In this three-part roadshow Frank, Cormac, and Duncan will discuss how VMware (and products like vSphere, vSAN, Tanzu, etc) can help to transform your infrastructure to facilitate this new wave of applications.

Agenda

  • Opening by VMUG Leaders
  • Frank Denneman:  Creating a developer self-service platform with vSphere 7 while maintaining governance
  • Q&A and Break
  • Cormac Hogan:  vSphere 7.0 U1 and the Kubernetes Admin
  • Q&A and Break
  • Duncan Epping: vSAN 7.0 U1 and the vSphere Admin
  • Q&A and wrap up by VMUG leaders

 

Secondly, the inaugural Fiji VMUG meeting is happening on the 13th May. If you’re close to their timezone, log in and give them some support.

Random Short Take #52

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Welcome to Random Short Take #52. A few players have worn 52 in the NBA including Victor Alexander (I thought he was getting dunked on by Shawn Kemp but it was Chris Gatling). My pick is Greg Oden though. If only his legs were the same length. Let’s get random.

  • Penguin Computing and Seagate have been doing some cool stuff with the Exos E 5U84 platform. You can read more about that here. I think it’s slightly different to the AP version that StorONE uses, but I’ve been wrong before.
  • I still love Fibre Channel (FC), as unhealthy as that seems. I never really felt the same way about FCoE though, and it does seem to be deader than tape.
  • VMware vSAN 7.0 U2 is out now, and Cormac dives into what’s new here. If you’re in the ANZ timezone, don’t forget that Cormac, Duncan and Frank will be presenting (virtually) at the Sydney VMUG *soon*.
  • This article on data mobility from my preferred Chris Evans was great. We talk a lot about data mobility in this industry, but I don’t know that we’ve all taken the time to understand what it really means.
  • I’m a big fan of Tech Field Day, and it’s nice to see presenting companies take on feedback from delegates and putting out interesting articles. Kit’s a smart fellow, and this article on using VMware Cloud for application modernisation is well worth reading.
  • Preston wrote about some experiences he had recently with almost failing drives in his home environment, and raised some excellent points about resilience, failure, and caution.
  • Speaking of people I worked with briefly, I’ve enjoyed Siobhán’s series of articles on home automation. I would never have the patience to do this, but I’m awfully glad that someone did.
  • Datadobi appears to be enjoying some success, and have appointed Paul Repice to VP of Sales for the Americas. As the clock runs down on the quarter, I’m going two for one, and also letting you know that Zerto has done some work to enhance its channel program.

Sydney VMUG – April 2021

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*Update* This one’s been postponed for a few weeks. I’ll provide an update as soon as I get the new date.

The next Sydney VMUG meeting is coming up in a few weeks, and it should be great. Details below, and you can register here.

Providing a platform for modern IT services with a VMware SDDC    

Abstract: Today’s business requirements are driving the evolution of IT at an extremely rapid pace. Never before have IT administrators introduced so many new services and solutions to their customers. Although ensuring availability, performance, and recoverability of these solutions is key, it cannot come at the cost of business or developer agility. In this three-part roadshow Frank, Cormac, and Duncan will discuss how VMware (and products like vSphere, vSAN, Tanzu, etc) can help to transform your infrastructure to facilitate this new wave of applications.

Agenda

  • Opening by VMUG Leaders
  • Frank Denneman:  Creating a developer self-service platform with vSphere 7 while maintaining governance
  • Q&A and Break
  • Cormac Hogan:  vSphere 7.0 U1 and the Kubernetes Admin
  • Q&A and Break
  • Duncan Epping: vSAN 7.0 U1 and the vSphere Admin
  • Q&A and wrap up by VMUG leaders

Random Short Take #51

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Welcome to Random Short Take #51. A few players have worn 51 in the NBA including Lawrence Funderburke (I remember the Ohio State team wearing grey Nikes on TV and thinking that was a really cool sneaker colour – something I haven’t been able to shake over 25 years later). My pick is Boban Marjanović though. Let’s get random.

  • Folks don’t seem to spend much time making sure the fundamentals are sound, particularly when it comes to security. This article from Jess provides a handy list of things you should be thinking about, and doing, when it comes to securing your information systems. As she points out, it’s just a starting point, but I think it should be seen as a bare minimum / entry level set of requirements that you could wrap around most environments out in the wild.
  • Could there be a new version of AIX on the horizon? Do I care? Not really. But I do sometimes yearn for the “simpler” times I spent working on a myriad of proprietary open systems, particularly when it came to storage array support.
  • StorCentric recently announced Nexsan Assureon Cloud Edition. You can read the press release here.
  • Speaking of press releases, Zerto continues to grow its portfolio of cloud protection technology. You can read more on that here.
  • Spectro Cloud has been busy recently, and announced supporting for management of existing Kubernetes deployments. The news on that can be found here.
  • Are you a data hoarder? I am. This article won’t help you quit data, but it will help you understand some of the things you can do to protect your data.
  • So you’ve found yourself with a publicly facing vCenter? Check out this VMware security advisory, and get patching ASAP. vCenter is the only thing you need to be patching either, but hopefully you knew that already.
  • John Birmingham is one of my favourite writers. Not just for his novels with lots of things going bang, but also for his blog posts about food. And things of that nature.

VMware – vExpert 2021

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I’m very happy to have been listed as a vExpert for 2021. This is the ninth time that they’ve forgotten to delete my name from the list (I’m like Rick Astley with that joke). Read about it here, and more news about this year’s programme is coming shortly. Thanks again to Corey Romero and the rest of the VMware Social Media & Community Team for making this kind of thing happen. And thanks also to the vExpert community for being such a great community to be part of. Congratulations to you (whether this is your first or thirteenth time). There are now 2100 of us in over 40 countries. I think that’s pretty cool.

Brisbane (Virtual) VMUG – March 2021

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The March 2021 edition of the Brisbane VMUG meeting will be held online via Zoom on Tuesday 16th March from 4pm to 6pm. We have speakers from Lenovo and VMware presenting and it promises to be a great afternoon.

Here’s the agenda:

  • VMUG Intro (by me)
  • Lenovo Presentation – XClarity and VMware Day 0 – 2 operations, covering the ThinkAgile VX appliance, what comes in the box, how does it work with vLCM, XClarity modules and what they plug into, vRLI, vROps, vRA, etc.
  • VMware Presentation – Cloud Foundation and Tanzu
  • Q&A

The speakers have gone to great lengths to make sure this will be a fun and informative session and I’m really looking forward to hearing what they have to say. You can find out more information and register for the event here. I hope to see you there (online). Also, if you’re interested in sponsoring one of these events, please get in touch with me and I can help make it happen.