Virtually Anything

Category: Virtually Anything (page 2 of 4)

VMware Over the Years

VMware has lost a great leader (Pat Gelsinger). He led VMware for close to 10 years as their CEO. It feels like a short while ago Paul Maritz previous VMware CEO handing over the baton to Pat Gelsinger and now it’s time for another long standing VMware resource, Raghu Raghuram take leadership of this amazing company VMware.

VMware Interactive Timeline

Source : VMware

VMware is 23 years, and every year has just been amazing with great innovation, leadership & acquisitions. Now, VMware has become an independent company for the first time since 2004.

VMware Empower 2021

We at it again with VMware Empower. Last was a great success as many of the VMware partners got to attend and understand the value of this conference for partners. 

Once again VMware had a great line of distinguished speakers and well-respected SMEs. I focused most of my time in the Multi Cloud tracks as this is my area of interests lately and the relationships with AWS, Azure & Google to name a few.

Source : VMware

My interest are with AWS and Azure. 

As you should be aware, there are different tracks for different audiences. They are namely Sales, Pre/Post-Sales (Technical) & Marketing. If you are afraid that you won’t get to all the tracks you desire, don’t stress, after the event most sessions are on-demand. This means you can watch the replays at your pace and get up to what’s happening with VMware as a partner.

Source : VMware

There are the really amazing LiveFire sessions and there are serious technical sessions but really a gives you an understanding of VMware technical staff go through when they get training.

So strap your seatbelt…it’s going to be a few fun packed days of information to get you thinking differently.

VMworld 2020 Overview

I wanted to start of this new year of 2021 with a post reflecting on VMworld 2020. We have seen many changes over 2020 and as we head into the new year of 2021…VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger steps down to join Intel. This has come to a shock too many as he has played a vital role at VMware with their vision and his great leadership. But prior to Pat was Paul Maritz and he was an amazing CEO as well…I can’t wait to see who will be the newly appointed CEO for VMware and that we will continue to drive this business into a new era.

Source: VMware

So VMworld was a virtual event and 2021 will be the same…although virtual it still had great content and the VMworld team tried their best to create a great experience. I’ve been attending VMworld for many years…in fact my first time to VMworld was 2011 in Copenhagen. I’ve been attending VMworld consecutively since 2015 in Barcelona and it has been a privilege to get to be part of this amazing community.

I’ve learnt about the vExpert program at VMworld and which I have pursued to be accepted in this program. There is so much value to be of the vExpert community. I will do a dedicated post on becoming a vExpert and the benefits.

Announcements made at VMworld

Carbon Black Workload For Kubernetes

vRealize Network Insight

VMware’s Workspace Security VDI 

Tanzu support for VMware Cloud on AWS,

VMware Cloud Web Security service

VMware vRealize AI Cloud

VMware Carbon Black Cloud Workload

VMware Container Networking With Antrea

VMware NSX Advanced Threat Prevention

VMware Edge Network Intelligence

VMware NSX Firewall as-a-Service for the VMware SASE Platform 

VMware Workspace Security Remote

Time to skill up – VMware

So 2020 was a year of many uncertainties and trying to keep sane and assist my clients with running optimally whilst working remotely kept me busy and I did not get a chance to attempt any certification that I can remember.

So this year, I needed to to play catch up on my existing certifications as we as exploring new training and certifications.

Source: VMware

I started to upgrade my existing VMware Certifications. I started with the VCP-DCV 2021 and then the VCAP-DCV Design 2021. I’ve used VMware Learning Zone as well as Plural-sight from training and to get up to speed.

Resources Used

Training Videos

Pluralsight – vSphere Training

VMware Learning Zone

Exam Guides

Professional VMware vSphere 7.x

Advanced Design VMware vSphere 7.x

Study Guides

Study Guide provide by Nakivo

This VMware VCP-DCV vSphere 7 Study Guide Covers:

  • Identifies the prerequisites for and components of a vSphere implementation, storage access protocols for vSphere (NFS, iSCSI, SAN, etc.), basic VMware vSAN 7 requirements, etc.
  • Describes vCenter Server Topologies, Storage Policies, instant clone architecture, ESXi Cluster Concepts, etc.
  • Lays out the difference between vSphere Network I/O Control (NIOC) and vSphere Storage I/O Control (SIOC)
  • Demonstrates how to manage Networking on Multiple Hosts and Network I/O Control (NIOC) with vSphere Distributed Switch, Storage (datastores, storage policies, etc.), host profiles, etc.
  • Explains how to set up vCenter identity sources, Content Libraries, etc.
  • Describes how to configure single sign-on (SSO) domain, VSS advanced virtual networking options, Identity Federation, Active Directory integration, etc.
  • And many other vSphere-related topics!

VMware Hands On Labs

VMware Hands On Labs was a great place to get the experience with the new interface of vSphere 7 of you don’t have a home lab or an environment at the office to work on.

I still believe in training and getting certified.

As my previous job function was a VMware Certified Instructor, I found joy of interacting with delegates and feed off each other’s experiences when discussing VMware designs.

For the vSphere Design exam prep I used the exam guide and went over the white papers and documentation library. There is lots of resources so don’t overwhelm yourself by trying to get through everything as you will get drained and most probably and new edition of vSphere will be released.

VMware Documentation Library

I will do dedicated posts for the other vendor certifications that I will be getting done during the year as I get closer to them.

So all the best…Good Luck!

Let’s get certified!

Here We Go….2021

Reflection…2020

As I prepare for a new year (2021)…I need to reflect on 2020. Last year has been one the most uncertain years for anyone. Most of the world started 2020 with excitement and loads of plans to accomplish. We all like to put in some solid goals for the year. Regardless of where in the world we as based COVID-19 had an impact in our daily lives. This seemed so unreal…felt like this was a movie and things that we only thought off and watched open the big screen has just become a reality.

Although last year was difficult for the worlds population, it was great to see countries come together to fight this virus. We have seen business re-invent themselves as well as individuals. We all tried to stay informed and tried our best to try and live a normal life with this virus that floated around. We had nations enforcing complete lockdowns to help reducing the spread of the virus, which meant that we needed to change the we work and lived.

Home became the office and the office became home…this posed to be difficult for many household and we all started to work even more that we did when we had to go into the office. We learnt how to manage home and work life in the same space.

We started to use technologies that in some parts of the world seemed to be used too, but for others it became the new norm. Digital platforms such as Zoom & Teams became the gateway and medium for us to have our meetings and have visual sanity. Collaboration tools became so ever important to our lives and the internet just showed us…how we needed this to be able and stay connected.

Technology has really played a huge part of keeping the sanity of people and business operational while we are in this pandemic. To all the companies and individuals around the world that have brought these technologies for free for a limited time just to help companies and people to stay connected….Thank You!

As for 2021…we need to ensure that the momentum that was started last year continues. I’ve spent sometime last year attending virtual conferences and assisted clients with their journeys to the cloud. We have seen that adoption of cloud growing exponentially in South Africa and I assume around the world.

We just need to continue evolving ourselves…I really enjoyed the vendors that provided free training to help build skills and gain new skills. Let’s don’t stop.

Hopefully this year I can get more posts done 🙂

Finally…I would like for the following:

Business needs to become more agile.

People need to adopt technology. 

KubeAcademy Pro

Source – KubeAcademy

So in my previous post, I shared a few links to start of some training to better understand Kubernetes. One of the links was to the Kubernetes Academy provided by VMware. There was a lot of entry level / beginners training to get you familiar with Kubernetes.  So VMware is now offering the advanced stack of training, done by instructors and subject matter experts. This is really awesome as we get to widen our knowledge and understand the platform as it will be part of our day to day activities.

“KubeAcademy Pro connects you with industry leaders for free so you can advance your skill set regardless of where you are on your Kubernetes journey. Whether you’re a systems administrator new to Kubernetes or an operator ready to manage clusters, KubeAcademy Pro includes a breadth of courses for a wide range of roles.

KubeAcademy Pro instructors are made up of VMware Kubernetes architects, field engineers, trainers, and developer advocates who bring their experience helping customers adopt Kubernetes, as well as their own experience learning Kubernetes.”

Read through the article below:

https://tanzu.vmware.com/content/blog/introducing-kubeacademy-pro-in-depth-kubernetes-training-totally-free

Sign Up for Access to great content for FREE!!!

https://kube.academy

Source – KubeAcademy – Courses Catalog

Carbon Black

VMware Carbon Black Cloud is a cloud-native endpoint protection platform, that combines the intelligent system hardening and behavioural prevention, all done with a  single lightweight agent and an easy to use console. VMware Carbon Black Cloud has various modules for an administrator to manage endpoints.

Meet Carbon Black

Source – YouTube – VMware Carbon Black

What products make up VMware Carbon Black Cloud?

VMware Carbon Black Cloud

https://www.carbonblack.com/products/vmware-carbon-black-cloud/

Endpoint Standard

https://www.carbonblack.com/products/endpoint-standard/

Enterprise Endpoint Detection and Response

https://www.carbonblack.com/products/enterprise-edr/

Audit and Remediation

https://www.carbonblack.com/products/audit-remediation/

Managed Detection

https://www.carbonblack.com/products/managed-detection/

VMware Carbon Black On-Premises Products

App Control

https://www.carbonblack.com/products/app-control/

Endpoint Detection and Response

https://www.carbonblack.com/products/edr/

Source – VMware

VMware Carbon Black Cloud Workload Essentials

“VMware Carbon Black Cloud Workload delivers agentless protection for vSphere workloads that is easy to operationalize, while reducing the attack surface and strengthening data center security posture. This cloud-native solution provides foundational workload inventory, hardening, and vulnerability management capabilities to protect workloads running in virtualized environments.

This solution helps teams protect their workloads by:

  • Integrating natively with vSphere to simplify operations with a more unified solution
  • Prioritizing vulnerabilities with risk scores based on real-life exploits
  • Providing the necessary lifecycle context
  • Enabling agentless protection to intrinsically build security into your core infrastructure

https://www.carbonblack.com/workload-free-trial/

Secure Your vSphere Workloads

Helping customers more effectively secure their virtual workloads is a critical objective for VMware. As part of that strategy, we are offering a free trial of VMware Carbon Black Cloud Workload Essentials to current vSphere customers through April 2021.”

Source – YouTube – VMware Carbon Black

Azure VMware Solution

Source: VMworld – Azure VMware Solution

This solution is really exciting, as this is designed built and supported by Microsoft and endorsed by VMware. We’re in tough times, and it is great to see that large vendors such as Microsoft and VMware come to the party to provide combined solutions that will benefit the customers, and now can seamlessly extend or completely migrate their existing on premises VMware workloads to Azure without the requirements for re architecting their applications. This will allow clients to then benefit workloads and services provided by Azure and consume directly on a VMware platform.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/azure-vmware/

The partnership between Microsoft and VMware allowing customers currently that have VMware on their private datacenters, to have the same experience in Azure. So how is this achieved, this allows VMware to utilize a solution known as VMware Cloud Foundation Which will run natively on Azure’s compute and storage. Azure VMware Solution is VMware Cloud Verified, basically it allows customers to have confidence to use VMware capabilities on that platform that has been vetted by VMware.

The technologies that will be used on Azure VMware Solutions are VMware vSphere, HCX, NSX-T & vSAN. These products are the foundation for a software defined datacenter for customers worldwide. For Azure VMware Solution it has limited availability to certain areas in the world. Availability in the US East and West Europe regions are live and hopefully we will get these services down in South Africa soon in the near future, as we do have the Azure datacenters locally. 

Use the link below to check out pricing and availability in your region.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/azure-vmware/

What is Azure VMware Solution by CloudSimple?

Source: Microsoft – Azure VMware Solution by CloudSimple

Azure VMware Solution by CloudSimple is a fully managed service that empowers you to run the VMware platform in Azure. This solution includes vSphere, vCenter, vSAN, NSX-T, and corresponding tools. Your VMware environment runs natively on Azure bare metal infrastructure in Azure cloud locations. The service includes all the features required to consume the VMware platforms efficiently and securely.

For more information…use the link below

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/vmware-cloudsimple/cloudsimple-vmware-solutions-overview?WT.mc_id=thomasmaurer-blog-thmaure

How to run native VMware workloads in Azure 

VMware on AWS

VMC on AWS

More than 20 years ago VMware provided us with a revolutionary solution, known as  virtualisation. This has helped us reduce costs within the datacenter, by reducing power, the hardware footprint as we as the need to purchase more hardware. A few years ago we have seen the era of the Hyper-Scalers, such as AWS.

Clients worldwide want to use/consume these offerings/services, but at the same time have their own trusted solutions from VMware. We have seen that this need has created the partnership with VMware & AWS. This has been a huge impact of the world of IT. We are now truly embracing the Hybrid Cloud.

One of the biggest challenges out there is, legacy applications that are running on the private cloud. In order to move these applications to the cloud there will be a need to refactor the application which can be costly and lengthy. By leveraging VMware Cloud Foundation, all the trusted products such as vSphere, vSAN & NSX are used to create a connection to the AWS cloud, giving you the same look and feel, while consuming AWS native services.

VMware Cloud on AWS – Overview

“VMware Cloud on AWS is an on-demand service that enables clients to run applications across vSphere-based cloud environments with access to a broad range of AWS services. Powered by VMware Cloud Foundation, this service integrates VMware vSphere, VMware vSAN, and VMware NSX along with VMware vCenter management, and is optimised to run on dedicated, elastic, bare-metal AWS infrastructure. With this service, IT teams can manage their cloud-based resources with familiar VMware tools”

VMware Cloud on AWS

VMware Skyline

“It would awesome to proactively monitor problems in my VMware environment.” Heard that before? Well, there is good news…. VMware Skyline. This is not a new product, mentioning of this product was made around 2017, yet many clients and partners are not aware of this and that they qualify for this product based on the SnS agreement that have with VMware. There is no license costs.

https://cloud.vmware.com/skyline

To get this going in your environment, you will need to deploy the Skyline appliance and start collecting product metadata to start learning your environment. There is a fair level of Machine Learning in this solution.Most products are support, unfortunately at the time of writing this post NSX-T is not supported, but I’m sure we will have it in the next few releases.

You can use Skyline log assist, that will assist with the timing consuming process for an Engineer to upload log bundles. This is an automated process and will reduce clients effort.

Above is the capabilities based on your support contract

Want to give a try and have a look and feel….There is a VMware Skyline, Hands on Lab available for you to try out before you implement. Just search for Skyline.

https://labs.hol.vmware.com/HOL/catalogs/catalog/1212

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