Tag: VMware (page 1 of 2)

VMware by Broadcom

As we start 2024, there is a lot of changes that have taken place since December 2023. Let’s try to break it down.

It’s done, the acquisition is finalised and VMware is now part of Broadcom. Now VMware will be known and referred as VMware by Broadcom. Websites, email addresses and all branding are starting to change. What a way to end/start the year!

Lot’s of changes are being done and at lightening speed. Let’s jump into these changes.

All VMware partners existing contracts will be terminated and “some” will be invited to the new partner program. Perpetual licenses will end and no longer available to sell to clients. It will be only subscription going forward. Licensing has been simplified, we will have mainly two suites to work from VCF & VVF. Carbon Black will become a separate unit and not part of VMware. EUC will be excluded as well.

Let’s briefly look at VCF & VVF (VMware Cloud Foundation & VMware vSphere Foundation)

vSphere Foundation is focused on providing essential virtualisation capabilities for smaller environments, while VMware Cloud Foundation is a more comprehensive solution designed for building and managing cloud infrastructure at scale, including private and hybrid clouds.

VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF):
- Reason: vSphere Foundation is a bundle of VMware vSphere products designed for small businesses and organisations looking to start with virtualisation or currently have virtualisation.
- Products: It typically includes the foundation of virtualisations platform and comprises the following

vSphere Enterprise Plus

vCenter Server Standard

vSphere with Tanzu

Aria Suite Standard

vSAN Enterprise

Size: This offering is suitable for smaller environments and may not include advanced features found in higher-tier vSphere editions.

VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF):
- Reason: VMware Cloud Foundation is a comprehensive integrated software stack that provides a complete cloud infrastructure platform for both private and hybrid clouds.
- Products: VCF includes vSphere (compute virtualisation), vSAN (software-defined storage), NSX (network virtualisation), and the SDDC Manager (a unified management interface for deploying and managing the components).
- Integration: It is designed to simplify the deployment, management, and scaling of a software-defined data centre (SDDC) by integrating compute, storage, networking, and cloud management components.
- Use Cases: VCF is often used for building private clouds, hybrid clouds, and as a foundation for VMware Cloud service

VMware Explore Build Up

November 24, 2023 / admin

So this year is my first VMware Explore since the change from VMworld. It’s bitter sweet, as VMworld was the conference to always represent the largest virtualisation conference and always associated with VMware. Change can be good at times, they say. It’s really exciting to get to travel and meet friends from around the globe, last we all connected was in 2019, my last in-person conference. Then was the virtual conferences that was cool to a certain extent, as we all did miss the human interaction and socialising.

So, the day has arrived, and I make my way to Barcelona from South Africa. Its a long trip, but was really looking forward to the event. I was expecting some big news, especially with the acquisition for VMware by Broadcom.

As we kicked of the General Session, we had a short message from the CEO of Broadcom and not much could be mentioned as there was a hold up on the finalisation of the acquisition. We still had a great keynote from VMware Execs and including some clients.

Every Keynote, keeps you on the edge pf your seat as you get to see why VMware is one of the great technology companies that are out there and why clients globally trust them.

Taking a Cloud-Smart Approach to Harness the Power of Generative AI

https://www.vmware.com/explore/video-library/video-landing.html?sessionid=1688163522492001luxB&videoId=6340669054112

It was really great to meet the vExpert team Corey & Eric was at the conference and was pleased to hear that Broadcom understands the value of the vExpert community and that they will be still keeping the program active and Corey will still be the captain of this amazing vessel.

So enjoy watching the on demand recordings from VMware Explore and lets see if this was the last of VMware Explore as a new chapter will begin with Broadcom for 2024.

VMware Flings a wonderful world of innovation from Techies

August 17, 2023 / admin

What are VMware Flings?

VMware Flings are essentially free, experimental tools and applications created by VMware engineers. Think of them as side projects that the techies at VMware create and share with the community. These tools may not be officially supported, but they sure do add some cool value to the virtualisation area.

What makes VMware Flings so amazing?

1. Unlock Innovation:

These tools often provide a sneak peek into potential future features, giving you a glimpse of what could be coming down the pipeline in the world of VMware.

2. Collaboration with the Community:

Users are encouraged to provide feedback, share ideas, and even contribute to the development of these tools.

3. Surprise and Delight:

You never know what you might find in the world of VMware Flings. From handy utilities that simplify complex tasks to mind-bending visualisations that make data exploration a joy, each Fling is a delightful surprise waiting to be unwrapped.

Top Picks

Let’s explore VMware Flings, here are a few gems:

1. VMware Horizon Toolbox:

Horizon administrators will love this Fling, because it provides a range of tools to enhance your virtual desktop infrastructure management experience.

2. vSphere HTML5 Web Client:

It so 2000…the Flash-based web client…This Fling introduces a HTML5 interface for you to manage your vSphere environment, making your virtualisation tasks more enjoyable.

3. Workspace ONE UEM Workload Migration Tool:

Transition to Workspace ONE UEM by using this Fling to migrate your existing applications from traditional ConfigMgr deployments.

Get Started

Here’s how you can get started:

Visit the VMware Flings Website: VMware Flings
Choose Your Fling & Download: HCI Bench
Share your experience: On any Social Platforms

VMware Flings are tools that showcase the experience and passion of VMware Engineers and working with the community. So, if you’re ready to jump into your virtualisation journey, dive into the world of VMware Flings.

VMware Explore 2023 approaching soon!

June 16, 2023 / admin

VMware Explore 2023 is a must for anyone keen about virtualisation, cloud computing, and the future of technology. This conference will bring innovation, networking opportunities, and the latest trends in the world of technology.You will benefit from learning experiences to amazing networking opportunities to name a few of the reasons you should make your way to VMware Explore 2023

So Why Attend:

VMware Explore 2023 will deliver the latest in technology and thought provoking ideas, which will include inspiring keynotes to live demos as well as the ability to meet the experts themselves. You can expect a great line up of keynote speakers that share a glimpse in to the direction our industry is heading too that helps you to get ready for the change based on their insights, experiences and visions of the future. It’s the perfect event for you to get yourself in the latest trends and advancements in virtualisation, multi-cloud, and software-defined infrastructure. This opportunity will allow you to stay ahead of the curve and be part of shaping the future of IT, by gaining a deeper understanding of emerging technologies, such as multi—cloud, virtualisation, cybersecurity, and more.

The event has loads of fun and entertainment to help keep your mind relaxed and unwind in between all the great breakout session and some hands on labs. From engaging activities, entertainment zones, and social gatherings, and hanging out at the exhibition centre. There are many social gatherings by some of the sponsors and a huge party for attendees. Food, Drinks and Good Music to celebrate another great conference and reflect. After all, making new friends and having a memorable experience is an essential part of any conference.

There is an amazing community within the VMware network, you’ll join a supportive community of IT professionals who share your passion for technology. Attend community meet-ups, and take part in forums where you can share ideas and collaborate with like-minded individuals. Within this community you can benefit from learning, mentorship, and professional growth. By getting involved in this amazing and unique community, you’ll gain valuable insights and build strong connections.

Hopefully you will make it to attend the Las Vegas or Barcelona event!

VMware Multi-Cloud Briefing…The Next Chapter December 2022

December 2, 2022 / admin

On the 5th of December, VMware will be be showcasing their next chapter with their Multi-Cloud Briefing, come and join me online to get some great insights and tech previews. What’s even more special for me is that we will have a South African, Johan Marais from Discovery, that will share his customer success story, using VMware products in their environment.

The new VMware Aria portfolio will be on showcase during this session. You will get to understand how this portfolio will be able to help organisations to optimise costs, performance and configurations across public clouds.

Key VMware leaders will be on the session, as well as the President of VMware, Sumit Dhawant to Purnima Padmaanbhan to name a few.

So get this session into your dairy and enjoy the 25 minutes of exciting information and great tech preview of:

VMware Aria Hub and Graph

There is Free Tier to get started with your multi-cloud management solutions

VMware Cross-Cloud Services

Build, Run, Manage and secure applications across multiple clouds.

You can find this briefing and the entire series on VMware YouTube channel

KubeAcademy Pro

December 30, 2020 / admin

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

https://kube.academy

Carbon Black

November 4, 2020 / admin

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/

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

October 17, 2020 / admin

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 Skyline

August 27, 2020 / admin

“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

It’s time to go Virtual Conferencing

May 15, 2020 / admin

Every year, most IT professionals plan and gear up for a pack year of IT conferences. There is a lot of really great conferences held globally. So there is a need to plan travel to these events is key. This year, everything has changed, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. All, if not most conferences has been cancelled from being hosted physically. This had to change the way vendors would host their annual conferences. Virtual Conferencing is the way forward.

There is a lot of pros and cons related to this. By going virtual there is larger audience that can be targeted, which will also allow individuals that don’t have budget for travel. The interaction with experts and networking and connecting with like minded individuals from around the world is limited to digital, which I will really miss and these conferences are places where I get to meet friends from abroad that I have met attending conferences since 2011.

This year, we have seen that most of these events have no charge associated to attending them, which is great, but I do understand that this also creates a huge financial impact for vendors, conference facilities etc. I’m grateful that many that will be able to attend will understand the value that these conferences bring to self development and helping your organisations grow and be more relevant, sharing your experiences.

I had to request vouchers for my flights from the airlines as I had made my bookings in advance so that I could get my flights and accommodation at a better rate, Some of my friends globally have been unlucky, as they could not get a refund or vouchers.

My upcoming trips that I was really looking forward to attend was VMware Empower, Dell Technologies World, Veeam ON & VMworld. This year I will be attending these conference from the comfort of my home.

Below are some of the vendors that have gone virtual and have no fees for registration.

VMware Empower 2020
VMworld 2020
Veeam ON 2020
Carbon Black Connect 2020
vForum 2020
Dell Technologies World 2020
HPE Discover 2020

There are many more virtual conferences out there, so such online to discover more. This is a first for many vendors to convert their annual conferences to virtual.

Just get onto google and search for the events and register. And if you can’t attend there is always the on-demand content from these events to catch up!

Hope you meet you virtually at the upcoming events!