lenzker – vLenzker – a comdivision partner

#VMware Explore 2022 – 10 reasons why you should go

4. July 2022lenzker

VMworld is dead – long live VMware Explore. We are back and it is getting physical again. Barcelona & San Francisco welcomes us back to celebrate VMware’s yearly conference.

Why you should go to VMware Explore? Let me give you 10 reasons:

Meeting/Connecting/Drinking/Eating or in business-talk: Connecting with people who love the datacenter field is such a great selling point of yourself. If you are passionate about something and you give something to others (blogs, tweets, vBeers or a simple thank you) there will come the day that you will get something back from them. Use VMware Explore to find new friends.
The Solutions Exchange is a great chance to get in-touch with the overall ecosystem in our software-defined datacenter & multi-cloud world. Seek for a discussion with the people at the booth. I know, sometimes they cannot give you the level of information you want to have, therefore try to figure out which product might interest you and schedule an appointment with a specific person to discuss your needs and ideas.
Many of the breakout-sessions are really really good. Remember: many Gin Tonic’s are good as well, but if you get too many …. you might know what I mean. Select your breakout session wisely. Remember that with a VMware Explore ticket you can access all breakout sessions later on (even though most of the session will get public-accessible after a longer-term). Check out William Lam’s fantastic collection of all direct-links to last years VMworld sessions. But hey: don’t think now you have everything you need. I am pretty sure there is a lot of great/new stuff is coming this year.
Check the VMTN booth, vBrownbag & blogger table. Many of the people in our field would love to share their knowledge during this conference.. Unfortunately their session is not getting accepted for political, technical or whatever reasons :) -> Apply for a vBrownbag session & check the VMTN booth at the community space to listen and learn from other experts in the field . Send in your own proposal or just learn from the others in small community-agnostic way.
Meet the experts: VMware Explore will have a very high density of Experts. Try to make appointments to talk about certain problems, wishes, design/product-questions you have.
Connect with people in advance. Go on twitter, figure out what’s going on in San Francisco. Organize or join those public meetings & events. Figure out what the vendors/community-members are sponsoring in the evening. The VMware Explore party is NOT the only event in the evening. Make sure that you register early for those late-night events. Do not miss the chance to talk to the presenter after the session or try to use twitter to figure out where us geeks meet after-hours.
If you feel lonely…. join the Hackathon [I am sure there will be one :)]. I have joined the hackathon a few years agon in Las Vegas and we had a great time. You get together with very very smart people and try to solve specific problems. Even though small the amount of time (and minor technical challenges) are not allowing to create a new hypervisor, people loved this event.
Meet the community and VMware’s social media persons behind the scene. My favorite place every year is community booth with the tables where all the blogger and community active persons are. Take your time to talk with me/us. Take your time to talk to the persons who manage the social media branch within VMware. Big thanks to everyone involved: Corey Romero, Tom Berry, Tej Cheema, Jenni Gonzales, Julia Klaus, Eric Nielsen and all the others that are part of this fantastic team.
Come back in your daily job with new ideas. I discovered that multiple times. Many of us know a lot of things, but over the years or during specific problem-solving tasks you end up in a very specific situation based on initial assumptions. Assumptions that might have been changed by newer technologies, methodologies, smart peoples words, etc. Getting together with thousands of other smart people will definitely give you a better chance to open the box of your mind.
Find business and job opportunities: Not a solid argument to convince your boss, but the opportunities within the SDDC and cloud era are big. New opportunities will come up outside and inside your company. To be able to recognize the opportunities you need to have a feeling for the market and environment. I realized during last VMworlds that this is the perfect location to develop such a feeling.

What’s next? Convinvce your boss & Register here.

VMware Explore 2022 – The 2 minute story around multi cloud in the Virtual Machine & Dev world

3. July 20223. July 2022lenzker

Things have changed over the last few years. I have become a dad, my blog was on pause, but now I am back :) And so are our IT-events. Like Olivia Newton-John have foreseen it in 1982 – let’s get physical.

VMworld is now VMware Explore – and a lot has changed. The window for VMware was open just for a short timeframe (a little reference to himym) has decided to not be solo anymore & get part of broadcom. Even though we are in the middle of the takeover and certain scenarios have been discussed I am looking forward to how VMware will present itself during this years VMware Explore. To bring you on track what major topics are going to be the theme I am going to give you a short wrap up about the current state of VMware’s VM & Container/Dev strategy.

Register HERE

As in the years before VMware will have two main conferences in the United States (San Francisco) & Europe (Barcelona). Besides that 4 more 2 day events are coming to countries with a huge growing market around IT.

The topic will remain the same as the last years: multi-cloud multi-cloud & multi-cloud (and for sure workplace :). VMware’s Cloud Console is gaining more and more cloud services. A lot of common products we use are available as a subscription based service & still there is a lot to do from my point of view.

VMware follows certain strategies in the world of multi-cloud. One of those strategies is

“One (cloud) foundation to rule it all”

Within the pure infrastructure & virtual machine space VMware is pushing its cloud foundation (vSphere, vSAN & NSX) into all major clouds for several years now. The goal here is to convince customers & enterprises getting rid of their datacenters to migrate everything as it is in a lift & shift manor to AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Alibaba, Oracle Cloud or one of the plenty VMware Cloud Provider’s out there.

And if you don’t want to go to the cloud? If you simply want to keep your datacenter or choose a partner as a co-location for your datacenter VMware is going to give us surely more insights in vSphere+ & vSAN+: the new subscriptions around vSphere & vSAN included in a centralized cloud console. What would be the target of the business to go that road?

This strategy is is something we have seen for years now. What are the challenges for VMware & it’s partners? Convince companies that it is more useful to keep the current operations models you have to today & migrate it to the cloud. That will just works when you talk to companies that are satisfied with how the IT is operates today. Otherwise the CIO will prefer a way to migrate to the native infrastructure service instead of putting it on a vmware-in-the-middle stack.

If you have a solution based on vSphere/vSAN/etc. running today, that satisfies the business goals but lacks scaleability, availability (in terms of – I need that solution on all continents within days) and maybe operability the VMware Cloud Story is just great. IMO the best way to get the quick wins of lift & shift projects into the cloud.

But since most cloud initiatives also wants to reduce the amount of legacy VMs with a concrete set of things like cpu, memory & disk we need to talk about modern applications that are not just installed on a ‘fat’ system. We need to talk about applications that scale out if required & scale down to zero once they are not used. The answer to that is:

tanzu

Now you see it :) VMware’s Tanzu is an interesting name for all tools & solutions around developing application & running them. Over the years the story around kuberentes has changed a lot and seems to be finally finalized (the story is finalized not the products & velocity of features / products within tanzu).

Within the comdivision team we did some cool stuff around the infrastructure part of tanzu & if someone would ask me what the goal here is I would say the following.

The cloud native landscape is huge and to get things here up & running from scratch is nearly impossible for enterprises.

With tanzu & its tools VMware tries to make a lot of those things consumable in an easy fashion. From an infrastructure point of view Tanzu Kubernetes (Grid) clusters are the key.

You run this K8s conformant (VMware supported) cluster everywhere (on vSphere/EC2/Azure VMs), manage it centrally with the SaaS solution Tanzu Mission Control.

If you want to create new clusters -> Just do it. If you want to scale out k8s clusters -> Just do it. If you want to extend clusters with services from the Cloud Native landscape? -> Just do it.

With just do it I mean -> run a simple cmdlet for the pros or click on the proper buttons in Tanzu Mission Control.

From my point of view what Cloud Foundation is the core foundation for the infrastructure within all the clouds, is the Tanzu Kubernetes (Grid) cluster for everything cloud native.

So I am really looking forward on new things coming into the cloud native world & I am really hoping that broadcom will follow VMware’s current strategy in the cloud-native space.

#VMworld 2020: Free for everyone, take your chance and see my top 5 sessions

11. September 202011. September 2020lenzker

2020 is different. The pandemic situation has changed the way we work, the way we meet each other. The same counts for our beloved IT conference. For multiple years I am attending VMworld which is the annual conference of VMware in person. I have written yearly posts why you should attend VMworld and many of the reasons are still valid.

This year #VMware has been migrated from a in-person conference to an online event which for sure has a lot of disadvantages like the missing social factor. So the opportunities to network in person are limited.

On the other side if we look at an IT conference like #VMworld, we must admit it is something that locks out many persons who are not privileged enough to pay for the travel & hotel, conference pass and further expenditures (which can be easiliy added up to 5000-10000$ for a week in San Francisco where VMworld would have taken place).

This year is a chance to experience VMworld for a minimum of capital invest, because it is free. Everyone can experience certain live-sessions or around 700 pre-recorded technical sessions around the #VMware portfolio.

Two passes exist:

General Pass: Access to on-demand an live sessions.
Premier Pass: Cost 299$ (available until 22th September) which includes 1:1 technical expertise sessions, guided labs, exam-vouch and many more.

Check out the details here.

I love the approach that everyone can access #VMworld and maybe for the future the online event might be an addition to the physical VMworld which would lead to a VMworld US, VMworld Europe and VMworld online [with Edge locations where VMware customers, partners, fans can meet in person]. I would highly appreciate that.

Personally me and my comdivision friend we will make a in-person event out of it to still experience the social character of VMworld. I am really looking forward for it.

What’s next?

Register for VMworld

Check out my top 5 VMware sessions this year:

VMware and NVIDIA CEOs Discussion on AI and ML [VI3178]: NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger discussing about the technological future of Aritificial Intelligence and Machine Learning.
How to Architect for Success: Ask the EUC VCDXs [DWHV2826] – Including EUC all-stars like my colleague and friend Jens Hennig, Sean Massey, Johan van Amersfoort, Maarten Caus,
60 Minutes of NUMA [HCP2453] – Frank Denneman will abstract the complex topic of CPUs and NUMA characteristics into an understandable form, including latest CPUs like AMD’s EPYC2, etc.
VEBA and the Power of Event-Driven Automation – Reloaded [HCP1358] – William Lam and Michael Gasch talk about the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) which was released last year. The idea is that certain events can trigger certain automation task in your environment. Definetly a hot topic over the next years since this will lead to a certain form of intrinsic automation.
NSX Data Center for vSphere to NSX-T Migration: Real-World Experience [VCNC1590] – NSX (for vSphere) is dead, long live NSX(-T). The migration projects are coming more often and an exchange of experience is quite needed.

Better together: #vSphere 7 and #NSX-T 3.0 OR We are slowly getting friends ;)

20. April 202020. April 2020lenzker

Let me start with a quote I wrote down 5 years ago (wow did time pass by).

IMO this quote is still correct (maybe I should have used network & security skills) and really changed the quality of services I can deliver within the IT field. My NSX journey startet at this time with homelabbing and learning NSX-v from the one and only fellow comdivision partner & friend Matthias Eisner.

NSX-v; NSX-T; NSX Datacenter; NSX Cloud; NSX Advanced Load Balancer; NSX Intelligence.

Woa woa woa ….. that’s a lot of NSX…. Remember; NSX is not a single product. NSX is a suite of network & security products fullfilling VMware’s dream: Deliver every network & security service in software.

NSX-v (or NSX for vSphere) has been the software defined networking solution for vSphere evolved from the product vCloud Networking & Security. We were able to to create software-defined VXLAN networks or software defined network services with edge services gateway in a simple manor & create microsegmentation around vSphere based virtual machines.

It was good but it was a product around vSphere and not a real network product (which made it easier for me to get started with it).

Better together: #vSphere 7 and #Horizon 7.12 with #Nvidia vGPUs in high end #vdi environments

17. April 202017. April 2020lenzker

Current situations accelerate the demand for virtual desktops and a proper virtual desktop infrastructure. I am working for years in the field of the software-defined datacenter and virtual desktops delivered via VMware Horizon. While standard office virtual desktops have become something like a commodity, the usage of hardware graphics accelerated workload and high-end demand is still kind of ‘newer’ and not as mature as the non-gpu workload.

I am involved in a large scale product that creates a virtual desktop landscape for engineers doing a lot computer aided engineering (CAE). This is a very interesting environment that comes with a lot of difficult user requirements and how it can be solved.

3D Acceleration required during normal “working” operations when modelling / analyzing components. (NVIDA vGPU for the win)
Huge amount of local persistent storage to cache models loaded/checked out from a network location. (vSAN is everywhere in the cluster, included in Horizon Advanced & brutal fast if you do it right).
High throughput between the virtual desktops and the network location (The big benefit of a VDI setup).
Secure access from everywhere & sharing of the session (Another big benefit of VDI).
Windows & Linux Desktops must be supported (Horizon can do that)
Huge amount of memory per virtual desktop since sometimes models can have 100/200GB of size and needs to resist in the memory of the virtual machine. (vSphere scales indefinelty [almost :P]).
Most engineers will require a dedicated linux desktop where he can individually use modules/kernels/packages based on his needs (an IT managements nightmare). (dedicated user assignment with persistent VDIs).
Different working behaviours (more than 500 different user-interaction scenarios) that cannot easily be matched to a single use-case.
Store certain states of the virtual desktop. Loading / pre-processing might take 1-XX hours and needs to be repeated several times (VM snapshots with memory ftw).
Certain Desktops should be shared among team-members (working in parallel or sequential).
…..

#VMware‘s Center of Advanced Learning (#VMwareCAL): We did it … and it was quite an interesting ride

25. October 201925. October 2019lenzker

Almost two weeks are over and I am back at the SFO airport. I have written about my expectation of VMware’s center of advanced learning and it is about time to wrap things up.

First of all. Congratulations to Yves Sandfort & Jens Hennig and therefore the whole comdivision for being involved in multiple post-cal awards e.g. as a top-scorer on the class besides Mr. triple VCDX Safouh Kharrat & Rachit Srivastava more about that later).

Besides that Yves’ team an our team were awarded with the best final presentation based on a case study and a customer C-level sales pitch simulation.

#VMware‘s Center of Advanced Learning (#VMwareCAL): What is it good for …. and my personal expectations

14. October 201914. October 2019lenzker

A dream comes true. Since I started specializing on VMware products I always wanted to visit its Headquarters in Palo Alto. I have driven through Palo Alto multiple times during personal trips over the last year. Silicon Valley, Stanford, so much great myths surround my head when I think about this place.

And here I am: I am currently traveling to Palo Alto to visit the VMware campus for two weeks. Being part of comdivision, a German VMware Partner holding all 5 master services competencies, Yves Sandfort, Jens Henning and myself were given the chance to attend a special training at The VMware headquarter.

Center of Advanced Learning

VCAP-NV Deployment Exam Preparation: Tips and Tricks

30. May 201930. May 2019lenzker

During VMware Empower 2019 in Lissabon my colleague Jens Henning and myself had the honor to do two breakout sessions about the VMware Certified Advanced Professional – Network Virtualization (VCAP-NV) exam.

In this session we covered tips and tricks for the deploy exam. This short post should summarize the content for all those people who weren‘t able to attend. The following information are totally suitable for the VCAP-Deploy exam in all kind of VMware‘s tracks:

Datacenter Virtualization
Network Virtualization
Desktop- and Mobility
Cloud Management & Automation