#VMware Explore 2022 – 10 reasons why you should go

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
  5. 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.
  6. 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.
  7. 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.
  8. 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 BerryTej CheemaJenni GonzalesJulia KlausEric Nielsen and all the others that are part of this fantastic team.
  9. 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.
  10. 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

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

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

tanzu

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 2019 EU: #SDDC, Containers and Cloud Products: Announcements and Releases

Around VMworld Europe a lot of new products have been announced and released. The following post will give you a high-level overview and might be a kick-start to dive deeper into certain products or solutions.

When I should summarize VMware’s vision in 3 words (which exists now for multiple years), it would be:

‘bridge the gap’

Bridging the gap between server, storage, network and security; bridging the gap between operations and developers; bridging the gap between multiple clouds …….

It’s a physical constant that complexity rises over time (entropy). A proper way to deal with complexity is abstraction and therefore creating a proper common interface that can be used from a higher level.

The new announced products and further enhancements of existing products foster this bridging approach. Let’s have a look at some of the new products.

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#VMworld Europe General Session: Tech in the Age of Any

During this years VMworld intro the message was quite clear. It’s not just about the technology, it’s about the people.

“Make your mark”

14.000 attendees made their way this year to Barcelona, which is an increase of 2000 people compared to last year. Please be aware of that this summary here consists out of information extracted from the general session & my personal opinions.

For the 8th time in Barcelona Pat Gelsinger, just voted to one of the best CEOs in the US, told us more about VMware’s vision, strategy & the current state.

To be honest: The strategy has been clear for a couple of years now:

Any device, Any Application, Any cloud

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

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.

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

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

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

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VCAP-NV Deployment Exam Preparation: Tips and Tricks

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
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Lenzker’s Why VMworld 2019 ? 10 Reasons Why You Should Go

It’s this time of the year again where a lot of us need to decide. Shall I go to this year’s VMworld? From time to time discussions come up with statements like:

“(#VMworld) is not the same any more…..When I was young, real knowledge and content was presented… . I was at #VMworld in the old days before it was cool….Virtualization is legacy, Azure and AWS is the only thing that counts”

Who am I to contradict those statements (even though they are wrong :P). I will try to give you my opinion why #VMworld is still the tech-conference highlight of the year.

If it’s your first time visiting VMware’s event I am going to create a second article called ‘let’s visit #VMworld’ about some personal tips and tricks how to get the maximum out of this years #VMworld

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#vRealize Operations and #PowerCLI: better together OR distributed switch health check alert. How to easily identify a wrong configured physical network

During this week I worked a lot with vRealize Operations (vRops). vRops is a great tool when we need to get easy and quick insight into our environment, especially when the environment is a little bit larger. This post should highlight why the eco system (products and community) around VMware is so great and helps us to chose the right tool for the right purpose.

At a customer’s environment we gathered the following vRops alerts

“The MTU on the Distributed Switch is not allowed by one or more VLANs on the host’

“One or more VLANs are unsupported by the physical switch”

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vSphere Update Manager Troubleshooting: Could not scan ESX / ESXi host OR cannot execute upgrade script

Even though I was more involved in conceptual doing in the last months I was recently asked for help since a customer was not able to update their environment via vSphere Update Manager.

The following blog post explains how we can work deal with the following event / task error messages:

“Could not scan ESXihostname” or “Cannot execute upgrade script on host”

The vSphere Update Manager is nowadays integrated in the vCenter Server Appliance and is pretty suitable for patching and upgrading ESXi hosts. In theory the process is really straight forward.

  1. Optional: Create a baseline that includes all relevant ESXi components (so called vSphere Infrastructure Bundles [VIB]) that you want add to your ESXi hosts (e.g. Create a static baseline for a specific vSphere build)
  2. Attach the baseline to a Cluster or an ESXi host object
  3. Scan the Cluster or ESXi host object against the baseline. In the end we can discover which baseline elements are installed on the ESXi host and which are missing. In case all baseline items exist on the ESXi host the host is declared as comply.
  4. Remediate the baseline. The ESXi host will be placed into the maintenance mode, the components defined in the baselines will be installed on the ESXi host. The host will reboot and the maintenance mode will be disabled. Afterwards the ESXi host should be comply to the baseline.

That is quite easy. Easy enough that this module takes around 1 hour in the vSphere: Install, Configure & Manage class (from time to time I still deliver VMware Trainings -> contact me if you want to join :).

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