#VMware Explore – Content Catalog and my top 5 picks

25. September 202425. September 2024lenzker

Whoop Whoop! The VMware Explore 2024 Content Catalog is now live! You can explore a wide range of sessions, workshops, and expert-led discussions tailored to all things VMware and beyond. Start building your agenda today and find my top picks for this year :)

Mastering Infrastructure As Code With VMware VSphere And Terraform [VCFB1813BCN]

Join us for an in-depth, in-person seminar to learn the essential skills to build and manage your virtual infrastructure using VMware vSphere and Terraform. This hands-on moment is designed for IT professionals and developers who want to better understand infrastructure as code (IaC) and how to leverage these powerful tools to streamline and automate their virtual environments.

Why Do I want to join the session? Infrastructure as a code is such a great concept used quite often in modern clouds. vSphere is still lacking this nowadays in my customer base :) Its time for a change

Supercharge Your Workloads On VCF: Unleashing The Power Of DPUs [VCFB1208BCN]

Offloading central processing unit (CPU) tasks to a network interface card has been around for years, but data processing unit (DPU) cards take this to a completely new level. They free up CPU resources and reduce the number of hosts needed in your data center. DPUs are pivotal in accelerating and offloading computational workloads, but their potential to enhance security, particularly in intrusion prevention and detection, remains unexplored. How can we leverage these cutting-edge advancements to ensure the utmost protection for sensitive data and critical systems? We explore how DPUs strengthen security for VMware VCF Workloads and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) platforms, e.g., firewalling and testing real-world performance-simulating attacks. Gain valuable insights into best practices for configuring DPUs in your VMware Cloud Foundation environment.

Why Do I want to join the session? CPU Core Count is key due to the new licesining model, all features that increase performance and decrease CPU requirements must be Analyzed and understood as an architect :) Besides that Philipp and Marvin are great guys I want to work more with in the future :)

Unlocking Your Data With VMware And NVIDIA—RAG Deep Dive [VCFB1881BCN]

Organizations today have acquired massive data sets, but getting the right information at the right moment can be a challenge. Enter retrieval augmented generation (RAG), an approach that combines the intelligence of a large language model with current, relevant and accurate data from trusted sources. Join us for a 300-level look into a RAG pipeline-architected using Private AI Foundation with NVIDIA. We review the end-to-end workflow and how it maps to virtual infrastructure. Then we dive deeper into the components, including the LLM, NVIDIA Inference Microservices and Vector DB. We also review best practices—including sizing considerations and when to leverage fractional, full, or multiple graphics processing units (GPUs).

Why Do I want to join the session? Adjusting LLM to organisational needs is something many mid- to large size organisations ask for nowadays. Getting a better understanding how that can be achieved in a private infrastructure is something I want to understand by heart.

VMware Cloud Foundation Networking Performance—Deep Dive [VCFB1646BCN]

What performance should I expect from VMware Cloud Foundation networking stack? What is enhanced data path? How does a data processing unit help? How can I tune to maximize throughput? Is it possible to lower the latency? If these are some of the questions you would like answers to, join this session. We take a close look at application traffic profiles, real-life performance expectations, tuning, design considerations, hardware choice and more, to achieve optimal performance when leveraging VMware NSX.

Why Do I want to join the session? DPU Network performance real-life data :)

Breaking Chains: Transforming Attack Chain Analysis Into Defender Strategy [ESGB1142BCN]

In this session, we delve into the anatomy of recent cyber attacks to uncover the strategic lessons they offer. By analyzing various attack chains, we have identified key tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs) attackers use. We translate these insights into practical defensive strategies, equipping cybersecurity professionals with the knowledge to bolster their defenses. Leave with actionable tips and a deeper understanding of how to protect your organization from attacks based on lessons from real-world data.

Why Do I want to join the session? Security is everywhere nowadays and everyone needs to get a better understanding of attack vectors, tactics, techniques, etc. I am really looking forward to it.

If you haven’t registiered yet -> Do it here :) If you want to join our secret public friends & family dinner in Barcelona on Monday… Drop me a note and I can give you guidance how you might join the proper club :)

#VMware Explore 2024: Join Us in Las Vegas to get confident in the new #Broadcom Chapter

27. May 20246. June 2024lenzker

LAS VEGAS | THE VENETIAN | AUGUST 26 – 29, 2024

VMware Explore returns this year at The Venetian in Las Vegas. This event marks the first VMware Explore since the acquisition by Broadcom, and by now, everyone will understand how things work in the new VMware Broadcom era. The focus will be on VMware Cloud Foundation and utilizing VMware for AI workloads, providing valuable insights and updates for all attendees.

Why Attend VMware Explore? Here Are 10 Compelling Reasons:

Connect and Network Forge meaningful connections with fellow datacenter enthusiasts. Whether you’re meeting new people, sharing a meal, or engaging in business discussions, VMware Explore is the perfect platform to build lasting relationships. Contribute to the community through blogs, tweets, or vBeers, and you’ll find that giving often leads to receiving valuable insights and support.
Explore the Solutions Exchange Dive into the heart of the software-defined datacenter and multi-cloud ecosystem. The Solutions Exchange offers an unparalleled opportunity to engage with the latest innovations. Take the time to have in-depth discussions with booth representatives, and if needed, schedule one-on-one meetings to address your specific needs and ideas.
Attend High-Quality Breakout Sessions Choose from a wide array of breakout sessions tailored to enhance your knowledge and skills. With your VMware Explore ticket, you’ll have access to all sessions, even after the event. Make sure to check out William Lam’s comprehensive collection of direct links to previous sessions for a preview of the valuable content you can expect.
Engage with the Community at VMTN Visit the VMTN booth and participate in discussions at the blogger table. Share your expertise or learn from others in an inclusive, community-focused environment. Submit your own session proposal or simply absorb the wealth of knowledge available. Unfortunalty vBrownbag will not attending this year anymore, but don’t forget to join the VMware #code program at the community booth.
Meet the Experts VMware Explore will host a high concentration of industry experts. Arrange meetings to discuss specific challenges, wishes, or design and product questions. Take advantage of this unique opportunity to gain insights directly from the best in the field.
Pre-Event Networking Connect with attendees in advance on Twitter/X/TikTok/LinkedIn and other social media platforms. Discover what’s happening in Las Vegas, organize or join public meetings and events, and stay updated on vendor and community-sponsored evening activities. Don’t miss the various late-night events—register early to secure your spot.
Participate in the Hackathon Join the hackathon for a collaborative and intellectually stimulating experience. Work alongside brilliant minds to tackle specific problems. Even with limited time and resources, the hackathon is a fantastic way to engage with peers and enjoy a creative challenge.
Meet the Community and Social Media Team One of the highlights every year is the community booth, where you can interact with bloggers and active community members. Engage with VMware’s social media team Eric Nielsen’s team (including Corey Romero) and others who make this community vibrant and welcoming.
Return to Work with New Ideas Gain fresh perspectives and innovative solutions that you can apply in your daily job. Engaging with thousands of smart, forward-thinking individuals will open your mind to new technologies, methodologies, and problem-solving approaches.
Discover Business and Job Opportunities While this may not be the main argument for convincing your boss, the potential to uncover new business and job opportunities within the SDDC and cloud sectors is significant. Understanding the market and environment at VMware Explore will help you identify and seize these opportunities.

Ready to Transform Your Career?

Don’t miss out on this incredible opportunity to enhance your skills, network with industry leaders, and explore the latest in VMware technology. Convince your boss and register here for VMware Explore 2024 [don’t miss the early bird chance until the 11th June]. See you in Las Vegas!

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.

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

27. May 201927. May 2019lenzker

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

#VMworld 2018: General Session – The Superpowers of Tech

6. November 2018lenzker

2018 marks the 20th anniversary of VMware. 12000 attendees have joined this years European conference in Barcelona. From an economical and technical perspective the last years have been a real success for VMware. During the annual European conference VMworld, Pat Gelsinger who is VMware’s CEO for 6 years, gave an outlook on the companies’ present and its future.

Bridge across

Listening to Pat Gelsinger the core message of VMware’s core strength is pretty clear. Bridge across things.

Act 1 bridge across Servers (vSphere) [and Storage]- vendor independant (Lenovo, HPE, Dell)
Act 2 bridge across devices (Workspace One) – vendor independant (Microsoft, Apple, Samsung, Google)
Act 3 bridge across networks (NSX) – vendor independant (Cisco, Juniper, HPE)

VMware’s #vExpert Programm. Wie starte ich meine Reise? #VMworld Edition

5. November 20185. November 2018lenzker

This post is available in English

Vor ca. einem Monat wurde ich gebeten im deutschsprachigen Raum als vExpert Repräsentant Nachwuchs zu rekrutieren ;-). In der Rolle als vExpert Pro ist es meine Aufgabe Leute in Deutschland zu finden und ihnen Tipps zu geben wie sie sich innerhalb der Virtualisierungs-Community zurecht finden und einen Beitrag leisten können.

Was ist das vExpert Programm?

Das vExpert Programm ist VMware’s Kunden und Evangelisten Programm um Anreize zu schaffen sein Wissen mit anderen zu teilen. Als vExpert bekommt man Zugriff auf interne R&D Quellen, Webex Vorträge, Einladung in den vExpert Slack channel (Unglaublich mächtiges Tool), Einladung zu #vExpert Parties bei der VMworld und last but not least: Man wird Teil einer unglaublich coolen Community.

Why you should try becoming a #vExpert ? #VMworld edition

5. November 20185. November 2018lenzker

Note: This post has also been created in the German language.

About a month ago VMware has announced their new vExpert sub-program: vExpert Pro and I was honoured to become a representative for this programme within Germany.

What is goal of vExpert Pro Program and why did I participate?

The vExpert program has been created by VMware to as VMware’s global evangelism and advocacy program. In the end it’s a community of fellow virtualization experts, geeks who share their knowledge in form of tweets, blog-posts, speaking-engagements or other fancy formats.

Over the years this ‘small’ program has grown to more than 1000 members.

The vExpert Pro progam has been established by Valdecir Carvalho (aka homelabber brazil) to increase the number within specific regions. As in every community there are a few people that don’t like small/internal programs to grow, since with too much growth the exclusiveness of being a member of such a ‘club’ decreases.

I understand that argument and of course there is a risk that if the bar of becoming a vExpert get’s too low, the quality of such a program will lack. That argument is legit, but VMware needs to think on a global scale about that topic.

#VMworld 2018 Europe: Let’s get started ?! Focus on the network and win 1.000.000$

5. November 20185. November 2018lenzker

It’s November; it’s VMworld again and it seems that the sun is definitely celebrating #VMworld with us. As every year in Barcelona, Sunday evening’s event kicked off #VMworld: #vRockstar

(If you are here because you wanted to win 1.000.000$… good luck!)

It has been a pleasure to meet so many vGeeks out there and I am very proud to be part of the team that has sponsored this event among others: comdivision.

(They knew which music needs to be played: Fuerte NSX on Spotify)

The evening went by far too quick and it’s time to get technical. Within the VMware world it is important to remain focussed. The ecosystem is amazingly growing in all kind of areas:

Hybrid (we have heard that for a while) Cloud
Edge-Computing (Computing moves closer too the customer’s site – sounds familiar right?!)
Internet of Things (IoT)
End-User Computing
Public Cloud