Last week I was able to attend the London VMware User Group at the iconic BBC Television Centre. Here’s a brief summary of what occured:

 

 

Introduction – Chris Bradshaw

After stuffing our faces with bacon sandwiches and pastries, Chris provided an introduction to the day including the agenda and some items of note:

• ESXi, Workstation and Fusion are free
• vSphere 7 End of Life is 2nd Oct
• Next London VMUG meeting: 3rd July
• VMware Explore: 28th August
• VMware Explore On Tour (London): Mid Sept (tbc)

 

Broadcom Update – Paul Nothard (Broadcom)

Paul provided an update on how Broadcom are trying to move away from traditional 3 tier environments and how newer companies are choosing a cloud first strategy.  One problem however is that cloud doesn’t do everything that on premises can do. VCF however resolves both by providing a modern infrastructure, unified cloud experience with a secure and resilient platform. He mentioned about VCF 9 being released soon and that the aim is to run all things (i.e. AI\ML, VMs, K8s). He also ran through some cool features for VCF 9 including:

• One Interface via VCF Operations Console – Giving you private cloud operations with less confusion around running things (no confusing names like Tanzu, TKG, etc)
• Advanced memory tiering for NVME storage – Allowing NVME memory to be utilised as memory
• Improved storage efficiency with vSAN – vSAN to vSAN replication, VCF data path enhancements

 

 

From Administrator To Developer Experience Engineer – Jonny Williams (Red Hat) & Phil Prosser (Red Hat)

In this talk the guys explained how businesses want their engineers to be as productive as possible whilst providing added value from the infrastructure and also how developers face a maze of complexity to being as productive as possible. This can compound to various other teams. They went through the following developer challenges:

• Dreadful Dev Hardware – Creating dev performance bottlenecks
• Nightmare Networking  Issues – Networking that not portable
• Painful Path To Production – Many long manual tasks to get to production

They also explained and demo’ed how Red Hat’s tooling can help alleviate these issues and allow Devs to have an improved experience , with faster and better productivity.

 

 

Ask Me Anything – Christopher Lewis – Lead Solutions Architect (Broadcom)

This was a short session whereby audience members could ask Chris anything. Most of the questions were around VCF & certification. Some information obtained:

• VCP-VCF:
• Currently: 5.2  Administrator and Architect Exams
• Coming Soon: Version 9
• There will be a design exam, support exam  and specialist exams – i.e. vSAN
• There will be a VCDX level and VCAP level too at some point
• Multi choice exam questions have to be all correct, no points given if 1 or 2 are correct
• There are future plans to reduce the amount of appliances used
• Recommendations for exams are to use the exam blueprint and to use Hands On Labs to get to know the product
• Orchestrator is being continued

 

 

On-premises Data Services for VMware Cloud Foundations – Cormac Hogan 

The guys started off by explaining about the challenges around DB management including different teams, low speeds, high TCO, lack of control & having lots of DBs (some customers known to have over 1000!) that are unpatched and unmanaged.

They explained how they can use Data Services Manager, (which is a virtual appliance) to gain control of your DB estate. It can be used for fleet management, automated backups and automated updates. It features role based access and LDAP authentication for governance and security. They gave a few recorded demos of the product in use. 

 

 

Multi tenancy & VPCs with VCF Networking – Andy Pearce

Andy explained what a VPC is (logically isolated virtual network) and how it can be used with NSX to create multi tenants. I’ll admit Im not the best with networking\NSX but as I understand it, it allows you to segment your networks so that different teams could use their own network space.

 

 

Unlocking Capacity with VCF – Do More for less – Verdat Kurshumliju

Verdat explained how he uses Aria operations with his customers to get the most out of their virtual estate. This includes the following:

• Right Sizing VMs – Checking for oversized or undersized VMs, investigating powered off VMs and idle VMs
• Aged Snapshots –  Creating automated alerts to maintain that snapshots are removed after a certain time
• Resource Reservation – Correcting incorrect memory configurations

He also advised on using capacity planning to predict how the estate will look in 6 – 12 months time. 

 

 

Taking #Advantage of VMUG – Over a beer to accelerate your carrer -Gareth Edwards, Chris Bradshaw

Definitely a good end of the day when the beers come out! This session was a brief reminder of the VMUG Advantage membership and some recommendations around the certifications and the new VCP-VCF exams. 

 

 

All in all it was a good day. If you’ve never been to a VMUG before, I highly recommend going (next London VMUG is on the 3rd July, register here: https://www.vmug.com/). You learn so much and it’s a great way to network and meet people.