Last week I was lucky enough to attend the first London VMUG of the year hosted at OVHCloud’s office. Here’s my breakdown of what occurred:

 

 

Intro – Chris Bradshaw

First a brief introduction from Chris with the normal housekeeping rules agenda, and venue information.

 

 

Broadcom Update – Gareth Edwards

Gareth advised the following:

•  For certification he recommended getting hands on with the actual products.
•  Advised on the how NVME Tiering helps customers with RAM costs (which have spiked recently). 
•  Advised that soon hardware compatible with ESXI 8 will be compatible with 9 and as a reminder that version 8 goes EOL in Oct 2027. 
•  There is also no longer a need for vSAN for principal storage. 
•  Private AI is now included in SKU.

 

VMware on OVHCloud – OVHCloud sponsor session

The two gents went through the following:

• Brief history of OVHCloud.
• Offerings around manged\unmanaged vSphere (VCF soon) and even bare metal.
• Their on prem cloud platform that consists of a full built & configured rack shipped to your premises.
• Been offering VMware solutions for 15 years

 

 

How Malware Behaves In VMs: Detection Using Heuristics and Machine Learning – Darlington Chigozie Okele

In this session Darlington ran through the following:

• How attackers have come to realize that VMs are most used and are developing malware specific to VMs.
• How traditional tools rely on static signatures or basic behaviour and modern tools need to be dynamic.
• Understanding that malware appearances change using polymorphic and metamorphic techniques.
• Once inside an environment moves laterally becoming adaptive.
• How to utilise machine learning to learn behaioural baselines and remian resilient.

 

 

Supercharging VMware Automation with Terraform and AI – Sam McGeown

Sam spoke around the following topics:

• How MCP (Model Context Protocol) is like USB C for AI apps.
• How it’s a standard and secure way for AI models to access tools, APIs and data.
• Including using an MCP server to access tools, resources, and prompts.
• Also using the MCP server through VS Code to access things like Terraforms Public Regitry, Mobile Dev Guide and style guides as well as accessing paid options through Terraform Enterprise.
• Live demo of using the AI (CoPilot) through VS Code.

 

 

Migrating VCF using HCX – Andy Pearce

In this session Andy ran through the following:

• HCX license used to be that had to buy most expensive product to get HCX license. Now comes with VCF.
• HCX is a tool to migrate big workloads\lots of VMs.
• The focus of HCX is for migration where as SRM focussing on DR.
• The common reasons to migrate (rehost, re-platform, rebalance).
• How HCX provides a simple, fast and economical migrations.
• HCX can convert VMs between private, public and cloud provider clouds.
• The different methods and use cases used in HCX.
• How network extension and traffic engineering can assist.

 

 

ClickOps to DevSec….Ops – Chris Bradhsaw

Chris’s session covered the following, including his analogies to maps:

• What Click Ops is: Clicking through your VM build (like driving until you get there).
• What Script Ops is: A script to go through, do this, do that (like pre written instructions)
• Declarative IaaS: Declaring what you need and where (like having a SatNav).
• How we now have Google Maps with traffic alerts, road closures which is similar to DevSecOps: Code analysis, best practise, security checks.
• Vibe Coding: AI coding but needs to be checked before running
• Do you need each of the methods and how they could apply.

 

 

After all those sessions there was a brief closing talk and then onto some drinking and networking.

As usual I really enjoyed the day, learnt some things, did some networking and had free beers and pizza. Many thanks to OVHCloud for hosting the event.