Here is my review of the recent London VMUG virtual event that streamed live on Zoom and also on YouTube. All sessions have been recorded and uploaded to the UK VMUG YouTube channel as well.
1045-11 introduction (Simon Gallagher)
Simon covered the below topics before introducing the guest speakers.
Log4j chaos over Christmas 2021 period and VMware current advice:
https://www.vmware.com/security/advisories/VMSA-2021-0028.html
VMUG Advantage membership and benefits: https://www.vmug.com/membership/vmug-advantage-membership/
Call for papers for future London VMUG submissions:
http://tinyurl.com/VMUG-CFP
11-1145 VMware Cloud infrastructure (Duncan Epping – Chief Technologist, Cloud Infrastructure , VMware)
AI & ML. Quote from Duncan’s presentation “Data is heart of every business transformation”. Presentation about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML). Duncan described the increasing adoption of Machine Learning by a lot commercial businesses. He used the example of everyday things we use Amazon website that suggests similar products after your purchase.
Project Monterey. This was announced a while back at VMworld 2020 and is something VMware is progressing in the background, currently in Beta program. The project is further improving the use of VMware to utilize new hardware, SmartNIC, to offload traditional network processing. For more information see VMware blog post
Project Capitola. Was announced at VMworld 2021 and continues the Software Defined Datacentre (SDDC) journey VMware has been driving over the last fifteen years. This project looks to produce Software Defined memory for datacentric workloads. VMware is collaborating with hardware memory vendors to deliver this project. Currently in preliminary testing (not in Beta yet). More details can be found on VMware blog post.
Duncan also used the end of the presentation to mention a new Tech podcast he shares with Frank Dennman and Johan van Amersfoort. Unexplored territory podcast: https://unexploredterritory.tech/
1215-1300 VCF (James Tiffany )
VMware Cloud Foundation – core.vmware.com/vmware-cloud-foundation
Can use excel deployment and convert to JSON file ready for use with cloud builder appliance
-Planning is key
-Reading the docs saves time later
-Spend time to ensure accuracy of names and IP ranges are correct
-Don’t patch poutside the SDDC manager process
-Education, people will be used to caryying out a task in a specfific way. Ensure SDDC manager is used rather than vcenter.
1400-1430 Horizon Cloud scaling (Michael Young / Andrew Nash)
VMware Horizon on Azure This delves into architecting the the necessary Azure infrastructure components and then Horizon components. If you are interested in this do check the vide replay on YouTube beginning at 14:00.
1435 – 1520 K8s for mere mortals (Brian Sulins)
Helpful guide for Kuberenetes newbies, from someone who was late to k8s.
Explanation of fundamentals Kuberenetes concepts and tools
Tools Brain mentioned were – minkube, TKG (community edition), docker, kubectl, kubectx and kubens.
Brian has also done a five part blog series on Kubernetes and getting started with it: https://thinkingoutcloud.org/2020/12/22/late-to-the-table-kubernetes-part-1-yet-another-take-on-kubernetes/
Learning resources – https://www.manning.com/books/kubernetes-in-action
1530 – 1615 TAM Life (Ian Sanderson iLand Cloud / Chris Dearden Channel Sales Engineer Delinea / Paul Robinson Senior TAM VMware / Matt Crape Senior TAM VMware / Dave Marley Senior TAM VMware)
Very insightful session from various TAMs in UK and US.
Providing knowledge about the life of TAM and what the role entails for their companies. Common theme was someone has had various technical roles over their career and then took a step sideways into TAM. They each explained their own journey to TAM and how each day can be different. Key point I picked up on was the TAM is not like Pre-Sales consultant role and they generally not commission/ sales driven. Was good to have a non-technical presentation that explores tips and advice about career development.
Thank you London VMUG