Simon Eady

DefinIT was started back in 2007, originally under the name www.mcgeown.co.uk , by Sam McGeown . At the time it was just a self-learning and self-documentation exercise, but after few short months Sam started noticing an increasae in traffic and that people were commenting on the posts he wrote. From that point on the blog became about helping other people who were hitting the same problems.

Fast forward to 2011 and Sam invited Simon Eady to join and co-author on the site, creating a wider set of expertise but still with the same goal of sharing the knowledge and helping people just like us.

Recently I had the good fortune to be invited to attend a VMware Multi-Cloud course at VMware UK HQ in Staines.

Multi-Cloud Builder

The course took place over 4 days and was very well structured.

Initialy, we were given the VMware vision on Multi-Cloud and then we were straight into the “good stuff” hands-on-labs. This would be a consistent and well executed theme for the 4 days.

VMware now have an impressive global cloud presence utilising their partnerships with major hyperscalers such as AWS, Azure Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and several others. You can see from the list below VMware are serious about this Multi-Cloud journey.

VMWorld, sorry VMware Explore has been and gone and seemed to go very smoothly, there were several announcements but the big one for me was Aria.

VMware Aria (formerly vRealize Cloud Management)

Cloud management that unifies applications, infrastructure, and services across private, hybrid, and public clouds in a single platform with a common data model.

With the VMware Aria launch, we are unifying VMware Cloud Management in four key respects:

Recently I stumbled upon a limitation in VCF that isn’t very clearly documented, and while not an issue you would regularly come accross. It is an import limitation to be aware of if you plan to adjust your pNIC configuration of any VCF hosts post deployment/commisioning.

The Problem

We have a few customers who will not be able to commision their new hosts with the desired pNIC configuration due to current hardware availability. The availability of the pNICs due to global supply challenges has meant severe delays in availability.

On the 10th February VCF 4.4 was released, this was quite a significant milestone as it removed a few things from the equation and also provided more flexbility.

Firstly and arguably the big change.

vRealize Suite

vRealize Lifecycle Manager 8.6.2, upgrade and deployment of the vRealize Suite products is managed by vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager. You can upgrade vRealize Suite products as new versions become available in your vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager. vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager will only allow upgrades to compatible and supported versions of vRealize Suite products. Specific vRealize Automation, vRealize Operations, vRealize Log Insight, and Workspace ONE Access versions will no longer be listed in the VMware Cloud Foundation BOM.

I am blessed to be working for a great employer, and while COVID had a significant impact everywhere, from a work point of view, I have never been busier.

Because we are growing as an organisation, opportunities are surfacing on a regular basis.

My focus in the last 24 months has shifted from a more project to project focus to now being involved in several projects at once providing project and architectural governance as well as normal consultant duties. This has been challenging but really enjoyable. This means often I am not in the technical “weeds”, and exercising new skills and leaning on past experience.

If you have spent any time designing IT soutions with VMware products you will very likely have come into contact with VMware Validated Designs (VVD)

VMware Validated Design is a family of solutions for data center designs that span compute, storage, networking, and management, serving as a blueprint for your Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) implementation. The documentation of VMware Validated Design consists of succeeding deliverables for all stages of the SDDC life cycle.

Having not sat any VMware exams recently (MSC exam not including) I had to update my VMware certification status and therefore sit the VCP exam.

The VCP-DCV 2021 certification validates candidate skills to implement, manage, and troubleshoot a vSphere infrastructure, using best practices to provide a powerful, flexible, and secure foundation for business agility that can accelerate the transformation to cloud computing.

Being a Consultant within a VMware Principal Partner there are standards we need to meet and preferably exceed.

Master Services Competencies (MSCs) are VMware partner designations designed to recognize services-capable partners with delivery expertise and experience within a VMware solution area.

With that in mind I sat the VCF Specialist exam.

The Exam

The exam covers a broad spectrum of VMware technologies (vSphere, NSX-T, vSAN, Tanzu) I was apprehensive about it as there is an awful lot of material to cover that the exam expects you to have good knowledge of. You have 130 minutes to work through 72 question It is available as a remote-proctored exam, and requires a score of 300 or more to pass.

There has been some really exciting things being announced/relased by VMware and their respective product teams recently so lets take a look at all the new goodness in vRealize Operations 8.4

vRealize Operations 8.4

vRealize Operations 8.4 delivers new and enhanced capabilities for self-driving operations to help customers optimize, plan, and scale VMware Cloud, which includes on-premises private cloud or VMware SDDC in multiple public clouds such as VMware Cloud on AWS, Azure VMware Solution (AVS), and Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE), while at the same time unifying multi-cloud monitoring, and supporting AWS, Azure Cloud, and Google Cloud platforms. Powered by artificial intelligence (AI), this release will provide a unified operations platform, deliver continuous performance optimization, efficient capacity and cost management, proactive planning, app-aware intelligent remediation, and integrated compliance.