COMMUNITY

I managed to dodge the rainstorms in the morning before arriving, the hotel being just across the road from the Venue was a huge help (Thank you Xtravirt) The main session was great particularly HCX announcement and the VR admin demo. I then hit the solutions exchange as soon as it opened. There are all the usual suspects there -except- Cisco (anyone know why?) It was also great to see the guys from Blue Medora.

Sunday Arriving in early on Sunday as the local flight choices are more limited from Bristol than perhaps a larger Airport, very fortunate to have a hotel so close to the VMworld venue, perhaps not so great for the evening activities but I am happy with it this way around. Other than registration (4pm-8pm) and hopefully catching up with a few folk who have also arrived early. In the evening I had the pleasure to meet many awesome people from the vCommunity.

I was honoured to be asked to be part of VMware’s CrowdChat for the general sessions this year, the idea being to live-tweet the General Session as it progressed. I’ve tried to embed the session from CrowdChat itself below, but it might be blocked by your browser for running unsafe scripts. You can also see the commentary on the Day One General Session here. [http://www.via-cc.at/057s1]

VMware vSAN 2017 Specialist Exam I always like to take a discounted exam at VMworld, this year I opted for the VMware vSAN 2017 Specialist exam, which was released a few weeks ago. Having delivered quite a few vSAN based solutions over the last few years, I was fairly confident in the blueprint. I am pleased to say that I passed the exam with a score of 422, way higher than I expected!

**a non-VMware employee! I am very much looking forward to meeting friends old and new during the week, so if you see me come say hi! Where can you find me? During the day I’m likely to be found in the bloggers area, or hanging around the vBrownbag stage, when I’m not in a session. Monday evening I’ll be leading a fearless team of hackers for the VMware {Code} Hackathon, hoping to create something cool!

Having missed last years VMworld I feel very ready for attending the EMEA VMworld in Barcelona. I almost felt annoyed about missing last year as the big announcements really caused a stir in the community and wider afield. (VMware on AWS) The announcements from the US VMworld this year were equally exciting so I am very keen to hear what else VMware has planned to reveal in a Barcelona. I have put a good deal of effort into planning what I will be doing and attending to maximise my time there without burnout (Veterans I hear you laughing)

I’ve been working for Xtravirt for over 3 and a half years now, first as a Senior Consultant, and more recently as a Lead Consultant. During that time I’ve had the opportunity to work with some excellent people, some fantastic customers and some huge projects. I’ve developed and grown as a consultant and architect, achieved multiple VCP and VCAP qualifications, and VMware’s elite VCDX certification. For all of this, and for the opportunities and support they have provided, I am thankful to Xtravirt and to all of my colleagues who helped along the way.

The Host Resources Deep Dive book by Frank Denneman and Niels Hagoort has been one of the most widely anticipated books in the VMware community - previous deep dive books by Frank (co-authored with Duncan Epping), tantalising blog posts and captivating presentations have whet the appetite for the last year or so. Having sat through some of these presentations at VMUGs and VMworld I can tell you the depth and understanding that the authors bring to the table is immense.

[<img class=“alignright size-thumbnail wp-image-8035” src=“/images/2017/03/logo.jpg” alt=“” width=“150” height=“150” which vROps can provide by using various extensibility solutions. We discussed the following use cases and demonstrated them in live environments: Use Case 1 - Full-Stack vSphere Monitoring. From application to Infrastructure. Use Case 2 - Amazon RDS Workloads. Monitoring public cloud workloads with vROps. Use Case 3 - vROps Extensibility. Metrics, Logs and Costing come together along with other 3rd party extensibility options.

<img class=“size-thumbnail wp-image-8092 alignright” src=“/images/2017/04/echo.jpeg” alt=“” width=“150” height=“150” and having everything wake up for me is really cool. I already have a vRealize Orchestrator workflow to shutdown my workload cluster. What I want to do is trigger that by a voice command from Alexa. Now, the correct and proper thing to do here would be to create a new Alexa skill, write the function in Lambda and connect that to my Orchestrator REST API and execute the workflow.