Community

So the other day my Skype account was briefly compromised, a successful login from Russia (after digging through activity logs) and this was after many attempts from IP addresses all around the world (China, Korea, Argentina the list goes on). You can see from the picture below the successful login attempt.

My initial reaction was stress and panic, as I didn’t know precisely where I had been compromised I ran scans on my local machines while resetting passwords a plenty. Once I had calmed down a bit and reviewed where I had gone wrong I set about uping my game.

vRealize Automation vExperts Workshop

I attended a workshop with Jad El Zein in Barcelona last year and it was one of the best sessions I attended, especially as it was just on the news of vRA7’s release. This workshop was this year’s equivelant, but because the session included a lot of people just getting started with vRA a lot of the time was taken to explain what vRA does, so there was no real time for the more in depth details on the new features that are coming (some already announced and in Tech Preview). I certainly don’t begrudge the guys just starting the chance to hear the basics from Jad, but I think a more expert session would also be good.

Day 1 keynote

I’m not going to lie, the start to the keynote was weird. There was drums and poetry. I will say no more. Another thing I’m not going to do (because many people do it far better than me - I’m looking at you Julian ) is do a blow-by-blow account of the keynotes, for me the headlines are that VMware announced VMware Cloud Foundation and Cross Cloud Services.

I landed in Las Vegas about 9:30PM local time on Saturday evening, having not executed my plan to sleep on the flight! I had planned to sleep on the Toronto to Vegas leg, which would have meant I could head over to the Sips and Stogies pre-event, however a very rowdy hen do a couple of rows away meant that I didn’t sleep at all, so I grabbed a taxi down to my hotel, the Excalibur, and got myself checked in.

In my post yesterday I promised to post my VMworld session picks, so here it is! I have filled my schedule, and even added some alternate picks when there were too many good sessions to go for. My session picks are focussing around:

• vRealize Automation
• NSX
• VSAN
• PowerCLI, APIs and automation

Now, before anyone tells me I’ve picked too many and I won’t make it to all of them - I know! I can guarantee I’ll get distracted/tired/hungry and won’t make all of them, but if I could…

I’m not sure if I’ll take advantage of the cheap certifications this year - in previous years I’ve take VCIX-NV , VCP-NV and VCAP5-DCD all with great results, so it’s something I’d consider, although at this point I’m not 100% sure what exam I’d take (I’ve done a lot of betas recently!)

This was my second UKVMUG and it was my first vCurry evening! so I was really looking forward to getting up to the event and seeing everyone.

The vCurry event was excellent and it was a great chance to enjoy good food in great company. Had the chance to meet with many people I would not normally get the chance to see, Frank @fbuechsel and Brad @VMUG_CEO to name a couple! To top off a really great evening we (my table/team) won the vQuiz which was organised and conducted by Stuart @Virtual_Stu (thanks Stuart!), a big thank you to Matt @Twickersmatt for the beers (one of the prizes).

First of all, thank you to everyone who came along to my session at the UKVMUG yesterday, it was great to see so many people at a round table discussion, sorry for those that had to stand! I hope that it was helpful and maybe a few of you will be building some awesome labs in the cloud!

Ravello very kindly sponsored a free home lab, equivalent to the vExpert 1000 hours account as a prize for my session at the UKVMUG yesterday. Using a high tech random number generator and an Excel spread sheet the winner was picked, so without further ado, congratulations go to…

I use mind maps quite a lot for study, I find the visual representation of info makes it a lot easier for me to remember! Below is a mind map I created for learning the roles in vRealize Automation, which I used during my presentation for #vBrownBag on VCP6-CMA objective 2.

You can download a PDF version here: vRealize Automation Roles Mind Map

Apologies in advance if this is post is a jumbled nonsense, I’m still way too excited!

This morning I woke to the news that I have passed my VCDX-CMA!

This was my second attempt at VCDX and although the first failure was a painful experience, the lessons learned from it were invaluable to take into the defence the second time around. Failing doesn’t have to be a negative experience - if there is one thing that I will take from the VCDX program it is that there is ALWAYS more I need to learn, and I can always do better. Learning has to be a way of life (in this industry especially!) and the minute you stop, you start falling back.