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Sam’s #VMworld 2017: Network and Security keynote and NSX-T Architecture Deep Dive #NET1863BE

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Posts in this series
  1. Looking forward to #VMworld EMEA 2017
  2. Sam's #VMworld 2017: Before I go...
  3. Simon's #VMworld 2017: Sunday and Monday
  4. Sam's #VMworld 2017: vSAN Specialist and VMware {Code} Hackathon
  5. Sam's #VMworld 2017: Day One General Session
  6. Sam’s #VMworld 2017: Intro to NSX-T Architecture #NET1510BE and NSX-T and Kubernetes #NET1522BE
  7. Simon's #VMworld 2017: Tuesday
  8. Sam's #VMworld 2017: Day Two General Session
  9. Sam's #VMworld 2017: Network and Security keynote and NSX-T Architecture Deep Dive #NET1863BE
  10. Simon's #VMworld 2017: Wednesday

Transforming Networking and Security for the Digital Era

Wednesday morning I attended the Network and Security keynote which, if I’m honest, I found to be a bit boring. To be fair, it was probably aimed at business leaders and maybe not those that are technical. There were three customer stories, but I would have liked to have heard much more about the problems that NSX solved for them specifically, rather than being datacenter transformation/cloud journey stories that included NSX. For me, it felt like there was nothing new in the presentation that hadn’t been covered in the general sessions. I would have liked to have seen and heard a bit more what the NSBU’s leadership think is going to be big over the next 5 years. [Read more…]

Sam’s #VMworld 2017: Day Two General Session

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Posts in this series
  1. Looking forward to #VMworld EMEA 2017
  2. Sam's #VMworld 2017: Before I go...
  3. Simon's #VMworld 2017: Sunday and Monday
  4. Sam's #VMworld 2017: vSAN Specialist and VMware {Code} Hackathon
  5. Sam's #VMworld 2017: Day One General Session
  6. Sam’s #VMworld 2017: Intro to NSX-T Architecture #NET1510BE and NSX-T and Kubernetes #NET1522BE
  7. Simon's #VMworld 2017: Tuesday
  8. Sam's #VMworld 2017: Day Two General Session
  9. Sam's #VMworld 2017: Network and Security keynote and NSX-T Architecture Deep Dive #NET1863BE
  10. Simon's #VMworld 2017: Wednesday

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 Two General Session here.

Sam’s #VMworld 2017: Intro to NSX-T Architecture #NET1510BE and NSX-T and Kubernetes #NET1522BE

by Leave a Comment

Posts in this series
  1. Looking forward to #VMworld EMEA 2017
  2. Sam's #VMworld 2017: Before I go...
  3. Simon's #VMworld 2017: Sunday and Monday
  4. Sam's #VMworld 2017: vSAN Specialist and VMware {Code} Hackathon
  5. Sam's #VMworld 2017: Day One General Session
  6. Sam’s #VMworld 2017: Intro to NSX-T Architecture #NET1510BE and NSX-T and Kubernetes #NET1522BE
  7. Simon's #VMworld 2017: Tuesday
  8. Sam's #VMworld 2017: Day Two General Session
  9. Sam's #VMworld 2017: Network and Security keynote and NSX-T Architecture Deep Dive #NET1863BE
  10. Simon's #VMworld 2017: Wednesday

It will be no surprise, given my impending move to the VMware PSO NSX Practice, that this morning I’ve been focussing on NSX-T. The two sessions I attended were the Introduction to NSX-T Architecture and Integrating NSX-T with Kubernetes. In a weird twist of scheduling, the Kubernetes session was before the introduction session, but it worked out OK.

I found the Kubernetes session really enjoyable and really felt like the speakers delivered a great overview of the integration and how they work together. I was pleasantly surprised with how familiar a lot of the concepts were, coming from an NSX-v and vRealize Automation background. It’s similar, but different! This is something I can really get my teeth into.

Moving into the NSX-T architecture session, Kevin and Dimitri walked through the components and functions of NSX-T and demonstrated integration with OpenStack as a cloud management platform to automate deployments. Again I was pleased with the familiarity of all the concepts and terminology. [Read more…]

Sam’s #VMworld 2017: Day One General Session

by Leave a Comment

Posts in this series
  1. Looking forward to #VMworld EMEA 2017
  2. Sam's #VMworld 2017: Before I go...
  3. Simon's #VMworld 2017: Sunday and Monday
  4. Sam's #VMworld 2017: vSAN Specialist and VMware {Code} Hackathon
  5. Sam's #VMworld 2017: Day One General Session
  6. Sam’s #VMworld 2017: Intro to NSX-T Architecture #NET1510BE and NSX-T and Kubernetes #NET1522BE
  7. Simon's #VMworld 2017: Tuesday
  8. Sam's #VMworld 2017: Day Two General Session
  9. Sam's #VMworld 2017: Network and Security keynote and NSX-T Architecture Deep Dive #NET1863BE
  10. Simon's #VMworld 2017: Wednesday

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.

Sam’s #VMworld 2017: vSAN Specialist and VMware {Code} Hackathon

by Leave a Comment

Posts in this series
  1. Looking forward to #VMworld EMEA 2017
  2. Sam's #VMworld 2017: Before I go...
  3. Simon's #VMworld 2017: Sunday and Monday
  4. Sam's #VMworld 2017: vSAN Specialist and VMware {Code} Hackathon
  5. Sam's #VMworld 2017: Day One General Session
  6. Sam’s #VMworld 2017: Intro to NSX-T Architecture #NET1510BE and NSX-T and Kubernetes #NET1522BE
  7. Simon's #VMworld 2017: Tuesday
  8. Sam's #VMworld 2017: Day Two General Session
  9. Sam's #VMworld 2017: Network and Security keynote and NSX-T Architecture Deep Dive #NET1863BE
  10. Simon's #VMworld 2017: Wednesday

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! I thought the exam itself was fair, and covered and tested the basics of vSAN well. You definitely need to know the supported architectures and how storage policies effect and apply to the data on vSAN.

You can check out my new badge on Acclaim

VMware Code Hackathon

Having taken part and thoroughly enjoyed last year’s hackathon at VMworld Las Vegas, I was definitely keen to get involved with the event this year. When I signed up there were no teams that took my fancy, so I created my own based on PowerCLI and some of my pod deployment scripts.

I was joined by some really good guys who all put in a serious amount of work in the short time we had – most importantly we had a great time and learned a lot! We managed to get a mostly working deployment of vROps, a HTML5 interface for the script config and the beginnings of the PowerShell required to deploy OVF templates from the vSphere Content Library – the content library script is available on my GitHub account. I’m hoping to continue working on it to develop a module to contribute to the PowerCLI script examples.