Hi All,

As you may know, I attended VMworld, it was quite a different experience this year, as I became a vExpert 2019. I had an opportunity to see and meet a lot of folks in the vCommunity. I remember last year when I was in VMworld, I was discussing getting my home lab setup and I remember Ather suggested that, I can start blogging again using my home lab.

A year forward I managed to Make Your My Mark and became a VMware vExpert 2019.

If you don’t know what is vExpert Program is about?

vExpert 2019 is an award given VMware evangelist, advocates. The program is designed to put VMware’s marketing resources towards your advocacy efforts, who has displayed going above and beyond with their use of the data. It forms part of their global evangelism and advocacy program.

I applied for the award after I was recommended by other vExperts – having seen the work done with my blog agileops.co.uk and his YouTube channel, if you haven’t seen it, check them out! And don’t forget to subscribe .

By the way, the program does have a lot of perks and it opens applications twice every year. in December and July. So if you are ready to Make Your Mark give it a go and you never know, you might become a vExpert 2020 https://vexpert.vmware.com/

vExpert Program Benefits

• Invite to our private #Slack channel
• vExpert certificate signed by our CEO Pat Gelsinger.
• Private forums on communities.vmware.com.
• Permission to use the vExpert logo on cards, website, etc for one year
• Access to a private directory for networking, etc.
• Exclusive gifts from various VMware partners.
• Private webinars with VMware partners as well as NFRs.
• Access to private betas (subject to admission by beta teams).
• 365-day eval licenses for most products for home lab / cloud providers.
• Private pre-launch briefings via our blogger briefing pre-VMworld (subject to admission by product teams)
• Blogger early access program for vSphere and some other products.
• Featured in a public vExpert online directory.
• Access to vetted VMware & Virtualization content for your social channels.
• Yearly vExpert parties at both VMworld US and VMworld Europe events.
• Identification as a vExpert at both VMworld US and VMworld EU.

So, what are you waiting for the applications for the vExpert 2020 program are now open, apply at https://vexpert.vmware.com/apply.

Don’t miss vForum on 12th December

If you have missed the VMworld this year you still have time to register for vForum which is this week on 12 December. This is a great opportunity to catch up, click here and registers vForum
vForum Online is VMware’s largest virtual event for IT professionals, is back with a post-VMworld update! Join the online event to hear about exclusive announcements from VMworld 2019 Europe regarding top solutions: disruptive technologies at the core of the digital foundation.

and guess what you can Register today and WIN A TICKET TO VMWORLD 2020! who knows you might just get lucky and win a trip to VMworld Europe 2020

vForum Online comes to you live, online, and direct to your desktop or laptop. With travel not required, there’s no reason not to attend!

Check out our exciting agenda below:

• Keynote:Tech in the Age of Any
  Joe Baguley, Chief Technology Officer EMEA, VMware
• Cloud Session:Accelerate Your Cloud Journey
  Rory Choudhuri, EMEA Solutions Product Marketing Director, VMware
• Modern Apps Session:VMware Tanzu and Your Kubernetes Journey
  Ed Hoppitt, Director of Modern Apps and Cloud Native Platforms EMEA, VMware
• Networking and Security 2.0 Session:What we said at VMworld 2019
  Garry Owen, EMEA Senior Solutions Product Marketing Manager, VMware
• Digital Workspace Session:Why We Need to Put the Employee Experience First Today
  Spencer Pitts, Chief Technologist EMEA, VMware
• Live Q&A Session

Lets discuss some of the important highlights of VMworld 2019 according to me:

Tanzu Mission Control

VMware Tanzu is Vmware’s modern application solution. fundamentally this about trying all the new products VMware has recently acquired and integrate it under one umbrella under Build, Run and Manage.

in simple term, this will simplify the life of VMware Admin’s as they no longer need to struggle to find which VM’s makes an application. it will be all group which will make life simple for troubleshooting too.

Vmware Tanzu is delivered in a way that allows any organization to adopt container and Kubernetes related technology incrementally.

 Tanzu supports scenarios from we are getting started with contemnors to we are running Kubernetes in production but are struggling to scale up.

Project Pacific – K8s on vSphere

Personally I think this is going to disrupt everything the big announcement at VMworld about, Project Pacific which is fundamentally re-architected vSphere with native Kubernetes to change the game when it comes to building and running modern applications.

DevOps get self-service resources from their cloud and Virtual administrators get to manage logical workloads as a group rather than the VMs that make them up.

There is a lot of information about Project Pacific here is a short video from Joe Beda, Principal Engineer for Cloud-Native Apps at VMware, answers all things Kubernetes and what customers can expect to gain from new technologies like Project Pacific and Tanzu Mission Control.

Azure VMware Solution by CloudSimple

Azure VMware Solution by CloudSimple is a fully managed service that allows you to run the VMware platform in Azure.

This solution includes vSphere, vCenter, vSAN, NSX-T, etc.

This was announced at VMworld this year too. I think this is really great news that we can run VMware Workload natively on Azure. of course the service is only offered by CloudSimple, however, I think its a great move by VMware to get the customers from Azure. I am sure we will be seeing more of similar services coming forward in the future.

Some important points to remember are:
Service offered by CloudSimple
Get scale, automation and fast provisioning for your VMware workloads on global Azure infrastructure.
Keep using your existing VMware investments, skills and tools, including VMware vSphere, vSAN, vCenter and all other providers’ tools
Modernise your VMware workloads by integrating with native Azure services such as Azure Active Directory, AI and Analytics.
Take advantage of unmatched Azure pricing and benefits for Windows Server and SQL Server.

Some of the advantages are: Stay on native VMware technologies without rearchitecting your environment when you move or extend your VMware workloads to Azure.
Get integrated management of Azure and VMware resources, and manage your cloud and on-premises applications the same way.
Modernise existing applications and build new ones by tapping into the massive Azure ecosystem of products and services.
Take advantage of unmatched Azure pricing and benefits for Windows Server and SQL Server.

VMware Cloud On Dell EMC

VMC on Dell EMC VMware Cloud on Dell EMC is actually Data Center As a Service which brings best of both world public cloud in private datacenter.

I think this is a great offering from VMware where you have restrictions from putting the data on public cloud partners or customers can use this.
This is similar to VMware on AWS, however, in this instance, it’s hosted on a private data centre.

currently, this offering is only available in the USA with an aim to roll out to Europe in the next year.

The benefits we get by using this VMware offering is we get the full solution managed and maintained by VMware support with 365/24 hours with 4 hours response time. VMware takes care of operating the infrastructure: deploying it., troubleshooting issues; and performing patching, upgrading and maintenance. This frees you and your experts to work on what matters the most and focus on your product.

This runs on vXRail hardware with full SDDC solution, however, in this instance VMware keeps the access for the VMware Cloud Foundation and give the customer a different portal to manage and run the environment.

What we have in this HCI solution is full SDDC stack running on vSphere hypervisor and vSAN, with the cutting edge security offered by NSX-T.
This gives us more time to focus on something else other than just managing and maintaining the VMware infrastructure.

Other benefits include:
Increase agility
simplified operation
Accelerated Innovation
Mitigated Risk
Controlled cost
Increased performance

Don’t forget to check out my short video on VMware Cloud on Dell EMC.

VMware Hands-ON Labs Command Center

I managed to find some time to do a lab on vRNI which was designed by one of my friend Atif @ VMware, this was one of the lightning labs which are designed for 30 minutes sessions.

On my last day at VMworld I had an opportunity to understand from one of the experts, how the VMware Learning Platform leverages different types of cloud private and public to spin up the labs on demand?

As mentioned the HOL is running on a mix of private and public cloud, we can see the true potential of vRelize Operations Manager, monitoring all the different cloud. IBM Cloud, AWS and VMware private hosted data centre, have a look at a short video where I tried to explain it.

Raspberry Pi ESXi on ARM

Not sure if you have missed my post about the Pi,

In solution Exchange one of the busy booth was ARM showcasing ESXi running on Raspberry Pi.

Use Cases:

1.Use case was running FT VM on Pi on remote or branch office.This can boot from iSCSI back storage

2. vSAN cluster witness site. Good enough for a lab environment I guess not for any production setup.

here is a short video of the ARM booth as they had quite a few demos running during that time.

So get ready to make your mark in 2020 and good luck.

References:

https://searchvmware.techtarget.com/feature/Whats-new-with-VMware-Cloud-on-AWS
https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2019/04/announcing-vmware-cloud-on-dell-emc.html#respond
Image: https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/files/2019/04/introducing-vmc-on-dell-emc.png
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-gb/overview/azure-vmware/

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/vmware-cloudsimple/cloudsimple-vmware-solutions-overview

Azure and CloudSimple

Image: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/vmware-cloudsimple/media/azure-vmware-solution-by-cloudsimple.png

vExpert

https://vexpert.vmware.com/

vFourom

https://onlinexperiences.com/scripts/Server.nxp?LASCmd=AI:4;F:QS!10100&ShowUUID=25147DFB-BFB6-4000-8A9E-17D2D3795DB0&AffiliateData=OS

Hi All,

I will be attending VMWorld Europe this week at Barcelona. Although this is my 3^rd year attending VMWorld, I am very excited about this year in particular because this is the first time I have been awarded vExpert. This gives exclusive access to vExpert lounges and a lot of other advantages too.

and this year i have decided that I am going to daily blog, and if time permits some vLogs for my YouTube channel, with an intention to post daily updates and highlights of the day.

I am being a little bit ambitious here as I have a busy schedule this week lets see how it goes.

If you want to stop by and say hello you might find me in VMVillage at with other bloggers. or feel free to message me on twitter @ibrahimquraishi