VMworld

VMworld 2020 Demo - Voice activated workload migration to VMware Cloud SDDCs

10/19/2020 by William Lam 2 Comments

One of my favorite but also most stressful part of preparing for a VMworld session is creating the demos. Even with a "virtual" VMworld this year, I personally felt it was even more stressful than a physical VMworld.

I have been presenting with Emad Younis for a number of years now and every year, we always end up with crazy ideas without thinking through all the feasibility aspects. This year was certainly no different and while working on our demo this year, I was seriously questioning my sanity and even the actual return on investment (ROI), if such a thing exists!? 😂

In case you have not watched our session, check out HCP132: Planes, Trains and Workload Mobility, you can watch it for free and see the full demo.

I was really floored by all the positive feedback that we had received from attendees which includes the VMworld survey but also on Twitter and Slack. This was one of my favorite tweet and response 😀

Best session I have seen so far👏😁

— Wesley Geelhoed (@wessieloerus) September 30, 2020

We really appreciate all the feedback and it definitely made up for some of the late nights where I was about to give up. I know a few of you were asking for more details about the demo and so this blog post will be focusing on some of the information I was not able to get to during the VMworld session.

vCenter Event Broker Appliance Updates - VMworld, Fling, Community & Open Source

11/21/2019 by William Lam Leave a Comment

VMworld

At VMworld Barcelona, Michael Gasch and I had the privilege of presenting our #CODE1379E "If This Then That" for vSphere - The Power of Event Driven Automation session. The room was completely packed for a 9am session on Thursday after the big VMworld Party and we just wanted to thank everyone who attended the session and for those that came up to talk to us afterwards. We really had no idea how the session would be received but from the feedback, tweets and DM's we have received and continue to receive, it looks like the session really resonated with customers. In case you missed the session or could not attend VMworld, the session was recorded and is actually available for everyone to view. You just need to sign in with a free VMworld account.

VMware Fling

For those who attended the VMworld session in person, there was a nice surprise at the very end, which I think may be a VMworld first. Michael and I have been working on a side project in our spare time called the vCenter Event Broker Appliance or VEBA for short. This solution enables customers to easily create Event Driven Automation based on vCenter Server Events and rather than just showing off some cool demos, we wanted to leave the audience with something they can actually use right now!

With a little chant that was started by Emad Younis (this was NOT planned), the audience had spoken and wanted us to publish the planned VMware Fling which we were going to release in the coming days since we had just finished the process literally the week of VMworld. I figure its VMworld, this is what customers, partners and colleagues come here for and with a click of a button and crossing my fingers, the vCenter Event Broker Appliance Fling went LIVE.

Podcasts I listen to

11/12/2019 by William Lam 3 Comments

In many of my conversations with customers, partners and colleague at this past VMworld, various topics about VMware software and solutions came up as you would expect. However, there were also many other topics that were discussed such as career, education, kids, tv shows, movies and podcasts.

One question that kept coming up over and over was around which podcasts I listen to on a regular basis? Like most, I listen to podcasts to help past the time while commuting into work, especially with our lovely Bay Area traffic. I also try to use this time as an opopournity to expose myself to other things happening outside of our immediate industry whether that is Bio, Retail, Healthcare, Economics, etc. I always enjoy learning about new things, especially the stories and innovations on how certain companies or things came to be, which is always super fascinating is usually the result of being passionate and having perseverance. Below are the podcasts that I listen to on a regular basis, a few like Worklife, Serverless Chats, Command-Line Heroes and TED Talks are recent ones which I have added and have only listening to a handful of episodes but they seem interesting so far.

I am also curious if there are other podcasts folks from the community would recommend? If so, please leave a comment as I am always on the look out for new shows!

How I built this with Guy Raz

The Indicator

Planet Money

Worklife with Adam Grant

Direct playback & download URLs for all VMworld 2019 EU Sessions

11/07/2019 by William Lam 6 Comments

VMworld EU 2019 officially wrapped up 45min ago (as of writing this) and this was another amazing VMworld. I really enjoyed all the great conversations from customers, partners and fellow VMware colleagues. Although many of us are running around the entire week for sessions and meetings, we certainly appreciate it when folks stop us and just hi or even ask for a picture.

I also want to personally thank everyone who attended my sessions and hopefully you got something out of it. Please consider leaving feedback on the VMworld Survey on what you enjoyed and things that we can improve upon for future VMworlds. Now that I am officially done, I figure I would have a beer and do some quick scripting.

Simliar to VMworld US, the VMworld team has already processed and published a number of recordings! Similar to past years, I have put together a nice summary page that contains all the session recordings links separated out by the different categories which you can find by visiting http://vmwa.re/vmworld2019.

Project Pacific - Workload Evolution in vSphere

09/10/2019 by William Lam 6 Comments

Project Pacific was definitely one of the most exciting and most talked about announcement at this past VMworld. In case you missed the big news, check out this quick snippet of the Day 1 Keynote where Pat Gelsinger and Joe Beda (one of the co-creators of Kubernetes, now at VMware) introduces Project Pacific to the world.

If you ask most folks what Project Pacific is about, they would probably answer something with Kubernetes and Containers in vSphere, which is a fair assessment, especially as Kubernetes was probably mentioned once or twice during the conference 😉

However, Project Pacific is actually more than just Kubernetes but with all the new lingo like Supervisor and Guest Clusters, one can easily get lost in the implementation or what I would refer to as the "how" part of Project Pacific. If you ask me, the "why" part is much more significant and Project Pacific is fundamentally re-defining what and how to deploy a workload in vSphere.

VMworld Startup: Hivecell - Stackable Edge Computing

09/05/2019 by William Lam 1 Comment

One thing I really enjoy at VMworld when I have a few minutes to spare between sessions and customer meetings is to walk around the Solutions Exchange and learn about what our partners are doing in the VMware eco-system. I usually do not make it in very far before bumping into an old colleague or customer before having to run to my next engagement, but some times I get lucky.

While walking the show floor, I came across a really interesting company that immediately caught eye and you can probably guess why from the picture I took below.

The company is called Hivecell and they make it super easy for Global 500 companies to deploy and maintain software at the Edge without requiring a large IT team to manage the deployments which can be spread across hundreds if not thousands of sites with very little to no IT staff.

One of the biggest challenges with Edge Computing is being able to process the large quantity of data being generated in all of these remote locations on a daily basis. In some cases, the dataset can grow up to several Terabytes and it is no longer feasible to send all of this data to the Cloud or back to your Datacenter to extract the business intelligence and value. In fact, depending on the connectivity of your remote site, it can take weeks before the data is available. For any type of real or near-real time applications, the window where the data is of value can literally be hours if not minutes and it must be processed immediately at the Edge.

Speaking of use cases, here are some of the scenarios where Hivecell believes they can really help with their solution, more details about each use case can be found here.

Petrochemicals
Renewable Energy
Quick Service Restaurant Chains
Manufacturing
Healthcare
Weather
Data Science
Hotels