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ASRock AMD "NUC" Gen 2 Platform

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It has been about one year since I first got hands on with ASRock's first AMD "NUC" platform dubbed the 4x4 BOX.

A couple of months back, ASRock launched their 2nd generation of the 4x4 BOX platform which adds support for AMD's Ryzen 4000U series mobile processors with the introduction of the 4x4 BOX: 4800U (Ryzen 7), 4500U (Ryzen 5) and 4300U (Ryzen 3) models.

One immediate difference between the original 4x4 BOX (right) is the slimmed down chassis design, which gives it that classic "compact" look of a traditional NUC. The updated design definitely looks cleaner.

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History of Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility and its productization in vSphere 7.0 Update 1c (p02)

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I am super excited to share that the popular Cross vCenter Workload Migration Utility Fling has been officially productized and is now available with the release of vSphere 7.0 Update 1c (Patch 02)! The official name for this capability is now referred to as Advanced Cross vCenter vMotion, would that mean the short hand is Ax-vMotion? 🤔 In any case, this has literally been 5 years in the making from an idea that I had shared back in 2015 to now having it fully integrated as a native vSphere feature in 2020 is pretty wild!

While reflecting back and writing this blog post, I came across this tweet from our CEO, Pat Gelsinger, which I thought was quite fitting

I have learned over the years, that simply having a good idea is not enough. It takes hard work, time and perseverance.

It has been very humbling to work with so many of customers of all sizes and shapes and enabling them to take advantage of vMotion in a new way that would allow them to solve some of their unique business needs. vMotion is still as magical in 2020 as it was when VMware transformed the IT industry when it was first introduced.

Of course this would not have been possible without the support of so many amazing VMware Engineers who contributed to the Fling including the original developer, Vishal Gupta who I had worked with as part of the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) team. After Vishal left VMware, I recruited a few more folks to help with the project including Vladimir Velikov, Vikas Shitole, Rajmani Patel, Plamen Semerdzhiev and Denis Chorbadjiyski. Lastly, I also want to thank Vishwa Srikaanth and Abhijith Prabhudev from the vSphere Product Management team who have been supportive of the Fling since day 1 and has been advocating with me on behalf of our customers.

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VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) v0.5.0

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Just in time for the holidays, the VMware Event Broker Appliance (VEBA) team is excited to announce our latest v0.5.0 release, which is also our last planned release of the year. 2020 has been a very difficult year for everyone, but looking at the positives, we could not have been happier with the engagement and community contributions that we have received from our user base. I just want to say, THANK YOU to everyone who has used and have shared their feedback on VEBA. We have so much more planned for 2021, cannot wait to share with the community! 

While reviewing some of the GitHub commits (changes) for the v0.5.0 release, I had noticed the number of commits in this release has even surpassed our very first v0.1.0 release back in November of last year.  

Here is a quick recap of all 6 VEBA releases: 

  • v0.1.0 (11/25/19) - 351 commits 
  • v0.2.0 (01/23/20) - 311 commits 
  • v0.3.0 (03/10/20) - 252 commits 
  • v0.4.0 (05/11/20) - 191 commits 
  • v0.4.1 (06/10/20) - 141 commits 
  • v0.5.0 (11/25/20) - 356 commits 

Let’s now take a look at what is new with the v0.5.0 release. 

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