VMware Tanzu Portfolio

This report from Enrico Signoretti looks at VMware’s strategy with Tanzu. This brand represents VMware’s embrace of the Kubernetes ecosystem with a broad product portfolio encompassing core infrastructure as well as multi-cloud solutions. For Enrico, he sees VMware’s effort to build a foundation for mixed environments of virtualized and containerized applications in a multi-cloud scenario appealing to enterprises that are moving quickly to engage hybrid cloud infrastructures. Enrico got a deep dive on Tanzu at Cloud Field Day, so be sure to dig into the video after reading his report.

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VMware Tanzu Portfolio

Infrascale Provides Cloud-Based IT Resilience to the Masses

During Infrascale’s presentation at Storage Field Day 19, they discussed how the rise in capability and popularity of cloud computing has had the fortunate outcome of providing new tools and approaches to solving age-old problems. One such persistent pain point is that of disaster recovery. Infrascale has responded to this by providing a feature-rich platform for protecting against partial and full site failures using a combination of local and cloud resources.

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Infrascale Provides Cloud-Based IT Resilience to the Masses

Forget Transformation. Go for Digital Stability

Evangelists of digital transformation emphasize speed and change, something often anathema to infrastructure professionals. In the end though, both want the same thing, infrastructure that’s robust, resilient, and stable. In this post, Drew Conry-Murray looks at red Hat’s presentation from Cloud Field Day, who showed how with telemetry, automation, tooling, training, and processes, organizations can build infrastructure to support rapid change and innovation. In the end, this isn’t just a technology problem, people and process need to be part of this for it to work.

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Forget Transformation. Go For Digital Stability

Insightful Fabric Management With Cisco Network Insights

What is your network fabric trying to tell you? Are you missing out on important updates about the status of patches and updates? How can you learn more about what you need to accomplish? Tom Hollingsworth looks at Cisco Network Insights Advisor and how it can help you decipher what you need to be listening to. Cisco showed off NIA at Networking Field Day, and Tom sees it as a support tech dedicated to doing nothing but update you on what the latest issues are that could affect things and how you can mitigate or remove those problems. And for the times when you can do neither, NIA can help you get your ducks in a row when you need to call TAC.

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Insightful Fabric Management with Cisco Network Insights

I Want Network Integration, I’m Not Getting It

At Cloud Field Day, Alastair Cooke was interested in hearing from AWS and VMware about how they are approaching network connectivity and integration between the two. He’s not a fan of point solutions that function or are managed differently; they add up to more problems. While the two showed a lot of interesting integrations, ultimately he’d like to see VMware on AWS networking fully integrated with the AWS VPC network as an equal to VPC. For now, there are a collection of workable solutions involving virtual interfaces, VPNs, and proprietary network bridging (HCX).

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I Want Network Integration, I’m Not Getting It

Scalable Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence for Teams With VMware Bitfusion!

Using virtualization to use CPU resources more efficiently in IT is such a familiar concept, it’s hard to think of a time before it was commonplace. The same cannot be said for using GPU resources, which in many organizations still operates at a one node per one user experience. To address this, VMware acquired Bitfusion in 2019 and is now rolling out their tech into vSphere 7. This allows users to request GPU resources using the bitfusion command, which can then aggregate and distribute resources over the network. Christopher Kusek heard some of the initial details at Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld 2019, and is excited to see them rolling out. He’s sees this as evidence of the maturation of ML and AI workloads in the enterprise, and Bitfusion will let organizations make best use of their existing GPU infrastructure.

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Scalable Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence for Teams with VMware Bitfusion!

Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management – Bringing the Control Plane Back On-Premises

Bhavin Shah was trying to keep up with the announcements from Red Hat virtual summit and Tech Field Day Virtual with Red Hat. One thing that stood out in the new OpenShift Container Platform 4.4 was Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management. This new control plane that helps you manage your OpenShift and/or your managed Kubernetes clusters running either On-Prem or in any of the major Public cloud platforms. This allows customers to deploy this control plane on any OpenShift Cluster, whether on-prem or in any of the public clouds. Red Hat ACM is currently in Tech Preview, so be sure to check out the full videos from Red Hat’s event to get all the details.

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Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management – Bringing the control plane back On-Premises

VMware Adds Distributed IPS/IDS to NSX

In this piece, Justin Warren looks at how VMware is adding security features to its networking efforts, something they recently highlighted at Security Field Day. Part of this involves adding intrusion detection/prevention to NSX. For Justin, support for groups and tags has been a vital inclusion. Groups allow admins to group objects together and set common rules against that group. Meanwhile tags let you add arbitrary attributes that follow an information scheme. Combined these two features can provide a way for admins to compliment their packet policies for security. Justin still thinks VMware needs to further operationalize these features to make them truly comprehensive for network security, but clearly the effort is being put into their platforms.

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VMware Adds Distributed IPS/IDS to NSX

Defeating Configuration Drift With Gluware

No two configurations are the same. Usually because they’ve been modified outside of recommended parameters. If you want to stop this from happening in your network, you need a tool that can detect the drift in your devices. Tom Hollingsworth examines Gluware and their presentation during Networking Field Day to see how they can help network admins keep your configs on track. Their drift tool takes a snapshot of the configuration of a device and allows you to quickly compare it with the state of the device later on. Tom admits to causing some network drift in his time, so he’s glad to see there’s a solution out there to help address it.

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Defeating Configuration Drift with Gluware

Rogue Device Detection Thanks to PathSolutions

How can you track down all the devices in your network that you don’t know about? How can you ensure they aren’t security risks or potential threat vectors? Tom Hollingsworth takes a look at PathSolutions and their new TotalView Security Operations Manager and how it can help you figure out what’s hiding just out of plain sight. He got a deep dive from PathSolutions during Security Field Day, so once you check out Tom’s piece, be sure to check out their full presentation video.

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Rogue Device Detection Thanks To PathSolutions

PathSolutions Security Operations Manager Helps Humans Find Security Gremlins

At Security Field Day, PathSolutions did a deep dive into an extension to their TotalView product called Security Operations Manager. This is aimed at helping mid-market IT folks gain better situational awareness of what’s happening in their network. The idea is to help admins quickly orient themselves to what’s happening in the often messy and under-resourced world of mid-market IT, where IT generalists are the rule and security specialists often aren’t available. Justin Warren was a delegate at the event, and while he found that the UX for the solution could use an update, the focus and plain language focus of Security Operations Manager made it an interesting solution for its intended customers.

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PathSolutions Security Operations Manager Helps Humans Find Security Gremlins

A Week of Unexpected Expectedness With Forward Networks

In this post, Tom Hollingsworth reviews the Forward Networks presentation about a week in the life of a network engineer from a recent Networking Field Day and how their Network Query Engine can help you get a jump on those totally unexpected problems you’re expecting. For Tom, NQE is the resource network admins can talk to in order to find the information they have to have to make the right decisions. It’s like a network encyclopedia. And any resource that can cut down on time to resolve problems or troubleshoot issues means admins can spend less of their week working on unexpected issues and more time keeping things running smoothly so those issues don’t crop up.

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A Week of Unexpected Expectedness with Forward Networks

How VMware Marketplace Makes Simple to Deploy Vendors and Open Source Solutions

Raff Poltronieri joined us for his 7th full Field Day event with Cloud Field Day. At the event, he heard from VMware’s Product Marketing & Strategy Manager Nee Palaka, who led a deep dive on the VMware Marketplace. Raff really liked the potential of VMware Marketplace, which lets vendors reach VMware’s customer base, and also provides an opportunity for customers to use and install third party solutions plus open source products inside their VMware environments. He sees three main use cases for Marketplace, simplifying moving customers to the cloud, maximizing their investment in VMware’s platform, and ensuring developer flexibility.

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How VMware Marketplace makes simple to deploy vendors and open source solutions

VMware Cloud on AWS: Gaining Momentum and Maturity

Ather Beg is a fan of VMware Cloud on AWS, so he was glad that the company spent much of their recent Cloud Field Day presentation on the subject. As a delegate at the event, he got to hear about some of the exciting enhancements to VMware Cloud on AWS, including Elastic DRS Rapid Scale-Out and VMware Cloud Director Service for MSPs. The former let’s admins set Elastic RDS policy to configure a SDDC to scale-up quickly by adding up to 4 hosts at a time while reacting to a scale-out event, rather than timing out after two. The latter allows MSPs to use VMware Cloud on AWS as their multi-tenanted platform to serve customers. Overall a lot of interesting refinements to the service.

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VMware Cloud on AWS: Gaining Momentum and Maturity

SolarWinds Joins the Cloud APM Game

Justin Warren sees the market for cloud monitoring tools as both crowded and operating on unstable ground. He got to see how SolarWinds plans to differentiate itself in this field at Cloud Field Day, with their Application Performance Monitoring suite. This consists of AppOptics, Loggly, and Pingdom, three products that SolarWinds brought in through acquisitions over the years. Justin sees this as a a cloud-based version of SolarWinds’ existing Orion platform. Justin would like to see the APM suite have deeper integration with Orion, but he wonders if these are being kept as separate to not bog down APM with legacy solutions that may not be relevant to organizations in the future. Be sure to check out his article and dig into the full presentation video for all the details.

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SolarWinds Joins The Cloud APM Game

Hammerspace Wants to Be Your Cross-Cloud Data Platform

The challenge of data management is something organizations have struggled with for decades. Within the storage market, the race has been on to provide customers with a solution that helps ease the burden associated with data management within the data center and across clouds. At Cloud Field Day 6, Hammerspace presents the answer customers are looking for.

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Hammerspace Wants To Be Your Cross-Cloud Data Platform

Rapid Incident Reponse With PathSolutions Security Operations Manager

At Security Field Day, Rob Coote joined us as a delegate and was able to participate in a fantastic conversation with PathSolutions CTO Tim Titus, as he presented TotalView Security Operations Manager and its capabilities as a SecOps tool that can greatly improve awareness and response time to security events within a network. Investigating alerts can be tedious, and can take up a lot of time, only to find out in many cases that the alert was benign, and doesn’t require intervention. TotalView Security Operations Manager is a security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) product designed to optimize event response, reduce wasted time on false positives, and provide a faster path to quarantine and remediation.

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Rapid Incident Reponse with PathSolutions Security Operations Manager

Gremlin Grappling With PathSolutions

For Becky Elliott, the ability of a network engineer to detect, troubleshoot, and respond to the inevitable network availability and performance issues borders on the preternatural. Having the right tools available can save not just time, but frustration for a lot of organizations to track down these issues. At Security Field Day, she got to hear from PathSolutions and get an overview of their TotalView Security Operations Manager. This has the ability to track down some security and networking gremlins in your network like unsecured protocols, unknown IOT devices, and unauthorized configuration changes. Becky really enjoys that all of these great capabilities are wrapped in a simple and clean UI.

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Gremlin Grappling with PathSolutions

HPE Nimble dHCI Bridges the Gap Between Converged and Hyperconverged

Hyperconverged solutions have done a great deal to simplify the way datacenter infrastructure is approached. However, these types of solutions do have their flaws, and they aren’t a good fit in every situation. HPE has recognized this and brought the best attributes of converged stacks and hyperconverged solutions to market in the form of HPE Nimble dHCI.

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HPE Nimble dHCI Bridges the Gap Between Converged and Hyperconverged

Network Field Day 22

Tony Efantis wrote up this piece looking back at Networking Field Day. An in-person event, Tony got to see first hand, not just the excellent presentations from a wide swath of networking companies, but to experience the community aspects that go on behind the scenes. We’re glad that Tony found the experience to be “magical”, and we’re happy that we’re able to keep the magic going with our virtual Field Day events too!

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Network Field Day 22