Ned Bellavance has now attended his second virtual Field Day event, recently participating at Cloud Field Day. He was impressed how the Field Day team has kept iterating on the virtual event format to take advantage of not being limited by physical space, providing two different presentation tracks to let people watch presenters at a convenient time. In this video, he looks at what Veeam presented at the event. They showed off their latest tools specifically designed to help users backup and protect workloads and data in the cloud.
Monday Hot Take July 13, 2020
Gina Rosenthal’s Monday Hot Take video do a great job getting you up to speed on the IT news, as well as highlighting the upcoming events for the week. In this video, she previews what to expect from Cloud Field Day. Be sure to subscribe to her channel to get these in your feed every Monday, and then head on over to the Tech Field Day YouTube page and watch the presentations for yourself.
Cisco SecureX Roundtable
Join the delegates from Gestalt IT’s Tech Field Day Virtual Cisco Live Experience as they look at the newest security platform offering from Cisco, SecureX. They discuss the importance of having a centralized solution to provide at-a-glance information and action capabilities. The delegates also discuss where the future of Cisco security solutions is headed.
Cisco Intent-Based Networking Roundtable
Join the delegates from Gestalt IT’s Tech Field Day Virtual Cisco Live Experience as they dive into the latest intent-based networking announcements from Cisco. Listen in as they discuss the importance of network policy, user-defined networks, location tracking, and SD-WAN. Tom Hollingsworth leads the expert panel of Phil Gervasi, Shala Denise, Jonathan Davis, John Herbert, and Jody Lemoine.
Dell EMC PowerStore: TFDx Quick Take
Keith Townsend is reflecting back on what he saw at Tech Field Day Presents Dell Technologies: Power Up the Portfolio in this video. This quick take on the Dell EMC PowerStore considers the hybrid device that converges a Mid-range (SMB) storage array with a VMware Cluster. For Keith, this might be a new category for storage, and a really important move for Dell EMC. Be sure to check out the full videos from the event for all the details.
Tech Field Day – Dell Technologies #PoweredUp Promo
Gina Rosenthal was excited to be a delegate at Tech Field Day Presents Dell Technologies: Power Up the Portfolio. This was kind of return to the very start of her career,and touches on a number of important updates to Dell’s Power portfolio. They went into detail about a lot of exciting new solutions, so be sure to check out the full video of the event to stay up to date.
Cloud Field Day 8 Prep – Daily Check-In for June 17, 2020
In this Daily Check-In video from Ned Bellavance, he digs into his homework ahead of seeing presentations at Cloud Field Day. He introduces his audience to the whole Field Day experience, and runs down the presenters to talk about what he expects to see. If you haven’t been checking out Ned’s daily check-in videos, be sure to subscribe to his channel for more!
Aid Complex Troubleshooting With Distributed Tracing – Day Two Cloud Podcast Video
Distributed tracing is the dark art of tracking a transaction that passes through several microservices for troubleshooting purposes. Why was the transaction slow? Hard to say, especially when the failure is intermittent. Ned Bellavance and Ethan Banks explain the problem and how SolarWinds Application Performance Monitoring suite is tackling it with Pingdom, Loggly, and AppOptics. Especially AppOptics, something they heard a lot about during SolarWinds’ Cloud Field Day presentation.
Moving Workloads With VMware HCX – Day Two Cloud Podcast Video
After hearing from VMware at Cloud Field Day, Ethan Banks and Ned Bellavance discuss moving VMware workloads with the VMware HCX. Do admins want this? Don’t they really want to move work between Kubernetes clusters instead? Or is that even the right question? It kind of was, but it kind of wasn’t. Kubernetes & containers are not simple drop-in replacements for VMware & virtual machines. Therefore, HCX has use cases, and they explain what they think they are.
Automating Disaster Recovery Is Risky Business – Day Two Cloud Podcast Video
Ned Bellavance and Ethan Banks think through VMware’s DRaaS offering, pondering the pros and cons of automation disaster recovery & business continuity. Sounds great, but are users testing regularly? What’s the failback process after the disaster is over? VMware went into detail during their Cloud Field Day presentation, and Ethan and Ned break it down in this episode of Day Two Cloud.
VMC on AWS Is More Cloud Like All the Time – Day Two Cloud Podcast Video
After hearing from VMware at Cloud Field Day, Ethan Banks and Ned Bellavance consider VMware Cloud on AWS now that a couple of years have gone by since the service launched. Is it really cloud yet, or just VMware in a colo alongside AWS? It’s really both. They dig into it on a recent episode of the Day Two Cloud Podcast. Be sure to check it out, watch VMware’s presentation from the event, and let us know what you thing!
Daily Check-In for May 4, 2020
Ned Bellavance has been checking in on his YouTube channel every weekday at 11am ET while we’re all working from home, and he recently talked about what he saw from OpenShift at Tech Field Day Virtual with Red Hat. He focuses on OpenShift Cluster Manager, which can be used as a SaaS service or deployed on-prem. He looks at how this fits into typical organizational uses of Kubernetes, where organizations might run into problems, and some of the advanced features available to on-prem deployments.
(32) Daily Check-In for April 30, 2020
Ned Bellavance has been doing daily video check-ins while sheltering in place, and in this video he provides his thoughts on Tech Field Day Virtual with Red Hat. He was a delegate at the virtual event, and was impressed by both the breadth of talent and tech shown at the event. The overall focus was on OpenShift. In the video, Ned breaks down some of the major updates, why Red Hat pivoted OpenShift to Kubernetes, and what the implications are for IT and organizations.
OpenShift TFDx Hot Take – What’s the Tipping Point for K8s?
To date, Keith Townsend hasn’t felt comfortable recommending OpenShift and Kubernetes to the typical enterprise he consults with. He got to get extensive time with the OpenShift team during our recent Tech Field Day Virtual with Red Hat, and finally got the firm response that he wanted the OpenShift is a PaaS solution in addition to a managed Kubernetes offering. Keith is still a Kubernetes skeptic, he still hasn’t heard the problem that Kubernetes has uniquely solved. But the clarification about OpenShift was well worth it for Keith.
Coming Together During COVID-19, With Stephen Foskett of Gestalt IT
Tech Field Day founder and organizer Stephen Foskett appeared on Live Now to discuss how technology companies and events are adapting to the current COVID-19 self-isolating landscape. He finds the industry is dividing into two camps: those that are scaling back on events and other efforts as they get up to speed, and other that are already used to working remotely and operating at full speed. It’s an interesting discussion in how IT as a whole is reacting to this unprecedented situation.
vSphere 7 and Kubernetes – Should Customers Wait?
On this video from Keith Townsend, he talks with CTO Dose co-host Joep Piscaer about vSphere 7 and his impressions of the Kubernetes integration. Project Tanzu Grid is the updated branding for Project Pacific. They break down if VMware’s initial release lived up to the not inconsiderable hype. They also discuss if customers should be quick to latch onto Tanzu, or wait for further development. Watch as Keith and Joep recap their impressions from VMware’s Tech Field Day presentation.
Hot Take Zerto 8.0 Tech Field Day 21
Keith Townsend recently made a video looking at what Zerto presented at Tech Field Day. In it, he focuses on how Zerto can help solve a common anxiety when testing disaster recovery, contaminating production data with DR and then having to roll back. Their platform introduces a logging feature, which replicates the whole VM state. With the configuration tools built into the feature, it makes it really powerful to keep the application state consistent. This logging feature also allows for the logs to provide extremely granular visibility for data protection. Be sure to check out Keith’s video to get his full hot take, then dive into their presentation video.
Google Cloud VMware Engine – Hot Take
The former CloudSimple team presented at Tech Field Day 21 on the recently rebranded Google Cloud VMware Engine (GVE). What is it? How is it different than VMware Cloud on AWS? What are the advantages and disadvantages? Keith Townsend got to learn all about it during our recent virtual Tech Field Day event. While not going into competitive solutions specifically, they did outline how GVE differentiates in the landscape. This takes the VMware Cloud Foundation based, which allows any cloud provider to take any VMware components to offer a managed VCS service. Google of course offers their considerable scale on top of this. Keith breaks down how this compares to the other major public clouds.
vSphere Kubernetes Hot Take
Keith Townsend got to hear from VMware at Tech Field Day, where they packed a lot of information into a four hour session. Part of the presentation that surprised him was the Kubernetes integration into vSphere. This didn’t take the approach that Keith had thought when it was originally announced. Instead it comes as an extension of VMware Cloud Foundation, providing the ability to run a SDDC reference design across any environment. His biggest question with this is using VSAN as the management platform for Kubernetes. It’s an intriguing breakdown of the presentation, and Keith can’t wait to get some more focused deep dive sessions from VMware soon.
TECHunplugged Videocast – Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer
Arjan Timmerman and Max Mortillaro are covering a lot of the announcements and presentations from Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live Europe 2020 in their video series with TECHunplugged. In this video, they dig into Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer. This is an impressive new addition to the management interface used for HyperFlex and UCS. Both of them thought it was a really interesting announcement. This lets an admin hook almost everything in a data center into Intersight, that can be used for monitoring and capacity tool for the entire environment.