Pete Welcher was one of the delegates at Tech Field Day earlier this year. Pete writes that he was impressed with all three presenters at Tech Field Day (Zerto, Google Cloud, and VMware) and writes about how each brought their own unique perspective in his event summary. We’re thankful for his participation in Tech Field Day and for his recap, even if it is later than he had planned!
Redefining Service Protection With VMware Service-Defined Firewall
The world of security is always changing and so are the challenges around it. Writing for Gestalt IT, Tom Hollingsworth (the “Networking Nerd”) writes about the evolving challenges facing the traditional firewall and how VMware is working to combat those challenges with its Service-Defined Firewall. Check out Tom’s post and VMware’s presentation on their new security products at Security Field Day.
Coffee Hour – Mobility Field Day 5
Rowell Dionicio and François Vergès over at the Clear to Send podcast recently previewed what to expect at Mobility Field Day. They were particularly interested to see VMware as a presenting company and can’t wait to hear what they’ll be discussing. They also look at some of the delegates attending to the event, note the increased importance of wireless security within the voices around the table, and how the virtual event is changing who can be a delegate.
VMware’s vSphere Unites Containers and Virtual Machines Under One Platform
At Tech Field Day 21, VMware highlighted the addition of Kubernetes support to vSphere 7 via VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 4.0, VMware’s Software-Defined Data Center solution for the Hybrid Cloud. This greatly anticipated announcement from VMware lets enterprises unify virtualized and containerized workloads into a single platform that can be centrally managed.
Why Did VMware Buy Datrium? | Gestalt IT Rundown: July 8, 2020
In this episode of the Gestalt IT Rundown, Tom Hollingsworth and Rich Stroffolino discussed the recent acquisition of Datrium by VMware. This was positioned as a DRaaS play for VMware’s cloud offerings, helping to refine their overall DR strategy. Rich found it interesting that Datrium had been billing themselves as a HCI vendor, to have them acquired for DR assets.
Monday Hot Take: VMware Acquires Datrium
In this edition of Gina Rosenthal’s Monday Hot Takes, she breaks down the acquisition of Datrium by VMware. She discusses how VMware will integrate this acquisition into their overall cloud disaster recovery plans. To get up to date on all that Datrium offers, she went to the Tech Field Day presentation archives to get up to speed on their tech stack. What stuck her was how much of Datrium was built to be a competitor to VSAN, and how deliberate VMware was in their announcement to stick to a DRaaS play with the acquisition.
VMware to Acquire Datrium
For Chris Evans, VMware’s approach to disaster recovery had seemed to take a pretty old school approach of emulating array-based replication, based on what he saw at Cloud Field Day earlier this year. This left a potential gap in their approach, that seems to have been filled by their recently announced acquisition of Datrium. This now gives VMware a modern DR solution that stands up to competing offerings, and adds a data mobility solution that extends out of the private data center and allows data migrations between public clouds.
VMware Cloud on AWS: A Cost-Effective Platform for Disaster Recovery
In this piece, Cloud Field Day delegate Ather Beg breaks down how to use VMware Cloud on AWS for disaster recovery, based on what he heard from the company at the event. This is actually one of Ather’s best use cases for the service when looking at the total cost of ownership. Using VMware Cloud on AWS allows the constant footprint of DR to be reduced to the bare minimum as hosts that can be added on-demand within minutes when required.
Extending ON-PREM to CLOUD With Google Cloud VMware Engine
Almost all companies have a desire to go to the cloud these days. But sometimes conventional lift and shift directly to the cloud is just not possible. But there’s a middle way: managed co-location in Google data centers! You heard me. They call it Google Cloud VMware Engine. In this video, Markus Leinonen breaks down what separates Google Cloud VMware Engine from other public cloud integrations, how it extends your on-premand why it might be the right fit for your organization. We’re glad Markus got some of his background for this video from VMware’s presentation at Cloud Field Day. Be sure to subscribe to his channel for some other great enterprise IT videos.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
VMC on AWS: 5 Reasons You Should Give a Damn!
Jason Benedicic was one of the delegates at our Security Field Day event last week and got to hear from VMware, and came away with a new appreciation for VMware Cloud on AWS. Much of the appeal comes from his experience refactoring applications, moving big monolithic apps to the cloud can be quite challenging. These are often tightly coupled with other infrastructure components, meaning moving to the cloud can be a very gradual process as you disentangle everything. VMware Cloud on AWS allows organizations to move the existing application and all its dependencies as-is to a familiar operating environment, as close the cloud as possible. Jason breaks down a lot of the concerns admins have with this approach, and thinks this is a viable solution for many organizations with legacy applications.
Security Field Day
Security Field Day is the newest event in the Field Day family, but it’s consistently featured the mix of industry leading presenters and innovative startups the event series is known for. At our more recent Security Field Day, VMware took the stage. While the company is synonymous with its virtualization solutions, they also have an impressive security portfolio. During the event, they discussed VMware Service-defined Firewall, NSX Distributed IDS/IPS, using NSX Intelligence as a distributed analytics engine, and their Intelligent Web Application Firewall solution. It was a packed session, so be sure to check out the full video.
VMware TKG
VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid represents a big shift for VMware and their long history of virtualization. Larry Smith was lucky to be delegate at Cloud Field Day to get to hear an extensive session on it at the event. With Kubernetes becoming increasingly important to IT infrastructure, understanding TKG as the core of core component VMware’s Kubernetes deployments is key. Larry breaks down the architecture of TKG, how organizations can deploy it across a number of personas, and how it integrates into vSphere. Be sure to check out the piece before digging into the presentaiton video
DR to VMware Cloud on AWS With Site Recovery Manager
In this piece, Justin Warren considers how VMware has really embraced cloud in a big way. After some attempts at building their own cloud, VMware can concentrate on what it does well, which is providing a familiar management environment for enterprises to manage complexity at scale. This approach shows in what Justin saw at Cloud Field Day with VMware Site Recovery, which uses vSphere replication on VMware on AWS to move VMs from one cluster to another.
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.
