Last week I attended the London VMware user group (VMUG). If you’ve never been to a VMUG then its a get together of VMware and their users to discuss, network and attend seminars provided by VMware, partners or users. It’s a really good day out and gives you many ideas for your environment(s) and career as well as a free lunch (always good!). I’ve listed below the seminars that I attended and a brief description of what they were about:

The Business of IT – Matthew Steiner & Ed Hoppitt – VMware

These guys introduced themselves as the Ant & Dec of the VMware world, but really they were more like Morecambe and Wise! This was a good session with some interactivity via Menti, allowing us to respond to questions via our mobile devices. Interesting that when asked about companies who provided excellent digital experiences, KFC was mentioned (there were some other food\delivery themed answers too). 

NSX/ALB – Ricardo Adam – VMware

This was a good talk around using and implementing Avi network load balancer. 

Infrastructure As Code – Using Ansible to install, manage, and configure VMware Products – Harry Thambi – Xtravirt

This talk was around how Harry uses Ansible to automate tasks within his homelab including 3 live demos of deploying and configuring various vSphere components. This definitely inspired me to think about using this to deploy my own homely at some point.

VMware Cloud Foundation – I’ve deployed it, What’s’s next? – James Tiffany & Stephan McTighe – VMware

This session was around some of the tooling available to assist with VMware’s Cloud Foundation as well as some good do’s and don’ts. Some good tools that I feel could help with general day to day work include vSphere diagnostic tool fling and the SoS tool (command line tool to perform checks and collect logs). I need to look into some of these bit more (maybe in a future blog post).

Effective Management of Windows devices with Workspace One – Brad Grimstead – Rentokil

Having some experience of using Workspace One as a MDM, I found this talk quite interesting. Brad advised how his work place has used Workspace One to automate and orchestrate their devices with actions such as app removal, assisting with SID mismatches and retrieving information from devices (including app versions) to assist app deployments.

MultiCloud – What’s VMware Aria got to do with it? – Panel with Charlotte Harrison-Gates, Christopher Lewis, Michael Moore and Sam McGeown – VMware

VMware’s Aria is the new name for the vRealize Cloud Management and CloudHealth products. This was a panel led session around the features of VMware’s Aria including its machine learning, single pane UI, troubleshooting, change log, capacity analysis and cost reporting to name just a few. They also mentioned that you can get a free trial (just a few mentions of this). 

Supercharge Your Career with VMUG – Community, Education and Networking – Sam McGeown – VMware

This talk was a great one to finish with, with Sam explaining how his career really accelerated by doing talks at VMUG’s both in London and at UK VMUG. He also explained and showed how hard he had worked to get to where he was at VMware. Again a really inspiring talk.