2 weeks ago I attended the London VMware User group. Here’s a brief summary of the talks\seminars I attended:

Integrated ML Ops – Samual Awonuga & Stephen Colquhoun – VMware\Domino

This talk was around using generative AI/ML and using it to manage the gap between data scientists and IT Ops. This is the practice of using ML to be be proactive and and manage the lifecycle of the environment. They showed how 79% of businesses using ML OPs see an increase in savings and 67% see an increase in revenue. The also showed how Domino on VCF allow data scientists and IT Ops the best of both worlds. That also Domino is vendor agnostic and can also run Kubernetes.

The Document Cartographer – Chris Bradshaw – Education Sector

This talk was about how Chris went on holiday and realised the similarity in maps to documentation, in that there are different documentation\maps for different readers. Some maps will show certain features or places and how it constructed for a specific user. Chris explained how we should think about the audience viewing the documentation i.e. Non-technical don’t need technical diagrams, etc. He also advised to ask questions about the documentation i.e. Can the users who need it, find it? Is there a need for updates, versioning and approvals? And importantly can you get the data out of a KB system if you needed to swap KB systems? I really enjoyed this talk and it definitely made me think about how I use the advice to produce better documentation.

User Centric Innovation – James Caldwell – VMware

This talk was around using design thinking  to transform the user experience. James talked about real world examples including how a children’s hospital used design thinking to understand children’s experience of a new MRI machine. The children found it a very scary experience as it was loud, tight fitting, and had no where to look. They transformed the user experience by becoming user centric. They painted the MRI machines up to look like a pirate ship and made sure they told a story to the children about the noise coming from the canons. Really good talk, that really made me think about how I can implement this “design thinking” into my work.

Slay The Dragon – Paul Donnachie – Runecast

This talk was around the history and features of the Runecast application. Runecast allows you to track security and compliance of your vSphere environment by checking against its rule base. It can also be used to assist with planning upgrades (including simulation). It has a 2 week free trial to experience the product itself. It looks like a really valuable tool for IT Ops to check the security and compliance of their vSphere environments.

Migration of NSX-V to NSX-T – Gareth Lewis – Xtravirt

In this talk Gareth advised on how he approaches migrating from NSX-V to NSX-T. He advised that NSX-V went out of support Jan 2022 so its quite a common migration. He advised on multiple ways to migrate including performing an in-parallel upgrade or to perform the process using the NSX migration coordinator. There were plenty of do’s and don’ts and information on rollback option, prerequisites and post migration tasks.

Anatomy of a ransomeware attack – Ant Ducker – VMware

In this talk Ant went through the process that normally occurs when threat actors deploy ransomware to a companies network. In included how the delivery is usually from some kind of payload (i.e. email, USB). These normally move laterally across a network before the threat actor extracts the data and deploys the malware. He also explained how NSX-T with threat protection can assist to eliminate these types of threats.

Cloud exit strategy – VMware & Community

This was a panel led discussion regarding the need for a cloud exit strategy. As sometimes things like cost, vendor relationship, and compliance can cause businesses to look to move their workloads out of the cloud. There was discussions around testing the agility of the cloud, concentration risk (all in one place?), recovery testing importance and workload placement.