Last week I got the chance to attend my first ever VMUG UserCon. This was held at the national motorcycle museum in Solihull. I’ve attended the London VMUG before and wanted to attend the UserCon since I heard about them a few years ago. I’ve enjoyed the London VMUGs and have made many friends through them but thought it would be nice to meet some other UK users and learn some more about the direction Broadcom are taking with the VMware stack.
After the reception was the first talk by Broadcom CTO for EMEA, Joe Baguley. He ran through previous announcements from VMware Explore including the VMUG Advantage options being offered of a 3 year VCF license if you take out the VMUG Advantage and pass the VCP VCF Admin certification. The upgraded membership also includes a significant discount off exams and training. Joe also went onto explain how he’s spent his time at VMware progressing the SDDC and how Broadcom want to simplify and standardise their offerings to only offering VCF.
He explained how 83% of enterprises plan to move their workloads back to private cloud. He sees hybrid cloud as the future with workload placement based on the best fit. He also mentioned some of the new features for VCF including live recovery, immutable replication with backup and Intelligent Assist (AI that goes through any issues in the environment and works through to remediate).
I then attended a VCF Overview with Mit Panchall (Broadcom). Some of the functionality of VCF included live patching (version 5.2), vSAN, vSAN storage clusters, data protections, ESA stretched cluster, VPCs, virtual networks & dual DPU NSX offload. He explained how VCF modernises, offer a cloud experience and provides security and resilience needed for businesses.
He also explained how VCF can be used with brownfield ingestion so you can start your VCF journey where you are. There are also Advanced Services that can be added to add enhance and add functionality to your VCF deployment. HCX providing workload mobility so you can move your workload to either public or private cloud. NSX providing the end to end network visibility. Mit also mentioned some other features like CA management, backup of SDDC manager, password rotation and API. VCF is really looking like a unified platform for virtualisation.
The next talk was on how to set up ransomeware resilient storage for vSphere by Sally Neate (IBM). Sally ran though the process that ransomeware tends to follow (infiltrate, reconnaissance , moving laterally & then activating). She advised that there are 2 key ways to ransomware resilience: 1. Fast recovery and 2. Early detection. She explained that you need have an immutable snapshot, stored locally and on fast storage for the fast recovery.
She then went onto explain about IBM Block Storage system and how it can provide the above functions. It was a good demo with her explaining how their storage has a double sided system (like a book) that has the storage memory on one side and a CPU on the other side that allows the storage to offload the data functions.
My next talk was how to make friends and be influenced by people by Chris Bradshaw. Chris explained about the different types of techies (general, T shaped) and compared them to RPG characters. He went onto explain his journey through various different tech communities and their adjacent groups and how it has influenced him and assisted in various different roles.
Like Chris I too have met many people and networked with many similar groups.
I then attended beyond micro segmentation by Ant Ducker (Cisco). This talk was on how segmentation is challenging especially with an explosive workload growth. Ant advised how patching is hard with mitigation being slow and how change can be risky and expensive.
He then went onto explain how Cisco security cloud with hyper shield provides the autonomous segmentation and distributed exploit protection to solve these issues.
I then attended a session on VCF automation provided by Chris Lewis (Broadcom). He advised of some of the new features of VCF Automation including automated delivery, cost and capacity, governance and compliance, performance and troubleshooting. It has a self service portal, and has multi cloud automation. It allows full infrastructure as code, extensibility and event brokering. You can automate anything and have anything as a service (Xaas).
Finally I attended certification update: VCF & VVF exams are go! By Katherine Skilling and Chris Lewis (Broadcom). They ran through the new certification tracks for VCF and VVF including the benefits of certification. They also explained the difference between VVF (VMware vSphere foundation) and VCF (VMware Cloud Foundations) and the key differences between the new certification tracks.
They also went over their process for taking certification exams including reviewing the exam blueprint, training, study and practice.
Overall I enjoyed my first ever UserCon and hope that I can attend it next year.