VMworld 2021 – My Top 10 Picks around Storage

Following on from last week’s post, VMworld 2021 – My Top 10 Picks around Kubernetes, I decided to do another post on my other favorite topic – storage. As per other years, storage continues to evolve, both for traditional workloads and new modern application/container workloads. And as you might expect, there are lots of good sessions at this years VMworld 2021 event that highlights these new and upcoming storage innovations. Without further ado, here are my top 10 storage picks: Storage Vision and Strategy There are two storage sessions related to storage vision and strategy that I picked out. The…

VMworld 2021 – My Top 10 Picks around Kubernetes

Well here we are again – another VMworld has come around. As most of you will know, VMworld 2021 is going to be another “fully virtual” event (no pun intended), the same as it was for VMworld 2020. Hard to imagine that it is 3 years since I presented at VMworld 2018 in Las Vegas, and 2 years since I presented at VMworld EMEA 2019 in Barcelona. Strange days indeed. Let’s hope we can all get together at VMworld 2022 and have a blast. Like previous years, I have picked out a few presentations that I plan on attending at…

VMworld 2020 – My Top 15 Picks in Storage, Availability, DR and Kubernetes

VMworld 2020 is only a few short weeks away, and since the Content Catalog is now available, I decided to pick some sessions to add to my conference agenda. In the past, I have made similar posts, and these were usually entitled “See you at VMworld”, but unfortunately that’s not going to happen this year. But even though we won’t be able to get together at one location this year, the fact that the event is online and free should mean that there are lots more opportunities for people to get to see what they really want to see. The…

Project Pacific – VMworld 2019 Deep Dive Updates

I’m sure most readers will be somewhat familiar with VMware’s Project Pacific at this point. It really is the buzz of VMworld 2019. If I had to describe Project Pacific in as few words as possible, it is a merging of vSphere and Kubernetes (K8s) with the goal of enabling our customers to deploy new, next-gen, distributed, modern applications which may be comprised of container workloads or combined container and virtual machine workloads. Not only that, we also need to provide our customers with a consistent way of managing, monitoring and securing these new modern applications. This is where Project…

Video of HCI Spotlight Session from #VMworld now available #HCI3551KE

This week at VMworld in Barcelona, I was honored to  be able to  co-present the HCIBU Spotlight Session with our GM and SVP, John Gilmartin. I noticed that the full video is now available online on the VMworld Video site. If you want to learn more about how to Future Proof your Infrastructure with vSAN and VMware Cloud Foundation, give it a watch. The cool demos, showing Cloud Native Storage, Site Recovery Manager support for vVols and Project Magna auto-tuning vSAN all start around the 30 minute mark. The full video is available here. Enjoy!

Introducing Project Magna – Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for vSphere self-driving operations

At VMworld 2018, Pat Gelsinger made reference to a project that was looking to use Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to create self driving operations for the vSphere stack. At VMworld 2019 last week, we were given a tech preview of the first iteration of this effort, called Project Magna. There were a number of VMworld break-out sessions dedicated to this effort, and I will reference them near the end of this post. However, this first tech preview is focused solely on hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI), namely vSAN. It is an interesting choice to start with, since we position vSAN as…

Announcing VMware Tanzu and Project Pacific

Today at VMworld 2019, VMware announced the Tanzu portfolio. Essentially, Tanzu covers a suite of up and coming products and features which will allow our customers to Build, Run and Manage modern applications on Kubernetes, on vSphere. I’m pretty sure that this will not come as a major surprise, considering some of the acquisitions and intentions that VMware has announced recently. For example, we have already had the Heptio acquisition at the end of last year, then the Bitnami acquisition in May of this year, and more recently, we’ve seen the intent to acquire both Carbon Black and Pivotal. Heptio,…