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vBrownBag Session – Microsoft Azure for vSphere Admins

Windows, VMware, , , ,

At VMworld 2018 I was invited to speak on the vBrownbag platform, which is a great community focused and run resource. Below is my session “Microsoft Azure for vSphere Admins”

You can find the presentation here – http://vexpert.me/azure

Regards

Dean


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Yet another “I’ve got a new job” blog post

General,

So I think I seen someone say on Twitter its silly season as we enter the winter period with people announcing they are moving jobs etc. And given the number of tweets about new jobs and blog posts, I think they are correct.

Well I won’t drag this out.

I’m joining VMware as a Technical Account Manager in December working across the UK. Over the past few years my focus or rather enjoyment of my roles, has been around the customer and building strategies with them. So this role fits in nicely especially for a company whose products I’ve tried my best to specialise in for the past few years.

VMware logo gry RGB 300dpi

Thanks to all those who have helped me in my journey or simply just said “don’t worry, you’ll smash the interview”.

Onwards and upwards.

IMG 0159Image Source

 

Regards

Dean


This blog has been rebranded

General

Hi All,

So after owning the vEducate.co.uk domain for a while, I’ve finally got around to re-branding the blog and even produced a basic logo.

I’ll retain educationalcentre.co.uk and redirect to the new domain, so that anyone who crops up on my older links can still find me!

I will probably write-up a post soon detailing the process of changing the domain name and what broke 😀 Thanks to those who helped me get it up and running yesterday.

veducate laptop

 

Regards

Dean


vSphere upgrade blog post header

Upgrading VMware vSphere 5.5 to vSphere 6.5 (VMUG Presentation)

VMware, , , , , , , , , ,
Blog post born from a VMUG Presentation

Mid Feb, one of the London VMUG leaders posted on twitter, looking for someone to present on the subject of “upgrading from vSphere 5.5 to vSphere 6.5”.

So I jumped at the chance, kind of, and offered to present. This blog post covers the content from that presentation.

  • vSphere 5.5 – End of Support
  • vSphere 6.5 – New features
  • OK, so let’s just upgrade then?
  • The plugin’s
  • SSO is gone!
  • Understand your topologies
  • Pre-Upgrade Tasks
  • The Upgrade, the big event
  • Gotcha’s
  • VSAN Considerations
  • vShield Manager is no more! Upgrade to NSX Manager
  • Resources

The presentation is available to download here – http://vexpert.me/London-vmug-dean (case sensitive link)

Dean Lewis London VMUG

Or I’ve figured out how to embed it from Slideshare.net below (But animations don’t seem to work);

vSphere 5.5 – End of Support
  • End of General Support for vSphere 5.5 is September 19, 2018
    • Includes vCenter 5.5, ESXi 5.5, VSAN 5.5
    • KB 51491
  • In the event you are unable to upgrade before the End of General Support (EOGS) and are active on Support and Subscription, you have the option to purchase extended support in one year increments for up to two years beyond the EOGS date.
    • Expect this to be more costly than general support.
    • SLA’s are more akin to that of basic support rather than production support
    • Annual security patch. Includes catastrophic/critical security fixes only
    • Ability to create hot patches for Severity 1 issues only
  • Technical Guidance for vSphere 5.5 is available until September 19, 2020 primarily through the self-help portal.
  • During the Technical Guidance phase, VMware does not offer new hardware support, server/client/guest OS updates, new security patches or bug fixes unless otherwise noted.
    • For example, there was no SPECTRE/Meltdown security patches released for vSphere 5.1

It’s not only the core vSphere 5.5 products that are affected, as we can see from the End-of-Support tracking page provided by virten.net. There are other VMware solutions that you have deployed that may also need upgrading.

vSphere 5.5 products end of support Continue reading Upgrading VMware vSphere 5.5 to vSphere 6.5 (VMUG Presentation) →

VMworld 2017

VMworld Europe 2017 – Day 1

VMware, , , , ,

11,000 people (the most ever), have descended upon Barcelona this week for the annual European VMware conference. This year sees the event brought forward from October to September, and only a week or so after their flagship Las Vegas Event.

Depending on your relationship with VMware, and for many, the Tuesday of VMworld is day 1. However if you are a partner it’s probably day 3, and if you are a TAM customer, day 2.

  • Partners can take part in onsite training on Sunday, to assist VSP and VTSP certifications, and on the Monday its Partner day, a keynote and dedicated sessions focused on enablement.
  • TAM Customers have their own dedicated sessions as well as a keynote as well. These are the customers closest to VMware for a variety of reasons.

The announcements

Ok, so lets summarise todays key announcements. VMware is now at the point where it is able to deliver the following;

  • Modernize Data Centers
  • Integrate Public Clouds
  • Empower the Digital Workspace
  • Transform Security

And these are the priorities in which they have been working towards in their strategy and product releases over the past few years.

  • VMware Cloud Provider Program – empowering partners to drive the innovation in technology, with customers finding it easier to deploy and utilize hybrid cloud environments.
    • VMware’s HCX technology to enable multi-cloud and multi-site application migration and portability – this is for the always on environments that have struggled to migrate in the past.

  • VMware vRealize Suite will be getting further updates, I expect more on Wednesday about this.
    • Tighter integration between the products of the vRealize stack, and VSAN.
    • Expect to see more workings with AWS and Azure now they have solutions running on them as well (VMC on AWS, Horizon on Azure).
  • VMware vSphere Integrated Containers 1.2 – the latest updates will push more robustness into the solution, and allow companies to scale further.
  • VMware Mobile Security Alliance Partners – under the digital workspace term, this is VMware’s big push and it wont stop soon. VMware is king of the DC, but they want a slice of whats outside the DC as well.
  • VMware vCloud NFV platform – there is now going to be a specific OpenStack for NFV.
    • Targeted at Communications Service Providers it will enable them to quickly and reliably deploy and upgrade OpenStack NFV environments—allowing them to accelerate service delivery, simplify management, increase agility and service security and readily develop new revenue streams.

 

You can now see the full day 1 announcements on the below YouTube link.

My sessions

I’ll be collating my sessions notes separately after the event.

Further information

Make sure you follow the hastags #vmworld and #vmworld2017 on twitter, to get an update from the community, its the best way to follow all the individual announcements and see what’s happening during session as well.

For other blogs etc around the web visit;

https://www.vmware.com/radius/accelerating-enterprise-transformation-perspective-vmworld-2017-europe/

https://blog.cloud.vmware.com/s/content/a1y6A000000eAvvQAE/introducing-vmwares-hcx-technology/