I’m delighted to be a guest on the Virtually Speaking podcast, in their latest episode release “Fire, Flood, Blood”. I’m lucky enough to have met the hosts of Virtually Speaking podcast in person. John Nicolson and Pete Fletcher are both great guys and incredibly knowledgable. Whilst we all attended a Veeam Vanguard Summit in Prague, they took an audio recording of myself for the latest podcast.
You can find the full webpage and run through here, and audio below.
VMworld 2018, I was lucky enough to get my name down on the list to present on the vBrownbag stage, a community driven source of brilliant knowledge articles, videos, and web meetings, for the community by the community. Read more about vBrownbag here
In the below session I took on the session that had proved to be a hit at VMUGs around the UK. “Upgrading from vSphere 5.5 to 6.x”
This session focuses less on the “how to upgrade the components themselves” but more what you need to cover for planning and preparation, considerations during the upgrades, and calling out known gotchas.
Since the above video, I’ve since joined VMware, and presented the official slide deck covering this subject at the UK VMUG Usercon with Kev Johnson, Technical Marketing Engineer – vSphere Lifecycle.
You can find the official free e-book that accompanies the VMware presentations here;
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”
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”.
Anyone out there done/doing vSphere 5.5 to 6x upgrade? and willing to do a pres at March 22nd #LonVMUG ? DM me pls #realworld#EoL
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.
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.
#VMworld in Barcelona tips over 11,000 people – bigger and better than ever.
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.
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