Tanzu Community Edition strengthens VMware’s credibility as a key open-source player

15. November 2021 · Write a comment · Categories: Kubernetes, vExpert, VMware · Tags: , , , , ,

A necessary preamble

I had in mind to write something about Tanzu CE for a while: I felt the itch immediately after its release and even more after having played with it a bit. The initial idea was to write about my testing experience but then I realized that I would have produced another useless how-to post. At the same time, I began thinking “above the keyboard” and I put together a few thoughts and personal considerations about how VMware got to this point and came up with a small dissertation instead! So, please forgive me for the length and mind though that these are just my personal, free thoughts based on what I have understood “from the outside”; I might be completely wrong or inaccurate… any feedback is welcome and I’d be happy to change my mind if it will make sense… so without further ado…

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Dell Technologies VxRail in 2021: beyond VSAN and ready for the VMware Tanzu era

23. August 2021 · Write a comment · Categories: Tech Field Day, Technology, VMware · Tags: , , , , , , , ,

This post is a follow up to last week’s one on Dell Technologies PowerStore, which was featured – among other products from the vendor’s portfolio – as part of Tech Field Day’s special two days event. Here we will focus on VxRail and I will briefly go through a few things that raised my interest, once again with a specific emphasis on its integration with the VMware stack. As usual, if you want to learn more, my recommendation is to head to the TFD event page where you can find plenty of videos, including demos, where the solution and its capabilities are presented in detail.

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Dell Technologies PowerStore: the storage solution with VMware at its heart (literally)

16. August 2021 · Write a comment · Categories: Tech Field Day, Technology, VMware · Tags: , , , , , , , ,

Brief but necessary intro: Tech Field Day recently held a two-day special event focused on Dell Technologies storage and compute/HCI solutions, specifically PowerStore, PowerMax and VxRail (with bonus content on APEX and CloudIQ). Most of the topics were relevant to VMware admins and architects as the interoperability of Dell’s solutions with the vSphere (and above) stack was a common theme that accompanied the audience for the whole duration of the event.

If you want to watch the many presentations and the very cool demos, all the videos are available as usual on the event page for your async consumption. In this post (or perhaps series?) I’d like to gather a few ideas and impressions I collected as a delegate. This by no means will be an extensive and detailed analysis as I will stick to what impressed me, bookmarking concepts for my own reference. If you want to dig deeper or check other specific topics I am not touching here, go ahead and check the online videos, the nice people at Tech Field Day will appreciate it!

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Running Modern Apps with vSphere with Kubernetes

05. December 2020 · Write a comment · Categories: Kubernetes, Tech Field Day, Technology, VMware · Tags: , , , ,

In my previous post on Tanzu, I explained how easy is to start consuming Kubernetes workloads from within vSphere 7, thanks to the newly introduced “vSphere with Tanzu”.

As discussed, this comes with some limitations but at the same time enables customers to deploy and consume modern apps on a tried and tested platform without the need to invest into more advanced technologies like VSAN or NSX-T.

For those who are ready to take a significant leap and have a richer, more complete experience, then the way to go is “vSphere with Kubernetes”.

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Cloud Automation Services: is VMware going all-in with multi-cloud?

29. July 2019 · 1 comment · Categories: Tech Field Day, Technology, VMware · Tags: , , ,

One of the highlights of TFD19 was the visit at VMware’s Palo Alto HQ to hear the latest from the Cloud Management Business Unit. The day was split in two, with the first half focused on the latest advancements of vRealize Operations Manager (a.k.a. vROps) and the last part completely dedicated to Cloud Automation Services (CAS).

Both sessions were demo-heavy and focused more around showing the real capabilities of the products rather than killing the audience with endless PowerPoint decks. John Dias and Cody De Arkland did a terrific  job in presenting their respective solution, I recommend you to visit the TechField Day website and watch the videos: seeing is believing.

Both topics were equally interesting. From my point of view and being a long time vROps user, John’s presentation was useful for taking notes of the “what’s new” features to be tested soon back at work. After an exhausting TFD week, I saved what was left of my energies to focus on CAS. Below are some of my thoughts on it.

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