VWannabe

Tag: vmworld

  • Hacking Public Speaking

    Hacking Public Speaking

    This morning I am crashing down on a bean bag to listen to a few tricks from newbies and seasoned public speakers alike on how to master this skill. Thanks to Ariel Sanchez (@arielsanchezmor ), Thom Greene (@tbgree00), Edward Haletky (@Texiwill), and Simon Long (@SimonLong_ ) for this excellent talk.

    1. Create a mind map, and plan your flow of the presentation. If you present something you love, it comes easier.
    2. If you are a mumbler or is not your first language, try to speak slower.
    3. Pick a topic that you feel comfortable with and that you know pretty well.
    4. Practice or rehearse,  you don’t have to wait for an opportunity to speak in public to start preparing, if you know you love something you’ll eventually present about it.
    5. Be realistic, sometimes there are questions you don’t know the answer to, don’t try to BS about,  answer: “I don’t know, but I will found out, and I will get back to you.” But do follow up, at the end of the talk collect the contact information of the person to be able to deliver the answer.
    6. Know yourself, some people are comfortable with being thrown into the cold water, others need to dip the toes. For example, talk to people before the session starts, or maybe have a ritual of something that you normally do to ease yourself.
    7. Don’t stand in front of everyone waiting for the presentation to start.
    8. Have confidence that the audience is there because they want to listen to what you are presenting and that you are the SME on that topic.
    9. Make eye contact to get a feeling how the material is getting absorved. If you see that people are wondering, then you could change your strategy a little bit, this is why is really important to know the material by heart.
    10. Record yourself practicing the presentation and post it on youtube, or at least record it with the idea in mind that it will be published.
    11. Have some friends be there, and ask for pictures while you are presenting to celebrate afterwards. That though will pump you.
    12. Give yourself time to prepare and to be able to share your presentation and content with friends to receive feedback with enough time to make corrections.
    13. Have the talk ready in full with a few days of buffer, prepare something that you can use as it is, but then you can keep tuning up to the last moment.
    14. Start preaparing as early as you can so you don’t get into a timing problem.
    15. Support from family, co-workers, and friends helps a lot.
    16. To get used to your voice, record yourself and listen to it as many times as you need to.
    17. If you are presenting a demo, expect that it will go wrong and have a video as backup.
    18. Don’t plan jokes, things will happen that will make you look funny anyway, smile a lot tho.
    19. Nerves will be present, develop strategies to cope with it.
  • VMworld 2017 General Session Day Two

    VMworld 2017 General Session Day Two

    Day one at VMworld 2017 was huge, exciting announcements about VMWare on AWS and ubiquitous security via the NSX framework and AppDefense. Day two is action-packed. Michael Dell joins Pat Gelsinger on stage for this second-day general session. The digital transformation is the main topic around all the sessions, Michael Dell talks about how easy is to make smart gadgets and that it is all connected. The fuel for these engines is the data, without it even the best algorithms are useless.
    Dell talks about how the drivers of the economy are small, medium and emerging business by employing most the workforce, and how VMware serves that market with a complete technology ecosystem.
    The market is seeing growth with next generation applications and containers.  Pivotal Cloud Foundry works together to shorten the gap between the IT people and the cool developer using the latest technologies, to make it happen, Rob, Pat and Mike announced Pivotal Container Services (PKS). Based on Kubernetes, it will allow customers to build scalable apps that can go from development to the real world in less time. Read more about it here.
    VMware proposes a consistent environment across all platforms, in an entirely secure environment. The office of the CTO goes ahead and presents a demo of a complete suite of VMware Cloud products for the Elastic Sky Pizza hypothetical company. It is all focused-on simplicity, scalability, speed, automation, and security.
    2017-08-29 09.37.58
    They provide a demo of the Pivotal Container Services to setup a platform for developers, and it only takes a few minutes on a single pane of glass. VMWare cloud services, built in the cloud and for the cloud. A technical preview of the automation services provides a visual representation of the system. You could provision this blueprint to any cloud.
    Networking and Security are the main challenges for any cloud deployment. With NSX Cloud we can manage and deploy services via policies maintaining a consistent experience across all stages.

    2017-08-29 09.58.37
    Wavefront by VMWare is a real-time metric, alerting and analytics platform that will help the developers identify and pinpoint the root cause of problems in applications deviating from normal behavior. This offering complements the suite that goes from the physical infrastructure all the way to the support of the application.
    How does VMware’s future look? Pulse IoT Center will help manage sensors and objects that are connected. With function as a service AI algorithms can observe and act on the system providing immediate response to different needs or patterns.

    2017-08-29 10.13.26Moving the functions to the data and not the other way around, bring the public cloud the edge of your on-prem DC.

    2017-08-29 10.16.01
    In my opinion, we are witnessing the evolving of multiple clouds to just one. It will not be private, public, or hybrid; it will be one cloud on any device used by any app.

     

  • VMworld 2015 General Session Day 2 (live)

    rdy-anyI am going to skip day one, we saw the vMotion across clouds, something that we have been waiting for a while. For day two we were promised a surprise guest, as I write this I am waiting to see who it is (live blogging). Twice now they mentioned something about the projection to the screens, maybe Apple paid for them to pave the road ahead? I am not sure, but let me go back to the main subject of this session, and that is mobility and end use computing. This is the ecosystem from VMware, SDDC, EUC and the App, being used from any device.

    euc

    The apps will come from any device, in a secure and flexible way. IDC named VMware a market leader in EUC for 2015, ahead of Citrix, but they assured to the general session that they would continue to optimize everything for Xen.

    The secret guest is from Microsoft is Jim Alkove VP of security. The vision for Windows 10 is IT simplified. “VMware loves Windows 10” The conversation revolves around security and identity management to be able to achieve the app mobility. In my opinion seeing Microsoft and VMware together on stage is very reassuring.

    VMware Workspace Suite joins the application delivery management and the device. VMware is combining Airwatch and App volumes to bridge the gap between cloud and legacy apps, Project A2 (square, not two). One thing I can see from yesterday’s session and today’s is that NSX is an integral part on all the new VMWare capabilities.

    Sesame Street simple! Now Martin Casado joins the stage to talk about security. BTW this is just an encore of the general session at PEX back on Sunday. What is going to be the VMware strategy on security, is called micro-segmentation using NSX (network virtualization) no to be confused with Software Defined Networking (SDN).

    The surface attack is becoming too wide, and the challenge is to deliver trusted applications to devices that may not be trusted or secure. VMware is presenting Distributed Network Encryption to protect the data. Also encryption of Data at Rest, like the vmdks. I wonder if the NSA already has some master keys for all the apps ;).

    Pat Gelsinger joins the stage now for the closing. The online connectivity estimates for 2025 is  5 billion. The size of the internet economy is 21% of the World GDP. To win or join the ecosystem, the start-ups need to play with a different set of rules and create an asymmetric battle. We are all expecting Flo to join Pat now on stage, but seriously Pat is giving us a view of how innovation can disrupt incumbent technologies and how it can change the way we live today.

    The challenge is still on the bridge from the private to the public cloud. That is where VMware with its Unified Hybrid Cloud enters the game giving apps the capability to span across both clouds, becoming the Hybrid Applications with common networking, management, and security. Is about enabling a global point of view across all clouds. The apps and your data will be within you “borders” (under you rules) no matter where they reside. The Unified Hybrid Cloud is the future.open

    Virtualization provides the best platform to architect for security. Virtualization has the perfect alignment  to be able to deliver the app or service to where it should be. Ubiquity -> the capacity to be present everywhere at the same time. I had to look that up, sorry. We are in the renaissance of Security. The building blocks of proactive technology are analytics and Big Data. Rule one of building the cloud is to automate everything. Of the top 100 of the IT companies, 50 of them will disappear in the next decade. These were the last remarks from Pat, now back to VMworld!.

    P.S. As always pardon my English, more so with this post on the run.

  • VMware Partner Exchange 2015 (my Recap)

    undeniableThis week I am at San Francisco for VMworld 2015. This is my first time at VMworld, and I am really enjoying the event. This past Sunday we had a really busy and long day. The day started with a nice breakfast at Mel’s, thanks to Simplivity for picking up the tab. Then I continued my day with some Best Practices, I try to stay away from marketing sessions as much as possible. My first stop was at session #PAR6421, Best Practices for Deploying IaaS with vCloud Suite and vRealize Automation. The session discussion was around Process, Architecture, Backup, and Upgrading. The basic idea is not too different than any other consulting engagement. The first and most important advice is to ask the customer what is it that they want, then design for that aligning your solution and products with those needs. For automation, is important to understand the day to day tasks of the administrator, and try to automate those first. Pay attention to repetitive tasks, automating those will lower the errors due to a manual process. The basic idea here is to understand the processes and make sure that these processes are good, it is a huge mistake to automate a bad process (garbage in, garbage out).

    For the architecture part, make sure that you are using the reference architecture documents and identify the kind of use or expected functionality from the system. If the client is expecting to use HA and a system that can’t go down or have downtime, then choose the appropriate reference architecture for this (medium). If the client can handle an RTO of 24 hours, then you can be confident that the small core reference architecture will be enough.

    I am not ging to discuss backup in depth because it follows common sense, like backing up everything after the installation, but before the actual customization begins. Also make sure that a backup is consistent across the platform, don’t backup one part now, and wait 20 minutes to backup another.

    In terms of upgrading, if you are in version 5.x there is not a direct path upgrade, it would require a new installation and then a migration. Keep in mind that customizations might not carry on with the upgrade.

    Moving on to the general session, we find the theme of magic phrase for VMworld, One Cloud, any application, any device. The concept of Hybrid Applications comes up and we go back to old catch phrases like The network is the computer (how I miss Sun Micro), but now the application is the network. The software is the wine and the hardware is the bottle.

    Next I go across the street for the VMundergriund panels, I realize that is much more interesting to sit down and listen to a panel of experts talk about relevant topics than sit down and watch powerpoints for an hour. Anyway, it was nice to see Duncan in a 30-minute talk about VSAN use cases, then also later at the Solution Exchange see him talking about it again.

    The real deal came at the Mark “A” session, on maximizing vSphere performance, here are some bullet points that might help:

    • Use Chrome as your web browser to connect to the vSphere Web client.
    • Install your vCenter close to its DB and in a TIER 1 storage.
    • Don’t change statistics levels in the vCenter, they are useless anyway,
    • Check you Java Virtual Machine size (previous to 6) KB2021302
    • Rightsize, not oversize and never undersize.
    • Don’t Use vCPU hot add, it will disable vNUMA
    • Select High performance in the BIOS
    • Always enable Hyper threading
    • Use the latest Virtual Machine hardware.
    • Keep VM tools updated (this one is mine)
    • Use vmxnet3
    • Disable Interrupt Coalescing
    • Use Jumbo Frames for thing like the iSCSI.
    • Use multiple vSCSI adapters
    • Don’t use RDM’s

    At this point, I started being lazy and started using my phone as my documentation tool. Here is a picture of the performance for virtualized DB’s best practices

    perf-dbs

    Finally, the best advice when troubleshooting performance is to know the key performance indicators and define the acceptable values, in other words, don’t accept a performance problem with a vague or subjective description. At the end of the day, we crashed into the VMunderground party for some more networking and socializing.