Thanks Halifax VMUG!

The Halifax VMUG group has been running strong for 6 years thanks to the dedicated efforts of Percy Gouchie, Greg Heard and Alex Stefishen. 

OnX sponsored the event and movie: The Equalizer starring Denzel Washington.  It was great to get the opportunity to present my VMworld Presentation to the user group out East. 

The event was well attended with over sixty members making the trek to Halifax.  John Deveau, an OnX customer, showcased many of the custom dashboards they have developed for their own use.  In addition Ryan Veino from VMware recapped some of the product announcements from VMworld. 

Feedback was excellent from the attendees with many finding the content both relevant and useful to some of the VMware technology they are working with or considering implementing.  Many thanks to our hosts and sponsor and for Lynn Morrison, one of the great Account Reps from OnX Enterprise Solutions for helping get it together.

virtualguru.org @ VMworld 2014

Technorati Tags: #vmworld

Well it has been a busy couple of weeks at the show but it was a great event.  Stephane Asselin (@virtualstef) and I had a great time at our presentation during VMworld 2014. We had over 370 people attend in person; a special thanks to those who attended virtually. With well over 500 registered we had lots of great questions after. For those who missed it, the recording of our session “EUC1289 - What’s New in End User Computing: Full Desktop Automation and Self-Service” has been released on the VMworld website (http://www.vmworld.com).

Not only was our session well attended but we also had lots of support for our most recent publication “VMware Horizon Suite: Building End User Services”. 

We appreciate all the great feedback and many thanks to those of you who came out on the last day for the book signing. We had a great time working with Eric Sloof (@esloof) and the crew of VMworld TV for the “VMware Press Trivia Challenge Book Give Away Event”. 

If you missed our discussion and interview regarding the book then you can catch it here on VMworld TV. 

I managed to get out quite a few posts for those of you following the http://virtualguru.org blog but have more coming.  There was just so much information and so little time so stay tuned for additional information from the show.

vCloud Automation Center Overview and a Glimpse into the Future

Virtualization on its own will not deliver on the software defined enterprise. Management through automation is the catalyst that empowers the software defined datacenter.

Management automation accelerates your service delivery model to your customers. It also delivers improved operational efficiency, better resource utilization and reduced complexity and standardization. vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) amalgamated vCAC, vFabric Application Director and vCenter Orchestrator under a single framework. The new name for the suite is vRealize Suite (vCAC becomes vRealize Automaton, vCOPs becomes vRealize Operations and ITBM becomes vRealize Business).

Unifying these products delivers a common service catalog of applications, infrastructure, XaaS and Desktops. vCAC allows both single and multi-tenant deployments. Services are defined through blueprints which allow you to define infrastructure and layered application provisioning (leveraging Application Director). In addition through the vCO integration you can define service blueprints allowing you to define custom processes through either standard or customized workflows.

ITBM can be plugged into vCAC to auto-populate the cost profiles using standard and reference industry costs. ITBM also allows you to compare other public clouds costs to ensure your resources are efficiently deployed.

Moving forward with vCAC, VMware is investing in comprehensive infrastructure management to ensure they can manage many platforms (hypervisor, converged infrastructure and public cloud) without compromising IT policies. VMware has also placed a strong focus on automated release management to deliver a DevOps solution using the product. The target is to deliver anything as a service and deliver on the IT as a Broker concept.

From a vendor perspective, support is coming for IBM, HDS and Fujitsu servers. NSX integration will become more seamless. VMware will build enhancements on other hypervisors and Clouds such as AWS. These orchestration plugins will be certified by VMware so it is simple to hook them in and start automating.

One area of focus is to be able to switch from on-premise to off seamlessly. This will include synchronization of blueprints between Clouds. Blueprints will also be enhanced to provide infrastructure and applications authoring that is simple and straight forward. In addition the product will monitor drift protection and auto-remediate them (very Puppet like).

Work is being done to allow multiple catalog selections by the user that consolidates them using a single approval process ("similar to a shopping cart approach"). vCOPs will be more tightly integrated to allow you to look at resources and build in reclamation and right-sizing workflows through vCAC.