Having recently joined Datrium, one of my first tasks is to begin to understand the product Datrium calls DVX. As a way of helping me wrap my head around this technology, I’ve decided to blog about it. I plan on starting at a high-level and then slowly digging deeper under the covers as I learn more.
If you are interested in following my posts, you can subscribe here and follow me on Twitter.
So to begin with, let’s start at the 100 level.
What is Datrium DVX? – 100 Level
Datrium DVX offers Disaggregated Hyper-Converged Infrastructure (DHCI) along with Cloud Mobility. Yep, lots of buzzwords there! So what does that actually mean? Let’s start with the basic question, “What is the Datrium DVX solution made up of?”
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After almost 8 years at VMware, I am excited to announce the next chapter in my career. Today, I’ll be joining Datrium as a Sr. Solutions Architect.
“Datrium?” I hear you say? “Yes, Datrium!”.
If you are not yet familiar with Datrium, you soon will be. As I begin to learn and understand the technologies that Datrium offers, I’ll be blogging them as a way to help myself and my readers learn more.
I’d just like to thank of my friends and colleagues that I leave behind at VMware. It’s been an amazing place to work and I will certainly miss everyone. Even though I am now longer at the Mothership, you’ll most certainly still see me around. Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith and put yourself into situations that you can learn and grow from.
Watch this space.
I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be speaking at not one, but two VMware User Group‘s (VMUG’s) in June/July. There will be lots of great speakers at both of these events which you really don’t want to miss out on. My session is titled: The Secret Sauce Behind VMware’s Internal VMware Horizon Desktop Deployment – In this session, I’ll be revealing how VMware deployed and run their own Horizon environments.
Make sure you register to guarantee your space and also keep an eye out for a couple of vBeers which we are planning on arranging in and around these events.
If you are attending either of events please be sure to come and say hi!
I’m happy to announce that vGamers.gg is finally LIVE! vGamers was created to provide an opportunity for virtualization enthusiasts and professionals to game together. We noticed that a large number of the vCommunity also like to play computer games, whether on a PC or via gaming consoles and many would love to be able to play with other members of the vCommunity. So, to facilitate this, we have created the vGamers Discord community.
We’ve been running the Discord community in BETA for the last month or so whilst we get the website up and running and we’ve already accumulated over 60 members. These members are playing a variety of games, from First-Person shooters like PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds and Fornite to MMORPGs such as World of WarCraft.
Now we invite EVERYONE from the vCommunity to join in the fun. It’s FREE! Instructions on how to join the Discord community can be found on the vGamers.gg website. Please follow our Twitter account: vGamers_gg to get all of the latest updates. If you have any questions, feel free to tweet me, Katarina Wagnerova or Craig Dalrymple and we’ll happily help you.
Looking forward to gaming with you all in the near future.
I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be speaking at not one, but two VMware USer Group’s (VMUG’s) in April. I am very excited as these will technically be my first (and second) time speaking at a VMUG. I’ve run a VCDX Workshop before at the UK VMUG, but never had my own speaking session. There will be lots of great speakers at both of these events which you really don’t want to miss out on. My session is titled: The Secret Sauce Behind VMware’s Internal VMware Horizon Desktop Deployment – In this session, I’ll be revealing how VMware deployed and run their own Horizon environments.
Make sure you register to guarantee your space and also keep an eye out for a couple of vBeers which we are planning on arranging in and around these events.
If you are attending either of events please be sure to come and say hi!
I thought I would share some pretty exciting news with you guys, I’ve recently received an award internally within VMware for a cool project that myself and my colleague Aresh Sarkari have been working on for the past 6-8 months. The project in question is called OneDesk. I’ll explain more about OneDesk shortly.
CIO Innovation Award
The award we won is called the VMware CIO Innovation award. Here is the description of the Innovation category:
The team which best accomplished the goal of creating and developing new products and/or services.
VMware & Dell Technologies CIO, Bask Iyer & Simon Long – CIO 2017 Innovation Award
Simon Long – VMware CIO 2017 Innovation Award
Luckily for me, our CIO, Bask Iyer was kind enough to present the award in person. It’s always a great feeling to get recognized for hard work. I’m very glad that other people within VMware also see the value of the project we’ve been working on.
OneDesk
The project myself and Aresh have been working on is called OneDesk. For those of you who attended our VMworld session: The Secret Sauce Behind VMware’s Internal Horizon Desktop Deployments you’d have heard us talking about it during our session. For those of you who were unfortunate enough to miss it, I’ll explain all about it now.
What is OneDesk?
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Each month in 2018, I plan on investing a small amount of money into a Blockchain project that I think might have potential to be a useful service/product. I plan on documenting my research on the specific Blockchain projects in blog posts as a way of making sure I do some due diligence, rather than just investing in whatever seems to be doing well that month. My aim here is not to just invest in coins that will make me the most money in the shortest amount of time. It’s more to invest in coins/projects that I feel might actually have a long-term future.
THIS IS NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE!!!
Project Name
Project Description
-
- Decentralized VPN running on the Blockchain – The Mysterium Network will be a decentralized marketplace for VPN services built using Ethereum smart contracts. Users set up nodes to contribute computing resources to the network. In exchange, they collect a fee from clients who agree to pay to use their network resources. Service matching between provider nodes and client nodes, payment service, identity management, and a database of account balances, available service providers, and registered identities are all executed on the Ethereum blockchain. The VPN services themselves are executed off-chain.
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VMworld 2017 seems like a distant memory. However, I wanted to share with you a cool vBrownbag session that I was luckly enough to be a part of, titled: Hacking Public Speaking – Tips To Help You Rock It!
The idea for the session came about in one of the #vExpert Slacks channels, where Thom was asking for some tips as he was planning on speaking at VMworld. A few of us replied to the thread with some of our favorite tips. We then thought it would be great vBrownBag session to present during VMworld.
So myself any my fellow co-presenters; Thom Greene, Ariel Sanchez and Edward Haletky combined our personal experinces and tips and came up with the following session.
I hope it’s useful.
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For those of you who follow me on twitter, you’ll have seen that very recently we had to evacuate our home due to a forest fire that was pretty close to our house. Luckily, when the evacuation order came through from the Sheriff’s department, I happened to be looking at my phone and I see the call come through. However, usually, I have my phone on Silent when I am asleep and would have missed it. Many of our neighbors missed the call to evacuate, as like me, they have their phones on silent when they are asleep. Luckily the Sherri’s department sent officers to our community to knock on door to make sure everyone was evacuated safely.
So I decided to try and figure out if it was possible to have my phone on silent, but still have Emergency calls ring the phone so I don’t miss them. It turns out, it is possible and it’s pretty straight forward. I’ve documented the steps for both Android (Oreo, v8) and Apple iOS (v11) below. (This post assumes you know your way around your phone. If you are not confident with your phones settings, please ask someone to help you).
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This year at VMworld, myself and my colleague Aresh Sarkari had the opportunity to talk about a project we’ve been working on for the past few years. We’ve been re-redesigning and deploying VMware’s internal Horizon Desktop environments.
Session Summary
“How does VMware architect its own global VMware Horizon desktop environment?” “Has it encountered the same obstacles we are facing?” Over the past two years, VMware has been re-architecting and deploying its virtual desktop infrastructure with VMware Horizon, VMware App Volumes, and VMware User Environment Manager running on top of the full VMware software-defined data center stack (VMware vSphere, VMware vSAN, VMware NSX) and integrating with VMware vRealize Operations Manager and VMware vRealize Log Insight. In this session, the lead architects will reveal all.
Our session (ADV1255BU – The Secret Sauce Behind VMware’s Internal VMware Horizon Desktop) includes the following sections:
- Where we we? – Why did we need to kick off this project (from the beginning)
- What do we need? – Revisiting the business and technical requirements (from 3:05)
- How do we do this better? – How do we design this new infrastructure making sure we don’t hit the same issues again (from 5:13)
- Where we are today? – A look at what we architected and deployed (from 9:12)
- What did we learn? – What challenges did we face along the way (from 30:45)
- Where do we go from here? – How can we improve upon what we have built (from 41:51)
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