In an attempt to try and clean up my Twitter feed to make Twitter conversations and tweets a little easier to notice and follow, I followed the recommendation given to me by my followers and decided to split the Twitter accounts I follow into Lists, so they are easier to sort and categorize. One of the lists I started to put together was a vCommunity Twitter List. This list contains many of the people who make up the vCommunity. One of the cool things about Twitter Lists is you can see people who have been added to the lists and you can follow them on your own account. It’s a great way to find people with the same interests. As you can imagine, the vCommunity Twitter List is designed to include people who mostly tweet about Virtualization topics.

Tweet Criteria

Although this is a very informal list, as I mentioned earlier, the whole aim of this list is to remove unnecessary noise from my Twitter feed. So I need to try and put some restrictions in place.

What to Tweet

You can tweet about whatever you are interested in, I’m not going to become the Twitter Police. But ideally;

• Virtualization topics
• Technology topics – We are all geeks at heart

What not to Tweet

I understand that from time to time we all tweet about a wide variety of topics, try and limit the following, if possible.

• Politics …zzzZZZ
• Cat pictures
• Endless Retweets – We want your thoughts, not just the thoughts of others.

Getting added to the list

The vCommunity Twitter List is still a work in progress and always will be. My intention is to keep this Twitter List dynamic. As new people join Twitter and start to tweet about relevant Virtualization topics, they’ll be added. And on the flip side, as people’s interests change and maybe their tweets are no longer focused on the topic of Virtualization, they will be removed.

If you want to be added to the list, please message Follow Me and message me on Twitter.

In a previous post, I talked about ‘What is Datrium DVX?’.
If you are not familiar with Datrium DVX, I’d recommend reading that post first as Cloud DVX integrates with on-premises DVX.

Datrium Cloud DVX

Cloud DVX is a SaaS backup service offered by Datrium that enables on-premises vSphere customers to replicate backup snapshots of their virtual machines and files into public cloud storage (AWS).

By replicating snapshots of virtual machines and files to Cloud DVX, customers are ensuring their data is safely stored offsite should there be a disaster within their own private datacenter. It’s a similar concept to the good old days of tape backups; backing up data to tape drives and sending them to a 3rd party to store offsite. Except of course with Datrium, everything is done automatically for you and the recovery of your data can be almost instantaneous. Read the rest of this entry »

Hey guys, I have some exciting news for you. Today, we (Datrium), announced CloudShift. Below I’ve summarized some of the things that really excite me about CloudShift. However, before I begin, I think it would be a good idea to quickly go over how Datrium DVX handles Backups and Replication for those of you who might be new to this solution.

Datrium DVX Backup and Replication

As mentioned in my previous post; What is Datrium DVX?, DVX is a Primary storage solution that provides extremely fast storage performance to virtual machines and applications running on DVX Compute Nodes. This is achieved by caching all required data locally on SSD devices installed on the Compute Nodes. DVX then adds a layer of protection by replicating all write IO’s over to the DVX Data Node which acts as a mirror copy for all of the data living in the SSDs on the Compute Nodes.

The Datrium On-Prem DVX system provides a built-in backup mechanism for protecting and restoring data. Protection Groups can be used to group a set of workloads together. Protection schedules are then be applied to the Protection Group based on how regularly data snapshots should be taken and how long they should be kept for. These Snapshots can then be replicated either to another On-Prem DVX system or to a Cloud DVX instance running in AWS.

Hopefully, that gives you enough background for the next section.

Datrium CloudShift

Datrium CloudShift is a SaaS-Based Disaster Recovery (DR) and Mobility orchestration solution, hosted in AWS, that can orchestrate a variety of DR scenarios;

1. On-Prem (primary) failover to On-Prem (secondary) using backups that are stored at the On-Prem (secondary) site.
2. On-Prem failover to Public Cloud using backups that are stored in the public cloud
3. On-Prem failover to On-Prem & Cloud using backups that are either stored at the On-Prem (secondary) site or in the public cloud

I feel this covers the majority of failover scenarios that our customers need to restore their business in the event of a disaster.

I imagine your next question is, “If this a SaaS-based solution, how do I get my data from one data center to another, or to the Cloud? Well, this is where Datrium DVX and Cloud DVX come into play.

Scenario 1 – On-Prem > On-Prem

Scenario 1 is most commonly used when a customer has two data centers, both of which have a Datrium DVX. The DVX is configured to continually replicate data using Elastic Replication from the primary over to the secondary data center (and possibly vice versa). In the event of a failure in one of the datacenters, CloudShift will orchestrate the failover of workloads from one data center to the other. Thanks to the replication technology in DVX, Recovery Point Objective (RPO) times can be less than 1 minute.

Scenario 2 – On-Prem > Cloud

Read the rest of this entry »

VMware just released Security Advisory VMSA-2018-0019 for customers who are using VMware Horizon v6 or v7 and the Horizon Client for Windows. As many of my readers are VMware Horizon customers, I thought I’d bring this to your attention in case you missed the official notifications from VMware.

Advisory Summary

Out-of-bounds read vulnerability in the Message Framework library.

Horizon 6, 7, and Horizon Client for Windows contains an out-of-bounds read vulnerability in the Message Framework library. Successfully exploiting this issue may allow a less-privileged user to leak information from a privileged process running on a system where Horizon Connection Server, Horizon Agent or Horizon Client are installed.

Note: This issue doesn’t apply to Horizon 6, 7 Agents installed on Linux systems or Horizon Clients installed on non-Windows systems.

Remediation Steps

• VMware Horizon 7.x.x customer should update to Horizon 7.5.1
• VMware Horizon 6.x.x customer should update to Horizon 6.2.7
• Horizon Client for Windows users should update to 4.8.1

For further information and direct links to the patch downloads, visit the Security Advisory VMSA-2018-0019 page.

Hey, another VMworld is almost upon us. I am fortunate enough to be talking again this year. However, this will be my first VMworld where I won’t be speaking as VMware employee. Below you’ll find the information about my session. Be sure to register if you are interested in attending.

VMTN TechTalk: Harnessing the vCommunity to further your career [VMTN5508U]

Tuesday, Aug 28, 2:30 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.

Session Summary: Over the past 10 years, I’ve been a part of this amazing community. Without this communities support, I wouldn’t have landed my dream job as a consultant within VMware, nor become a Double VCDX. In this session, I will share my story and highlight ways that you too can leverage our community to help you reach your career goals and aspirations.

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?”

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.

• Minneapolis VMUG (Tuesday, June 12th, 2018) – Agenda / Register here / vBeers
• Indianapolis VMUG (Tuesday, July 10th, 2018) – Agenda / Register here

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.

• Central Ohio VMUG (Tuesday, April 3rd, 2018) – Agenda / Register here
• Wisconsin VMUG (Thursday, April 5th, 2018) – Agenda / Register here

If you are attending either of events please be sure to come and say hi!