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

• Mysterium Network

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.

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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Hey, another VMworld is almost upon us. I am fortunate enough to be talking again this year. Below you’ll find the information about my sessions. Be sure to register if you are interested in attending.

VMware Cloud Foundation and Horizon VDI with Todd Simmons and Simon Long [PBO3160GUR]

Get your questions answered on deploying Horizon 7.1 on VMware Cloud Foundation. Chat with Cloud Foundation expert Todd Simmons and Horizon expert Simon Long. Group discussions are a great way to join together with peers, guided by VMware experts, and discuss a VMware key topic. Come to this session prepared to dive in, engage, and share best practices.

The Secret Sauce Behind VMware’s Internal VMware Horizon Desktop Deployments [ADV1255BU]

“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 re-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.

Hacking Public Speaking – Tips to Help you Rock It [VMTN6694U]

There are so many awesome people in our vCommunity who are afraid of public speaking and think they would not be good at it or would not have anything to share. This session showcases 4 different members of the vCommunity: Edward Haletky, veteran book author, podcaster, blogger and renowned vSphere security expert; Simon Long, double VCDX at VMware; Ariel Sanchez, vCommunity addict who works as TAM for VMware in Pittsburgh, and Thom Greene, ruler supreme. All of them will give you their best tips to help you be great at public speaking NOTE: Community TechTalk taking place in VMvillage.

Automating Horizon Deployments with VMware Cloud Foundation [PBO1254BU]

A major focus for VMware Cloud Foundation is the automation of the deployment and maintenance of the backend infrastructure for the VMware Horizon virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). This session covers the built-in automation of the deployment of VMware vSphere, VMware NSX, VMware vSAN, VMware vRealize, and VMware Horizon components that VMware Cloud Foundation offers. It will also describe the integration of VMware App Volumes in this infrastructure and the ability to dynamically build this infrastructure with the growth of your desktops, resulting in turnkey VDI deployment. All you need to bring are the desktop images.

Just over 8 years ago, I was working hard to learn all I could about VMware’s vSphere technologies. A big part of this learning process included creating VCP Practice Exam that I could use to help me learn all of the different products and features that I needed to know to pass the VCP Exam. What was unexpected, was the popularity of the VCP Practice Exam that I had created and shared on this Blog. I even had official VMware trainers recommending my blog to their students looking to sit the VCP Exam. And still, to this day, I get customers & colleagues coming up to me and thanking me for the work I did on my blog as it really helped them improve their knowledge and eventually pass the VCP Exam.

After offering VCP Practice Exams for both vSphere 4 and vSphere 5, other priorities meant that I never got around to continuing on this trend with vSphere 5.5 and vSphere 6.

However, today, I am pleased to announce that my VCP6.5 DCV Practice Exams are now available to everyone. I’ve personally created 150+ mock exam questions based on the objectives documented in the VCP6.5 DCV Exam Guide.

As with all of my previous exams, all of the questions are created by me. Unfortunately, this might also mean that some of the answers maybe not be completely correct. Yes, I am human, I make mistakes. This exam is still in BETA, as such, some question/answers may be incorrect or misleading. Feel free to provide feedback via the Contact Me page.

These VCP6.5 practice exams are designed to engage the thought process. DO NOT waste your time trying to memorize these questions/answers as they will NOT appear in your VCP exam. Instead, if you are unsure of an answer, go and revise the feature/product. This will ensure you have a better overall understanding and should be able to cope better when being asked other questions around those products/features.

I’ve created two types of Exams:

• Section Exams, which only have questions specific to each section of the exam guide.
• A Full Mock Exam, which simulates the actual VCP Exam. You will be given a time limit of 105 minutes in which to answer 70 questions picked at random from all 10 sections.

Section Exams

• Section 1 – Configure and Administer vSphere 6.x Security [20 Questions]
• Section 2 – Configure and Administer vSphere 6.x Networking [26 Questions]
• Section 3 – Configure and Administer vSphere 6.x Storage [30 Questions]
• Section 4 – Upgrade a vSphere Deployment to 6.x [20 Questions]
• Section 5 – Administer and Manage vSphere 6.x Resources [18 Questions]
• Section 6 – Backup and Recover a vSphere Deployment [28 Questions]
• Section 7 – Troubleshoot a vSphere Deployment [4 Questions]
• Section 8 – Deploy and Customize ESXi Hosts [12 Questions]
• Section 9 – Configure and Administer vSphere and vCenter Availability Solutions [Coming Soon]
• Section 10 – Administer and Manage vSphere Virtual Machines [Coming Soon]

Full Mock Exam

Exam will contain 70 random questions from all categories with a time limit of 105 mins

Start Mock Exam

I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be speaking at not one, but two VMUGs in June. You can catch me at the EUC-focused VMUG events, called EUC Explore. I am very excited as these will technically be my first (and second) time speaking 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 EUC Expert speakers at both of these events which you really don’t want to miss out on.

As soon as the agenda is released, I’ll share it with you. So 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.

• Boston Summer VMUG and EUC Explore 2017 (Thursday, June 1st, 2017) – Register here
• VMUG EUC Explore – New York City (Friday, June 16th, 2017) – Register here

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

Hey, another VMworld is almost upon us, and public voting has just opened. This is your chance to make VMworld 2017 what you want it to be.

I just want to shamelessly plug four cool sessions that I am involved in this year, so you can all go and vote for them! Don’t forget to vote for all of the other great session that have been submitted.

The secret sauce behind VMware’s internal Horizon desktop deployments [1255]

Ever asked yourself “How does VMware architect their own global Horizon desktop environment?”, “Have they encountered the same obstacles we are facing?” Over the past two years VMware has been re-architecting and re-deploying their virtual desktop infrastructure with Horizon, App Volumes and User Environment Manager (UEM) running on top of the full VMware SDDC stack (vSphere, VSAN, NSX) and integrating with vRealize Operations Manager and Log Insight. In this session the lead architects will reveal all.

VOTE HERE: https://my.vmworld.com/scripts/catalog/uscatalog.jsp?search=1255

Architecting vSAN for Horizon, the VCDX Way! [2177]

Balancing the performance and cost of a storage solution for Horizon can be difficult and affects the overall return on investment. VMware’s vSAN has provided architects with a new weapon in the battle for desktop virtualization. vSAN allows architects to design a low-cost high performance hybrid solution of solid state and spinning disks or all-flash for the high desktop performance. vSAN now includes features such as dedupe, compression, and metro clustering which provides greater options to fit your use cases. Learn from two Double VCDX’s on how to architect vSAN to support a Horizon solution to provide the levels of performance your user’s need, with management simplicity that will keep your administrators happy and at a cost that will ensure your project will be a success.

VOTE HERE: https://my.vmworld.com/scripts/catalog/uscatalog.jsp?search=2177

Automating Virtual Desktop Deployments with VMware Cloud Foundation [1254]

Building a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) requires Horizon software integrated with the backend virtual infrastructure with computer, network, and storage. A focus for VMware Cloud Foundation is the automation of the deployment and maintenance of the backend for VDI. This session covers the built-in automation of the deployment of vSphere, VMware NSX, VMware VSAN, vRealize and Horizon components that Cloud Foundation offers. It also describes the integration of App Volumes in this infrastructure, and the ability to dynamically grow this infrastructure with the growth of your desktops, resulting in turnkey VDI deployment. All you need to bring are the desktop images.

VOTE HERE: https://my.vmworld.com/scripts/catalog/uscatalog.jsp?search=1254

Turn the tables, this time you ask the questions! VCDX Panelist Panel [2650]

Its your turn to ask the questions this time! Turn the tables on VCDX Panelists who will answer your questions, anything from the VCDX program to general architecture at no extra cost to you!

VOTE HERE: https://my.vmworld.com/scripts/catalog/uscatalog.jsp?search=2650

I’ve just been reading a recent article titled: The Top 50 Overall VMware Influencers, I have to say, it’s such an honor to be included amongst some many massive names within the Virtualization industry.

After checking my Twitter account stats I had noticed that I managed to break the 8000 Twitter followers barrier!! And I just wanted to say thank you to all of you, hopefully, most of which are also readers of my blog.  I endeavor to continue tweeting/Blogging useful content and information for you all.