After working behind the scenes with Dave Marley (@bonkeydave) for the last few months I was able to secure a slot at the UK North West VMUG which was held in Manchester, UK a few weeks ago. I have wanted to present at other VMUG’s this year but my schedule has been rather full so it was just a fortunate bit of luck that I was able to be in Manchester at the same time as the VMUG.
As part of my visit, I spent some time with one of Dave’s customers at a WeWork building which was quite an experience and a lot different from my usual customer meetings! The meeting focused on vRealize Operations aka vROps and how the customer can get the most business value from it. The session was well received and there will likely be some follow up conversations as we work with the customer on their vROps and overall SDDC journey with VMware.
My VMUG session was generically titled “vROps”, so this gave me a fairly blank canvas to work with in terms of subject matter. In the end I presented a What’s New in vROps 8.0 and showed the journey we have taken to get to 8.0 by taking a brief look at what we delivered in vROps 7.0 + 7.5 and also showing how we continue to move towards the CMBU vision of “Self Driving Operations Powered by AI/ML”.
As you can see this got some good coverage on twitter!
As part of the 8.0 content I covered some of the new features in a live demo including:
- Troubleshooting Workbench
- AWS + Azure Dashboards
- Improved support for Public Cloud monitoring
- New vSAN Support
Unfortunately I only attended part of the VMUG as I had customer meetings in the morning but I was able to see James King (@virtualjames), VMware TAM provide an overview of the condensed highlights and big announcements from VMworld Europe 2019 and Guy Leech (@guyrleech) who provided tips to Automating and Managing VMware using Powershell + PowerCLI and despite having a good level of existing knowledge I actually learned something which was a bonus.
After Guy’s presentation it was time for some networking with food and a free bar as part of the end of year celebrations which was a nice end to the day.
I am grateful to Dave Marley + Steve Lester for giving me the opportunity to present at the UK North West VMUG and I hope to have a return visit in 2020 to present on another topic.
— Lukas
lukaswinn.net 