Tag Archives: Cloud

VMworld 2016, Book giveaway and New Updates!

vmworld2016

I have been very very busy with work and strategic leadership sessions which have kept me away from contributing to the community so let me begin with a huge sorry!

So VMworld 2016 – Be_Tomorrow is on and going and its really great to see VMware focus on IT transformation and hybrid cloud strategy to enable multi cloud “seamless” consumption – something few vendors out there offer and none is better than VMware themselves.

I am sure you heard about the new vRealize Automation 7.x release and the upcoming NSX features of multi cloud and hybrid cloud environments. This means you can use NSX to manage networks in Amazon and Azure! What you can also do is create “ONE” security policy that spans across all the clouds and automatically applies it! This means no going to each cloud platform to modify your policy – apply it in NSX and see it get enforced in AWS, GCP, vCloud Air, Azure and OpenStack! This is huge – unless you think security is not important – in which case you will be in trouble soon.

Horizon Suite has some major updates as well! Below is a grab from this blog site.

  • Further enhancements to the protocol
  • Improvements in the GPU-encode/decode that significantly lower bandwidth and latency
  • Improvements in the JPG/PNG codec to reduce bandwidth utilization by 6x
  • vRealize Operations integration with Blast Extreme.  I can now see Blast statistics in the vROPs console
  • UEM Smart Policies Integration with Blast.  I can now use the same PCoIP smart policies to control the Blast protocol.  This enhancement also allows administrators to set per-device policies so I can set different policies for Windows, Mac, Android, and IOS.
  • A Raspberry Pi client

vRealize automation features are awesome – The new 7.x version includes

  • Improved Views – You can now see the IP Address of the provisioned VM in items view and change the All Services Icon!
  • Improved Migration and Upgrades – vRA 6 to 7.1
  • Out of the Box Active Directory Integration for provisioning
  • Out of the box IPAM integration – Infoblox
  • Portlets for external web content – Great for posting how to videos or company wide messages.
  • Scale out/in -Support for elastic applications

And still in Beta and super exciting –

  • Native Container Support
  • Azure Endpoint – Provision to Microsoft Azure  (YAYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!)
  • vRA Service Now integration – Use Service Now portal for vRA (I FAINTED!!!)

Pretty awesome right? Well there are more upgrades and improvements in the entire VMware portfolio so will blog about it soon.

And before I forget – we had a very successful book signing session at the Rackspace booth! Stop by and have a chat with me or other awesome folks.

Be_Tomorrow!

Posted in: Technology / Tagged: , , ,

Cloud Management Platform – A Strategic Approach

single-pane

I have been talking to a lot of enterprise companies where the CTO’s, CIO’s and architects are trying to break into the “single pane of glass” service management strategy. Their reasons are fair and simple – the single pane of glass allows them seamless view, access and management capabilities for their entire IT foot print across multiple platforms and multiple regions.

What I hear ..

Most of these conversations have just about two key players who drive this discussion. The CIO’s/CTO’s really care about an easier way to broker IT services to internal business units. Cloud Services brokerage is the new hotness in enterprises and they are going all out to ensure they phase out the old, manual and antiquated processes and techniques and replace them with the new cloud savvy applications.

The architects and the operations folks on the other hand are all about how amazing the whole concept of a single pane of glass is and how much time, effort and man power it saves these teams not to forget the visibility that it gives to the IT staff in allowing them to respond faster to any events. (Advanced features in a cloud management platform include event management, monitoring and even disaster recovery!)

What adds fuel to fire is that Gartner and 451 research have clearly indicated that a majority of enterprise companies are transitioning to a cloud services brokerage model where achieving an effective ITSM model is easier than ever before.

Enterprises are stuck at either talking about how great Cloud management platform (single pane of glass) sounds or have deployed it but are not really using it to its fullest potential.

Easier said than done

There is a lot more strategy and planning that needs to go into effectively designing and deploying a cloud management platform to enable a reliable and an effective service brokerage framework.

The highlighted layers of the above picture are some of the key design aspects that need to be thoroughly thought of before deploying a management platform. You always have the option to grow your platform to add any feature at a later stage but you run the risk of reworking your foundation and your architecture which can have minimal to significant impact on your end users.

I will list out a few features that enterprises need to think about.

Read More …

Posted in: Technology / Tagged: , , , , , ,

NEW ROLE, TRAVEL AND EVERYTHING ELSE!

I wanted to do a quick write up to let you all know that I switched roles to join the Cloud Solutions Architects team at Rackspace.

In this new role I will be helping our Sales and the SE organization in architecting deep vmware and enterprise architectures –> read lot of white boarding and testing!

I will also be a liaison to help our Rackspace VMware product team, with whom I spent three years, to get more intelligible insight on customer requirements and trends to help in building new products which is exciting.

With that said I have been quite busy traveling to customer sites and also to VMUG user conferences. I recently presented at the Washington DC VMUG and the response was great.

If you are local or can make it to one of these VMUG user conferences, I strongly encourage you to do so.

I will soon get back to contributing and blogging once I settle down in my new role.

Posted in: Virtualization / Tagged: , , , ,