UKVMUG 2016 - Part 2
VMware VMUG UK VMUG vExpert
Published on 21 November 2016 by Christopher Lewis. Words: 599. Reading Time: 3 mins.
This post is Part 2 of a two part post covering UK VMUG, click here to read Part 1
The only session I attended in the morning was the Community Session, Going Hybrid - using vRealize Automation as a cloud broker for AWS, vCloud Air and Azure given by Sam McGeown . This was a good session overall with Sam going through the differences of deploying the same application to both an on-premises test infrastructure and with Amazon Web Services (no sign of an Azure demo though - but as this is expected in vRealize Automation 7.2 which is not GA yet - that wasn’t a surprise).
It was then lunchtime, so I headed off to grab a bite to eat and catch up with some of the guys from the various community based projects including OpenHomeLab and OpenTechCast before heading to the next session.
For my first session of the afternoon, I thought I would sit into the session with Nutanix around Making Datacenter Infrastructure Invisible: Demystifying Hyperconvergence and the cloud. I was hoping for something interesting and more than a sales play buy Nutanix, but after about 10 minutes of the slideware I was thankful for an unscheduled fire evacuation, as this gave me an excuse to duck out of the session. I’m sure the session was useful for the people who did stick around, but just not for me.
My next session was on Cross Cloud Architecture… Magic Mirrors & Unicorns with Martin Banda & Paul Nothard, in this session they talked about the features of VMware Cross-Cloud Architecture and Services in a SaaS Model. The audience was asked, who wants vRealize Automation as a Service ? Too many hands went up for my liking! Although, i’m not too worried, as this isn’t currently a offering from VMware, it was very much all Magic Mirrors and Unicorns…
My final session for the day was Automating vRealize Automation with PowervRA with Jonathan Medd & Craig Gumbley . For those who don’t know, PowervRA is a powershell module that you can use to configure the majority of features within vRealize Automation. It’s power is only limited by the fact they are connecting to the Appliance REST API rather than the IaaS API. This means as functionality is moved aware from the legacy .NET IaaS servers into the appliance more functions and features will become available. For those people who are supporting vRA on a daily basis, I suggest you head over to https://github.com/jakkulabs/PowervRA and download it. It may not change the world for everyone, but it should make your life a little easier and allow you to concentrate on more interesting things!
Then came the time for the closing keynote, Demystifying the Future of IT, an IT practitioners guide with Julian Wood . Again, just like the opening keynote, I won’t be detailing everything covered because I recommend you watch it for yourself. The basic premise of Julian’s keynote was about how we should embrace simplicity, how Wardley Mappings can help map your IT, how multi-(hybrid)-cloud is what is happening now and finally how Cloud Native Apps and micro-segmentation is the future. Finally I would just like to add, what a genius bit of marketing was that you could see Julian had scheduled tweets going out during is presentation covering the different topics as he spoke about them. Well played Sir.
Then came the vendor prize giving and also the 4 free tickets to VMworld 2017! Congrats all the winners!
That ended my very first UKVMUG and probably my final conference of 2016! What a year it’s been!
Published on 21 November 2016 by Christopher Lewis. Words: 599. Reading Time: 3 mins.
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