It is hard to believe it has been four years since VMware announced VMware Cloud on AWS. In the past four years there have been massive improvements to this offering by VMware and AWS. At VMworld 2020 new features and roadmaps are being announced. Below you will find a brief overview of what VMConAWS is … Read more
Over the last four years the partnership between VMware and Dell Technologies has allowed for some incredible integrations into the Dell portfolio. The flagship of this partnership VxRail has evolved into the new backbone infrastructure component of the modern datacenter. That is why VMware Cloud on Dell is a huge step forward into towards the … Read more
Earlier this year VMware acquired Datrium and from Datrium comes a new DRaaS offering. DR holds a special place in my heart because when I was at global enterprise companies, the annual if not quarterly DR tests were my responsibility. DR is not a sexy topic to be having in meetings and rarely do people … Read more
In the last few years as a VMWare person I have watched containers and Kubernetes go from people saying containers cannot replace virtual machines to now Kubernetes being integrated into vSphere. Years ago, I thought containers were really cool but it lacked all the infrastructure features we relied on to run in enterprise environments. Yet, … Read more
Apparently, people like blog articles on exam prep because I have been requested to write this article. I felt the VMConAWS exam was more than fair and straight forward. There aren’t any questions on the exam meant to stump the chump. I would say 6 months VMConAWS hands on experience & you should be more … Read more
This is my fourth and final installment of this series. These steps were taken by me to failover and failback multi-million dollar datacenters in as easy as 4-clicks. At this point we should have our SDDC deployed and linked back to our onprem. VR/SRM should be deployed both onprem and in the SDDC. All site … Read more
This is the third installment of my ongoing series on DRaaS. We have have by now installed VR/Site Recovery Manager, configured site pairings, and configured onprem and SDDC mappings. Now it is time to setup Replication, Protection Groups and Recovery Plans. What are Protection Groups and Recovery Plans A protection group is a group of … Read more
Each AWS Region supports the infrastructure and services for a given geography. Within each Region, Amazon builds isolated and redundant islands of infrastructure called Availability Zones (AZ). With VMware Cloud on AWS, ESXi hosts traditionally reside in an AWS Availability Zone (AZ) and are protected by vSphere HA. In the event of losing a ESXi … Read more
Faction came across my radar a few years back when I was designing a hybrid cloud solution for a former client. Since then I have watched Faction become a top 20 partner of VMware and be an early partner of VMware Cloud on AWS. Below I will describe why VMC on AWS and why Faction … Read more
This article is a continuation f the previous article of installing VR/SRM. Now that we have installed VR/SRM onprem and in VMware Cloud on AWS, it is time to configure SRM. Go into vCenter on SDDC to create new Resource Pool, Folders, and Logical Switches to map back to onprem. In VMC go to the … Read more
I’ve been requested to write a multi-part blog about setting up, configuring, and executing Site Recovery Manager to VMware Cloud on AWS. This is part one of a three part series. I hope this helps anyone out there who is considering DR as a Service to the VMC on Amazon Web Services. Please keep an … Read more
I am very excited about this new development in cloud storage via Pure storage. Cloud Block Store is Pure’s own Purity OS running in AWS. This is a huge development because it will allow companies to leverage abilities that have been unavailable in native AWS. Space saving features such as deduplication, compression, and thin provisioning … Read more
On the 13th of this month SDDC Version 1.6 was released by VMware Cloud on AWS, allowing for support for fan-in and other multi-site topologies. This will now allow the ability to have multiple remote sites replicating traffic to the same VMC instance. You can pair up to ten remote sites with a single SDDC. … Read more
I have been asked recently about the “easiest” way to migrate workloads from OnPrem into the VMC. Since I believe “easy” is a matter of perception I thought I would list the 5 techniques I have utilized. 5 types of VM migrations for VMware Cloud on AWS Migration with vMotion Migration with vMotion allows moving … Read more
Everyone, I have been named co-leader of a new VMUG community focused on the education and development of VMware Cloud on AWS. https://www.vmug.com/vmconaws In the coming weeks we will be adding webinars, videos, posting documents, and announcing sponsored events. I am also looking for recommendations on content that everyone would like to see. Please sign … Read more
I was recently asked in an interview what are 5 things I like or that a potential VMC on AWS customer should know. about VMC. I thought I would make a quick list of my 5 benefits of VMC. 1. Agility The provisioning of new resources is quick and easy. Within 15-20 minutes of adding … Read more
