VMware History – Part 1 – The first 5 Years

The idea of these pages is to provide a timeline for the full history of VMware. There have been a few sites that have created a timeline of the history of VMware in past.  VMware even have their own timeline on their website:  https://www.vmware.com/timeline.html Unfortunately, although the VMware interactive timeline is visually very good, it tends to skip over some […]

VMware Project Monterey

So, one of the major announcements from VMworld 2020 was around Project Monterey. Kit Colbert has done a great blog post on Project Monterey available here:  https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2020/09/announcing-project-monterey-redefining-hybrid-cloud-architecture.html Project Monterey is the next development of the vSphere environment and requires the use of SmartNICs.  In a current deployment, all of the components such as vSAN Data, NSX services and Host Management, […]

SaltStack & VMware!

So, the news broke a little while ago that VMware has announced its intention to acquire SaltStack. But what is SaltStack and what do they do?   Salt was an open source automation engine and originated from the need for high-speed data collection and task execution for data center systems administrators managing massive infrastructure scale and resulting complexity.  Originally known […]

Coronavirus Changes Everything!!

As I sit down to enjoy another full day of Zoom meetings, I started to think back over the past few months and how things have changed due to the Coronavirus Pandemic. The stories and memories mentioned in this post are from my personal experiences during the pandemic and, although we’re not through this, I thought it would be good […]

VMware VCSA 7 Backup Process

Following on from my last blog post, I thought that it would be worthwhile taking the very good guide created by Kevin Soltow at VMware Blog (https://www.vmwareblog.org/backup-restore-vmware-vcsa-6-7/) and update this for vSphere 7. Many people may not be aware that image based backups of vCenter servers utilising products such as Veeam are deprecated in vSphere 6.7 Update 3 and are […]

vSphere 7 – Changing VCSA Appliance Size (also for vSphere 6.7)

When deploying out a vCenter appliance (VCSA), you have to choose the size of the environment that you will be managing.  Some people truly understand their current size and their growth aspirations and can therefore make an informed choice of what size to choose.  Others are restricted by resource availability at the time of deployment or their environments grow faster […]

vExpert 2020

The vExpert 2020 announcements have just been released and I am pleased to say that I have been awarded the vExpert title for another year. I’d like to thank the team for awarding me this once again and would like to congratulate returning and first time vExperts. This is an amazing community that is helping so many IT professionals with […]

VMware Acquisition – Nyansa

Yesterday (21st January 2020), saw an announcement from VMware and Nyansa (pronounced “knee-ans-sah”) sharing the intent of VMware to acquire Nyansa.  Nyansa are a relatively young company creating innovative AI-based IT infrastructure analytics software.  VMware appear to be looking to align this acquisition to their SD-WAN portfolio (Velocloud) to help drive the development of truly self-healing networks. It’s often interesting […]