Dreams are important! Otherwise, sleep is just 8 hours of nothing. – MacGyver
vSphere 6.5 is here!
NDA’s have been lifted and the flood gates have opened in terms of bloggers around the world talking about vSphere 6.5! Now that the product has finally been declared GA we can all go ahead and download it today! Certainly the new HTML5 client, the addition of a more functional vCenter Server Appliance and built-in disk level encryption are enough to make me want to make the jump…eventually 🙂 That said there is a lot that is new with vCenter and ESXi – you can check it all out here.
Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 is here!
And just as VMware releases it’s flagship hypervisor software to the masses Veeam follows behind one day later with the support and availability back it all up with their updated release of version 9.5 of Backup & Replication. There is a lot that’s new within this release – check it all out here! With Nimble support and a ton of integration with other Veeam products such as the Veeam Agents this release has a lot – but perhaps some of my favourite enhancements will be the ones that will probably not be written about the most and that’s all of the engine enhancements and things like the vSphere inventory cache. As with most Veeam releases I’m sure this one will be well adopted!
Tech Field Day 12 – that’s a wrap!
I’ve just returned home from Tech Field Day 12 in beautiful San Jose! I say beautiful but I was told it was cold by multiple people there – that said, I’m Canadian, and 18C in the middle of November is not my idea of cold 🙂 Either way I sat with 11 of my peers around the TFD table for a couple of days and got blasted by the fire hose. There was some great presenting companies there; think Dell-EMC, DriveScale, Rubrik, Cohesity, StorageOS, Docker, and Igneous. Expect more in this space about what these guys had to talk about but for now if you want to check out the videos you can do so – links are all over here.
Fancy some community recognition!
Ah, November – cooler air, the transition from Halloween to Christmas – and of course, a flurry of forms to fill out if you’d like to be included in any vendor/community recognition programs. Most of these things require you to nominate yourself – so suck up any pride as you may have to get a little self absorbed while you try and brag yourself up. Recognition programs are a funny thing – Some are great, some are so-so – I’m not going to go into the details of each. If you want a great spot to see a list of them all Jim Jones has a great post outlining everything here. And to get a glimpse into one of my favourties, the Veeam Vanguard program – check out Matt Crapes post here. I’ve also been invited to the KEMP VIP program – which is new to me so expect to see more about that as well in the future.
Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, Docker
I feel like I can’t attend any presentation anymore without hearing the work Docker – honestly, containers and Docker is just popping up everywhere – with the oddest of technologies claiming they have support for Docker. So, with all this my problem is, What the eff is Docker – I’ve never had a use-case to even start looking at containers within my day job – therefore, I don’t really have that much knowledge around the challenges and benefits of them. After seeing them at TFD I can now say that I need to explore this further – and jump on this container bandwagon to learn what they are all about. First stop, Mr Stephen Foskett’s blog where he tells us just “What the deal with containers are“. If you are just learning, or just love containers – check it out!
