I’ve been in a VMware Workspace One and Airwatch training all week, and haven’t had a chance until now to post a quick recap about the Raleigh Durham area (RDU for those not in the know) VMUG meeting. This was the first local VMUG I’ve attended, mainly because work and vacation have gotten in the way of the previous meetings I had circled on the calendar.
The meeting took place on Thurs, Oct 12 at the RTP Conference Center. Things kicked off with a quick recap of the big takeaways from VMworld 2017. The local TAM team did a great job of hitting all the main points that have been widely discussed/blogged since VMworld US and EU have concluded. There was also a wider discussion on the specifics of VMware on AWS. With cloud still being a huge buzz word in IT at the moment, there is a lot of interest in the VMware on AWS offering. Having spent a lot of time at VMworld focused on VMware on AWS, I have mixed feelings about the offering as it exists right now. Obviously, one reason about the relatively slow cloud adoption from a VMware standpoint is the complete change of ecosystem when looking at AWS or Azure. VMware on AWS essentially solves this problem by providing the same management/monitoring a VMware admin is used to, just within a cloud infrastructure. The bigger issue I see at the moment is $$. VMware on AWS isn’t cheap, and there is a 4 host minimum just to get in the door. It will be interesting to see how adoption goes, as it does seem promising, but there are some financial road blocks that could keep non-enterprise customers from biting at the moment.
The second presentation was by Zerto and ePlus, focused on IT Resilience. Zerto’s product was given a high level overview for those of us who weren’t super familiar with their offering. A great use case was highlighted where a customer needed to virtualize a large physical environment that needed to move to a new colo facility. Zerto was used to go from phyiscal site A -> virtual site A -> virtual site B. It was presented as a very successful project, which is great to hear, especially while investigating a number of solutions (including Zerto) that claim to provide prod to DR and prod to cloud migration.
Ray Heffer (@rayheffer) closed out the meeting with a presentation called “Technical Deep Dive on Architecting VMware Horizon, the VCDX Way!” I was very interested in this presentation, as I started following Ray on Twitter around the same time I started my VCAP Design study. I probably stumbled upon some Google+ design group post linked to him back in the day. Apparently Ray is newly re-located to the RDU area as well, so it is great to have some double VCDX brain power here locally! I personally don’t do much around the VDI space these days, but it was great to learn more about the new Horizon DaaS offering and see the architecture behind it.
I’m glad that I was finally able to make it to a local VMUG meeting and look forward to more RDU events in the near future! I feel like I can proudly display my VMworld VMUG lego smart phone stand with confidence now that I have participated. I don’t think I’ll be rocking the VMUG fanny pack any time soon though. I highly recommending carving time out of your schedule to attend in the future. For as nice as it has been to start getting out in the vCommunity, it is good to have some local roots as well. Thank you VMUG!
