Plain Virtualization

First of all congrats to all vExpert 2025 announced . This year, there is some additional entitlement not made known to the community. I was surprised when I received the below email: And yes, you got it. All vExpert 2025 are given a year of VMUG Advantage entitlement. This includes a 50% one time certification fee and many more which you can find out more here . This is definitely an icing on the cake.

Back in the days of VMware, I was fortunate to talk to many customers and involved in numerous discussion on helping them from on premise to private cloud, hybrid cloud to public cloud and MultiCloud to today, Intelligence running in the cloud. Many thought that might change when I move on to my next career. In fact, I carry on that discussion with my customers today the same way I did in the past. That was also one great reason I joint NetApp. Let me show you where this happens: Reference link As changes of IT evolved, the amount of data customer have to collect, manage, protect and secure is way more than before. More so around complexity and managing the amount of data threats. In 1996, NetApp introduced ONTAP to solve the issue with local data siloes with NAS to help customer manage the large amount of data in files and block. When virtualization take place, NetApp supported a wide range of solutions such as VMware, Hyper-V, KVM, etc. helping customers manage that data growth. Even...

The year of 2024 is coming to an end. VMUG Singapore had hosted few events this year and it has been fruitful. They are not stopping there.  Starting 2025, VMUG Singapore is hosting their first event in 2025 on 14th Jan. Do register to join us. This year I am helping out for this event as a former VMware employee. This time round for a start we are doing something very different. 1. We will still have our product update from Sanjan and Iwan who will be at the first item to answer questions regarding where VMware product is heading and why on what they are doing. 2. We will have our education to update on training and certification changes. 3. For the very first time. We will be sharing career development with speaker, Jeremy Cheong from Juel Search. Some market statistic and giving you some data points on how you can grow your career. We are not just going focusing on technology but also helping our community to grow with us. I will be sharing some job trade secret which companie...

It the time of the year to apply and renew your vExpert for another year for your effort contribution back to the VMware community over the last 6-12months.  The vExpert 2025 application is now open starting from 6th Dec 2024 and will closed on 10th January 2025. So hurry start your application and fill up all your contribution. You do not have to do it once through, you can always save it in draft and add on and submit before the closing date. If you have doubt reach out or look for your vExpert Pro nearest to you to to advise you accordingly. This year has been a very different year for VMware. However, the vExpert program was valued and carry on. The perks this year been a vExpert will be very different from the investment from Broadcom.  Head over and sign up now. Good luck! Update 11th Jan 2025 Application dateline has been extended to 24th Jan 2025. Update 13 Dec 2024 Check out the vExpert application announcement here .

As mentioned in this article , VMware has release vSphere Enterprise Plus edition offering and I think this is a great add-on having it got removed after end of perpetual offering. Though the Standard and Essential is good enough but there are many cases where vSphere Enterprise Plus is needed yet only made available in VMware vSphere Foundation (VVF) or VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) which customer have to purchase just to use the vSphere Edition in it. Further on, the vSAN entitlement for VVF is also increased from 100GiB to 250GiB. This definitely make the usage of vSAN much more appealing in VVF. As I have create a calculator previously here , I have updated to include the 250GiB per core in VVF. I have not added any for vSphere Enterprise Plus since it can be used with the existing vSphere Standard since there is not special limitation for the new offering. Just to note the previous KB preferred to on the license entitlement for vSAN is however, not updated at the time of writing....

If you have read in my previous article , back in Aug 2024, that a number of Aria Operations Management packs will be retired from general support on 1st Oct 2024. Without the build in management packs provided, what can you do next? Aria Operations does come with a Management Pack Building which many are not aware. I like to share from this article  that I came across that illustrate how easy to just pull the wanted metric that you need to build your own dashboard. If those existing dashboard from management pack that is end of life, you can then see what metrics are been pulled and customize your own to keep moving forward. Alternatively, you can seek any system integrator to help build such dashboard easily if you have no such engineer in house to help.