Virtual Reality Meeting – the future of remote meetings?

I’ve recently been fortunate to participate in a Virtual Reality meeting pilot kickstarted by our IT department at VMware. This post will walk through my experience as an early adopter. When lockdown started here in the UK, I didn’t expect that I would go 6 months (and counting…) without a face-to-face meeting with a customer […]

Terraform for vSphere – OVA/OVF support

As I am gearing up for a VMworld session with Gilles Chekroun on Terraform and an upcoming webinar with HashiCorp’s Grant Orchard, I thought I’d publish a series of short posts on Terraform around some of the features and gotchas I have myself discovered over the past few months. First one: remote OVA/OVF support with […]

OCTO Initiative: Nonprofit Connect – Amplifying Impact with VMware’s Nonprofit Customers

Published on the VMware Office of the CTO Blog on 25th June 2020: https://octo.vmware.com/nonprofit-connect/ The post was co-written with the amazing Michelle and walks through some of the work we’ve done at VMware with a number of non-profit organizations. If you work with such organization and want to hear more, please contact us on the […]

Automation with VMware Cloud on AWS and vRealize Automation ABX

Updated (14th August 2020): for more information on this project, read Vincent’s blog post here One of the most fascinating aspects of working for a company like VMware is the opportunity to work directly with the product teams who design and build the solutions I get to play with. But at the rate the company […]

Mentoring, Coaching and Sponsoring – why you need to get some and give some

The day I started my career back in February 2005, my first and new boss introduced me to a colleague (who himself had only been there for 6 months) and said: “He’s going to be your mentor and show you the ropes.” I followed my mentor around for a couple of months, pestered him with […]

Deep Dive on PowerCLI, NSX-T, Pester and VMware Cloud on AWS

This blog post will walk through how to use PowerCLI, Pester for VMware Cloud on AWS, NSX-T and vCenter. No prior knowledge of PowerCLI or PowerShell is required to read this blog. In recent weeks, I have had the opportunity to participate in the construction of the VMware Hands-On Labs as a Lab Captain. I […]

Being a Black Man

As I entered the lift, the little girl stepped behind her mum. “Why are you scared, honey?” asked the mother. The terrified little girl pointed her finger at me and said: “Because the man is black.” “What can I do?” That’s probably the question I’ve heard the most over the past few weeks as we […]

Fling Update: PyVMC 1.1 release (and a walkthrough through some Python code)

Since I released PyVMC (a Python-based client to manage VMware Cloud on AWS co-created with Matt Dreyer) on my blog and as a VMware Fling, I’ve seen a fair bit of interest from engineers that need to automate the configuration of their VMC SDDC or that need to configure a large amount of security rules. […]

Bursting to the Cloud with VMware Event Broker Appliance, AWS Lambda and VMware Cloud on AWS

I was doing some research on who came up with the term “Cloud Bursting” – essentially the ability to leverage resources in the Cloud when demand for an on-prem application exceeds current capacity – and unsurprisingly, I came across Jeff Barr’s blog post from 2008 (Jeff is the Chief Evangelist for AWS). The way Jeff […]

Data Analytics with VMware Tanzu Observability by Wavefront

About 3 years ago, VMware acquired a cloud-hosted monitoring and analytics platform named Wavefront. With Wavefront, you could send time-series data from anywhere – applications, containers, serverless platforms, etc… – and render charts and get some analytics and insights. Naturally, I got my hands on it as soon as I could and started playing with […]