Life as a Technology Services Manager with Sam Akroyd

If you’ve ever wonder what a “Technology Services Manager” actually does, then read on! After Sam interrogated me on his blog, I thought I would return the favour and ask him almost the same questions in return. We covered a variety of topics, such as career changes, moving into a management role, delivering IT in […]

Using vRealize Network Insight with VMware Cloud on AWS

Last updated on 7th January 2021 with vRNI-HCX Fling link This post will walk through how to use vRealize Network Insight with VMware Cloud on AWS. Recap on vRealize Network Insight I’ve been a fan of vRealize Network Insight (vRNI) ever since the days it was still called Arkin Net. When I first started using […]

What does a CIO actually do? Observations from a week shadowing a CIO

I’ve recently had the opportunity to shadow the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of a large UK company and he had the kindness to let me sit into a variety of meetings and interview him and some of his reporting staff. I took off my “VMware hat” for a few days and was a fly on […]

Folding at Home and how to make a (tiny) contribution to coronavirus therapeutics research

If you want to help fight against coronavirus but don’t know how to contribute…well, read on. It turns out we all can do something (beyond staying at home and washing our hands!): we can give away our computer processing power to research to understand coronavirus better and design therapeutics to address it. Now, I’m not […]

First look into…VMware Tanzu Mission Control

This is my first of (I suspect) many blog posts related to cloud-native workloads and Kubernetes. I’m bound to make mistakes or describe things incorrectly – please Tweet at me or put up a comment below if you spot inaccuracies or mistakes – but I’ve found that the best way for me to learn is […]

Scheduled Cluster Auto-Scale with VMware Cloud on AWS and AWS Lambda

This post will walk through how to automatically add and remove hosts to your VMware cluster, by leveraging VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC, Python and AWS Lambda. While we have the very cool Elastic DRS feature that can scale up and down based on resource thresholds, EDRS is not clever enough (yet) to anticipate when […]

How to monitor Air Quality with a Raspberry Pi

I recently had the opportunity to work on a project with British Heart Foundation to reduce heart and lungs diseases through technology. The team I worked with focused on air quality. It has no obvious link with my day job at VMware but it has been a great experience so far and it has finally […]

How to be Inclusive When You’re Meeting Remote

On a very different topic… and with a huge amount of focus on remote work with the coronavirus outbreak, we thought it would be relevant to share our manifesto and guidelines on making remote meetings inclusive and effective. The article was co-written with Katherine Lightner and published on her blog: How to be Inclusive When […]

Introducing PyVMC: a Python-based tool for VMware Cloud on AWS

Last updated – 19th June 2020 This tool has now been promoted to a Fling and we are now up to version 1.1 with DFW support. More and more of our customers are automating as many common tasks as possible. There are many ways to script, codify or automate tasks with VMware Cloud on AWS […]

HashiCorp Terraform for vSphere – update for TF 0.12 and later

HashiCorp Terraform 0.12 was released back in May 2019 but most of my work with TF was using v0.11 or earlier. Some viewers of my previous post let me know they had some issues with the previous template configuration I had provided so here is an updated and validated version with 0.12. This post will […]