VMware and communities in 2021

Hey folks! 2021 is closing to an end, and, as you can see in the post frequency, I was really busy and involved in some important working and non-working activities. But let me say, that this 2021 was a really great year, full of news, hopes and even if this blog is not so frequently updated, I was working for webinars, VMworld 2021 sessions, and activities like Hackathon, and finally, after 2 years, the reprise of in-person events. Sure, I don’t wanna cite here the winning of the Football European Championship Cup, or the Olympic Italian winnings of 2021, and more than the others, the Italian vaccination campaign that is more and more bringing us back to freedom we’ve lost in 2020. But in the communities like VMUG and the common people of IT and DevOPS, the common desire is to put the face out of our “smart working places”! For sure it will not possible to organize an event like before 2020, and the usage of the mask will resist again for next months, but we hope to back to normality soon! Now it’s time to dive into techy things!

VMworld 2021

2021 for VMware has been an intensive year from every perspective: after the quit of Pat Gelsinger, Rangarajan Raghuram has taken the cloche of this important virtualization and cloud management company. Today see VMware as the creator of one of the famous virtualization platforms, sounds reductive. We already got some important signals of change of perspective with the coming of NSX, Horizon, and vRealize. Then with Tanzu and the empowering of the multi-cloud strategy, VMware is going to be a realistic starting point for everyone is going to “build” a complete cloud solution.

In fact, sessions at VMworld were focused principally on VMware Tanzu, Multi-Cloud approaches, and SD-WAN stuff. The news from VMworld 2021 regards essentially:

• Cross-Cloud strategy with the introduction of more integrated services like management, security, and integrated solution from Cloud to Edge.
• Some Tanzu portfolio improvements like Tanzu Application Service and Tanzu Observability by Wavefront: here I’d like to highlight also the coming of Tanzu Mission Control Starter Edition and Tanzu Community Edition.

You can find the announcements official page here and here.

I’d like also to mention an interesting wrap-up with a lot of independent consideration (there is also my perspective about Project Arctic ): https://searchservervirtualization.techtarget.com/pro/VMworld-2021-Conference-Coverage-Guide.

From TechTarget Coverage guide:

Project Arctic. Project Arctic aims to deliver VMware cloud capacity and cross-cloud services to on-premises vSphere deployments through native integrations of cloud connectivity within vSphere. Project Arctic enables upgrades to an as-a-service model directly from the vCenter console and expands capacity on-demand. “The need to speed the adoption process of a hybrid cloud solution without the worry of overprovisioning the on-premises infrastructure is the key element that brought the VMware cloud team to start Project Arctic. For sure, the initial setup and the workload placement is the critical part that old and new organizations are facing before they start to gain benefits. This is a great point for brownfield scenarios [when organizations] want to implement a multi-cloud as-a-service model from existing vCenters,” said Lino Telera, blogger and influencer for linoproject.net and cloud architect at InfoCert.

The format of this edition was really interactive and the mix of live sessions and continuous chats on Slack was a powerful ingredient to keep high the attraction of the people and at the same time to make this virtual event a really great experience. Unfortunately, as an in-person participant of the past VMworld, I can say that there are some other missing parts of the show that can’t be replaced virtually: the community feeling.

Next VMworld will be in-person and probably some people can also participate from their home (Hybrid event), and the dates are officially released:

• US August 29 – September 1, 2022
• Europe November 7 – 10, 2022

So, mark your calendar and I hope finally to attend in person! In the meantime check the on-demand version of the entire VMworld 2021 here: https://www.vmware.com/vmworld/en/index.html

If you’re interested in Tanzu automation, I suggest taking a look at session APP1412: I and my good friend Manuel Coppotelli showed how to automate infrastructures and applications with Tanzu, and probably during 2022 we’ll continue this with further meetings and showcases. So, stay tuned!

What about Pat Gelsinger? He back to Intel after 11 years. I already wrote an article here about that and I’d like to share also what appeared on HPCWire on 14th January: https://www.hpcwire.com/2021/01/14/pat-gelsinger-returns-to-intel-as-ceo/

VMware {code} Hackathon never die!

Keeping the eyes in the community at VMworld 2021, the VMware Code Connect Hackathon 2021 happened again with the winning of “The Tanzuformers” team let’s see what teams developed in detail:

• Ariel Sanchez Mora called “Windows gets no love” and composed by Jason ‘Willie’ Williamson, Wes Milliron, Greg Bates, Doug DeFrank, Eric Macintosh, Josh Demcher, Lucho Delorenzi created a great collection of vRAs automation for Windows VMs. You can try it here: https://github.com/vmwcode2021windows/all-the-ways-to-windows-server/blob/main/README.md
• David Prows and his team composed of Justin Brant, Markus Kraus, Barry Browne, Bill Kindle, Jon Husen had made available Ansible toolkit for vSphere Security configuration. If you wanna try, just take a look here: https://github.com/DaftPyPosh/vSphereSCG 
• Ankush Sethi developed an interesting Google integration for VRA. Project and details are available here: https://vmwarecode.com/2021/09/07/how-to-manage-vra-8-vrlcm-using-google-assistant-okgoogle/
• Yes, this year I headed a team called “The Tanzuformers” that with the great and friendly collaboration of Manuel Coppotelli and Scott Rosemberg, we developed Terraform modules and providers for VMware Tanzu. This collection is available on Terraform registry here: https://registry.terraform.io/namespaces/tanzuformers

For me, this is the 5th participation of VMware Code Hackathon, and since the beginning of this fantastic community, I see a lot of commitment and improvements coming from VMware itself, but also by the participation of the entire community. If you like to join, participate, contribute, have fun, etc, just check the official website at https://developer.vmware.com/home, and don’t forget to join the Slack channel and see the webinar recorded session on the official YouTube channel

My Contributions in 2021

VirtualMetric Webinar Cloud Native Applications on VMware & Kubernetes

Back at the beginning of the year, I started something that I had never done before: a presentation in English. For non-English people like me it’s not so easy to make a virtual presentation (without seeing people in their faces) and at the same time catch the attention and the attraction for the subject. But thanks to Yusuf, Irina, and the Virtual Metrics staff, I realize my first webinar talking about VMware Tanzu and Kubernetes on-premise in general.

Probably (for sure) I did a lot of English mistakes, but the hope is that I successfully transferred some basic concepts on Kube with Tanzu for System Administrator and DevOps people.

If you wanna get a look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LFSh5IaqeU

Terraform Webinar by VMware

Another great occasion to perform as a Webinar Speaker has come from VMware: Thanks to Daniela Quesada (VMware), I submitted an interesting topic about the introduction on Infrastructure As Code. This Webinar is recorded here: https://learning.customerconnect.vmware.com/site/openlearn.do?dispatch=previewLesson&id=639a2ad2-a9bb-11eb-8643-0cc47adeb5f8

Webinars and meetings with CRIT (Italian language)

It was a great season for the webinar with CRIT (https://polocrit.it/), an Italian consortium, focused on innovation and technology territorial growing in Cremona. In fact, during 2021, I experimented with the webinar and the first in-person event since 2019. As a Cremona citizen, for me, it’s a real pleasure contributing and providing a lot of interesting content like virtualization, cloud, DevOps, etc…

On the 27th of May I started the Tech Season with how to “Deploy Infrastructure as code with Terraform”: based on my VMware vSphere lab I demonstrate how to start using Terraform to automate and manage infrastructures in a vSphere environment. Details on this event are here: https://polocrit.it/eventi/deploy-infrastructure-as-code-terraform/

I’d like to share also a local press article about my webinar: https://www.cremonaoggi.it/2021/05/18/crit-3-nuovi-appuntamenti-per-il-mese-di-maggio/ 

Kubernetes with Tanzu by Cortech

Another Italian webinar organized by CoreTech, it’s available here: https://www.coretech.it/it/service/event/eventDetail.php?ID=803. This time I demonstrate how to play with VMware vSphere Tanzu and Tanzu Kubernetes Grid.

VMUG Italy UserCon 2021: Automate infrastructures and applications with Tanzu

I close the year with a great time with my fellows of Italian VMUG and with my friend Manuel Coppotelli (exceptionally in person), for the organization of VMUG UserCon 2021 and the Italian presentation of the VMworld session “Automate infrastructures and applications with Tanzu”. The recorded session will be available soon, and I’ll share it with my social channels… so, stay tuned