If you follow VMware technologies or want to see what's new and exciting, I recommend attending vForum Online starting today at 11:30 AM Central. You can RSVP and view the agenda by following that link.

I recommend the "What's New" sessions and the "Chat with Experts" sessions. Those are the ones I found most valuable as a customer.

Perhaps you’ve heard some buzz about Wavefront but don’t quite know what it is or how it can be used. I was in the same boat for a while, but then I saw a demo that blew my mind. Imagine a platform that could ingest time series data (or metrics) from various sources, retain all data points with no roll up, and allowed IT operations and developers to quickly analyze the data for spotting and visualizing trends affecting application performance. How could we use that data to make the business better, and what kind of data actually gets collected? Moreover, how and why are people using this tool? I hope this post will provide some answers.

Wavefront Integration with Google Cloud Platform
The Wavefront website shows a number of integrations, but what does that really mean? Wavefront has pre-built methods for metric collection from certain applications and will guide you through the setup process. There are other ways to get data into Wavefront, but integrations make the process easier.

I happen to have a Google Compute Engine instance running a single Linux virtual machine, so it made sense to play with the Google Cloud Platform integration. This blog post gives some detail on the GCP integration, but once I read it, I wanted to see it for myself. Sign up for a free 30-day trial of Wavefront and a free year of GCP to follow along.

The rest of the story can be found here - http://blog.thenetworknerd.com/2018/04/14/catch-the-wave-with-gcp-a-wavefront-integration-exploration/.

@coliver said in DFW SpiceCorps - 4/19/2018:

This sounds like it is going to be a good one.

Agreed - now if I could just get more people to sign up and show up....

Date: Thursday, April 19, 2018
Time: 6:30pm - 10:00 PM CDT
Location:
Holiday Inn Las Colinas
110 W John Carpenter Fwy
Irving, TX 75039

Spring is in the air, and it is time for another SpiceCorps meeting. If you like to talk technology, enjoy free refreshments, and want to meet your peers in the industry, come nerd out with us! This meeting is the result of a topic suggestion from our February meeting. Here's what we will cover:

Imaging 101 for the IT Pro

Is workstation imaging the bane of your existence? Is it as simple as pushing out a golden image to a new machine when onboarding employees, or are there other ways to approach the imaging process? Should everything just be scripted? How can we make image management easier and deployment faster for administrators? What about dealing with different hardware, a changing set of applications for end users, and multiple operating systems? How can we image at scale without needing to scale the department? We'll discuss different imaging methodologies and have plenty of time for questions.

Kudos to our very own ITGamer for securing a venue and volunteering to give a talk. Light refreshments will be provided. We hope to see you there!

RSVP here - https://community.spiceworks.com/meeting/show/2671

In the end, it is about what can help your business meet its RPO and RTO. That is going to determine the budget.

Be careful of trying brownfield VMware vSAN. The vSAN HCL is something you must adhere to when choosing hardware to use to set yourself up for success (i.e. controller is super important - look at the HBA330 instead of a PERC, need to choose the proper drives for cache and capacity, etc.).

So if you do roll with VMware vSAN or use Starwind, I would still look at a DR cluster. You can do a 2-node vSAN cluster but need a witness running somewhere else.

I'm be praying for his family. He helped me a number of times and was one super smart, super helpful dude.

Picture yourself in front of a rack of VxRail appliances. Ah, the bright shine of freshly racked and cabled new gear! The network team has VLANs ready. The operations team has picked out naming conventions for host names and virtual machines. Storage capacity will be more than enough to support growth efforts for the next year. It’s finally time to dive into the hyper-converged infrastructure pool of goodness.

Before jumping in, consider the tools used for cluster management in the VxRail world. VxRail Manager (a virtual machine within the cluster) is the secret sauce for lifecycle management, and vCenter is the tool for day-to-day operations. But is deploying VxRail really as easy as stepping through the setup wizard and taking a lunch break? It certainly can be, but don’t let vCenter derail the success of your VxRail deployment. This, my friends, is where our tale begins.

You can read the rest of the story here - http://blog.thenetworknerd.com/2018/03/31/a-tale-of-two-vcenters-vxrail-edition/.

I'm a little late on this, but it's not too late to register for the VMUG Virtual Event today (started about 40 minutes ago). The full agenda is here - https://www.vmug.com/Attend/VMUG-UserCon/VirtualEvent. Take advantage of things like Meet the Expert if you have burning questions.

I think you will begin to hear more about Workspace ONE powered by Airwatch rather than Airwatch as a separate product (https://www.vmware.com/products/workspace-one.html). There's a large amount of work being done around managing Windows 10 devices too (moving to Unified Endpoint Management instead of just traditional MDM, things like ability to manage BitLocker keys).

There were some platform announcements yesterday as well - https://blogs.vmware.com/euc/2018/03/workspace-one-intelligence-march-announcement.html.

But I'd stick with @StorageNinja's advice on being patient for a response.