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VMware vSAN 2017 Specialist Exam I always like to take a discounted exam at VMworld, this year I opted for the VMware vSAN 2017 Specialist exam, which was released a few weeks ago. Having delivered quite a few vSAN based solutions over the last few years, I was fairly confident in the blueprint. I am pleased to say that I passed the exam with a score of 422, way higher than I expected!

**a non-VMware employee! I am very much looking forward to meeting friends old and new during the week, so if you see me come say hi! Where can you find me? During the day I’m likely to be found in the bloggers area, or hanging around the vBrownbag stage, when I’m not in a session. Monday evening I’ll be leading a fearless team of hackers for the VMware {Code} Hackathon, hoping to create something cool!

Having missed last years VMworld I feel very ready for attending the EMEA VMworld in Barcelona. I almost felt annoyed about missing last year as the big announcements really caused a stir in the community and wider afield. (VMware on AWS) The announcements from the US VMworld this year were equally exciting so I am very keen to hear what else VMware has planned to reveal in a Barcelona. I have put a good deal of effort into planning what I will be doing and attending to maximise my time there without burnout (Veterans I hear you laughing)

I’ve been working for Xtravirt for over 3 and a half years now, first as a Senior Consultant, and more recently as a Lead Consultant. During that time I’ve had the opportunity to work with some excellent people, some fantastic customers and some huge projects. I’ve developed and grown as a consultant and architect, achieved multiple VCP and VCAP qualifications, and VMware’s elite VCDX certification. For all of this, and for the opportunities and support they have provided, I am thankful to Xtravirt and to all of my colleagues who helped along the way.

The Host Resources Deep Dive book by Frank Denneman and Niels Hagoort has been one of the most widely anticipated books in the VMware community - previous deep dive books by Frank (co-authored with Duncan Epping), tantalising blog posts and captivating presentations have whet the appetite for the last year or so. Having sat through some of these presentations at VMUGs and VMworld I can tell you the depth and understanding that the authors bring to the table is immense.

[<img class=“alignright size-thumbnail wp-image-8035” src="/images/2017/03/logo.jpg" alt="" width=“150” height=“150” which vROps can provide by using various extensibility solutions. We discussed the following use cases and demonstrated them in live environments: Use Case 1 - Full-Stack vSphere Monitoring. From application to Infrastructure. Use Case 2 - Amazon RDS Workloads. Monitoring public cloud workloads with vROps. Use Case 3 - vROps Extensibility. Metrics, Logs and Costing come together along with other 3rd party extensibility options.

I already have a vRealize Orchestrator workflow to shutdown my workload cluster. What I want to do is trigger that by a voice command from Alexa. Now, the correct and proper thing to do here would be to create a new Alexa skill, write the function in Lambda and connect that to my Orchestrator REST API and execute the workflow. That way I could control the “intents” and “utterances” and have verbal feedback.

Over the past 6 months I have been dwelling more and more on the obvious speed of change and development in IT Infrastructure. What do I mean? Well each year there is the new hotness, the next thing/innovation you are told you need or should have. In most cases the innovations and new tech are ground breaking awesomeness and most certainly offer new opportunities for the infrastructure masses. I am all for progress, if you are not moving forward and regularly looking for sensible ways to improve what you do and the infrastructure you use then I really do think you are in the wrong industry.

So the other day my Skype account was briefly compromised, a successful login from Russia (after digging through activity logs) and this was after many attempts from IP addresses all around the world (China, Korea, Argentina the list goes on). You can see from the picture below the successful login attempt. My initial reaction was stress and panic, as I didn’t know precisely where I had been compromised I ran scans on my local machines while resetting passwords a plenty.

vRealize Automation vExperts Workshop I attended a workshop with Jad El Zein in Barcelona last year and it was one of the best sessions I attended, especially as it was just on the news of vRA7’s release. This workshop was this year’s equivelant, but because the session included a lot of people just getting started with vRA a lot of the time was taken to explain what vRA does, so there was no real time for the more in depth details on the new features that are coming (some already announced and in Tech Preview).