Yesterday, VMware announced their list of vExperts for 2016 and I’m both proud and humbled to have been selected for the second time. I’m standing on the shoulders of giants here, as a lot of the people that I have been inspired by and/or helped by over my years in the VMware community are recognised as vExperts again this year, alongside some new faces. Many folks have been vExperts for a long time and their continued dedication to the VMware ecosystem and generosity with their time is rightly recognised.

Dell EMC Yeah, I know, Dell buys EMC for a proper Doctor Evil amount of money, on top of the billions it already owed the banks and VC guys who helped it to go private last year, but like I say, a debt is just a bunch of numbers on a piece of paper until someone actually calls it in. So whatever. VMware is still independent, just as it was last week, so we all have to wait to see just how this shakes out.

Ok, so first things first, I don’t know what day this is, day 1, day 0 or day -1, so it will have to stay as Sunday. That means flying to VMworld Europe day, a number of hours spent in transit, by now the normal Airbnb approach to staying in Barcelona, considering that basically all I will do in this apartment is sleep and shower. OK, and blog. It’s only a couple of hours from Gatwick to Barcelona, but today’s transport involved car, train, plane, taxi, taxi, feet, which would have been a lot worse had I not been able to sponge lifts off of unnamed people’s expenses :-) You have to love this community.

Once you have created an account with Ravello and Uploaded some images, then it is time to start building a lab environment on someone else’s cloud. If you’ve not signed up for a Ravello account, then you can do that here and if you’ve not read my first article in this series, then you should go here. I’ll wait. So, to get started you’ll need to create an empty, cloud optimised, ESXi application and then install ESXi within it.

Background Ravello Systems was founded in early 2011 by the same people who created the KVM hypervisor. Rami Tamir is the CEO and he took an invited audience of vExperts through a preview of Ravello InceptionSX on a pre-launch briefing early in August 2015. The Ravello Systems mission statement is to provide Cloud Economics (Pay as you go, on demand, endless capacity at commodity prices) for All Workloads across All Environments while Maintaining SLAs, Tools, Security etc.

So, the VMworld Europe schedule builder opened up today and some of the sessions are already full up. Scary. Almost every guided lab session was full up by lunchtime on day 1, I wonder if the same folks got in to all of them, quite likely! This is the list I am thinking of at the moment. I am sure this will get turned on it’s head when more info comes out about TAM Customer Central, additional sessions get announced after the releases announced at VMworld US and I’ll need time to take a look at the solutions exchange and talk toa ll the clever folks around the place.

Those lovely people over at Ravello Systems have given all of the current vExperts access to their nested virtualisation offering, so each month I have some free hours to run the equivalent of a homelab, but it’s located somewhere out on AWS or Google, fronted by the clever Ravello interface. This should allow me to test out a whole bunch of things that are difficult to set up on a home lab, so I can keep the on premises stuff for running my production and put my dev / test in the cloud.

So, you’ve got a nice new vCenter 6 up and running, maybe you have an external PSC as well? Jolly good! Now what? There’s a whole bunch of additional configuration items that you should look at amending before too long. Log in as your SSO Admin account - administrator@vsphere.local (or whatever you changed it to during the installation) and away we go. Let’s start with something new - the Download Remote Console option.

It was time to replace my old workhorse HP ML115’s with some new kit ready for the vSphere 6 launch and given the amount of commentary around the community at large I decided to take the plunge and source a bunch of Intel NUC devices, namely the D54250WYK model. No point doing things by halves, so I got three* and stuck 16GB memory in each, which should give me enough room to build a decent lab!

Synology have announced their latest beta this week. DSM 5.2 Beta now gives you the abilty to run Docker Containers natively. This will be interesting for a bunch of vExperts, who use these devices. After I get vSphere 6.0 bedded in, I imagine that I will be looking at the option that this presents where I will be able to have a Docker implementation within the vSphere environment and play with the portability options by shifting them in and out of the Synology.