Tag: vRealize Operations

Juggling priorities, and my unplanned, but temporary break from blogging

If you have a blog post for long enough, sometimes readers measure your contributions only by the number of recent posts published. If that were an accurate way to measure productivity, then apparently I haven’t been doing anything in the past few months. Quite the contrary really. Since joining VMware in August of 2016, I’ve had the opportunity to work with great teams on exciting projects. It has been fast paced, educational, and fun.

So what have I been doing anyway…
It is fair to say that VMware vSAN 6.6 is the most significant launch in the history of vSAN. The amount of features packed into 6.6 is a testament to the massive focus by R&D to deliver an unprecedented set of new features and enhancements. Part of the effort of any release is rolling out technical content. A significant amount of that load falls on Technical Marketing, and by virtue of being a part of the team, I’ve been right in the thick of it. The list of deliverables is long, but it has been fun to be a part of that process.

How vSAN is integrated into the hypervisor gives it unique abilities in integration and interoperability. An area of focus for me has been demonstrating practical examples of this integration – in particular, the integration that vSAN has with vRealize Operations, and vRealize Log Insight. Connecting the dots between what really happens in data centers, and product capabilities is one way to show how, and why the right type of integration is so important. There are a lot of exciting things coming in this space, so stay tuned.

I’ve also had the chance to join my colleagues, Pete Flecha and John Nicholson on the Virtually Speaking Podcast. In episode 38, we talked a little about storage performance, and in episode 41, we discussed some of the new features of vSAN 6.6. What John and Pete have been able to accomplish with that podcast over the past year is impressive, and the popularity of it speaks to the great content they produce.

Since joining VMware, I also stepped down from my role as a Seattle VMUG leader. It was a fun and educational experience that helped me connect with the community, and appreciate every single volunteer out there. VMUG communities everywhere are run by enthusiasts of technology, and their passion is what keeps it all going. I appreciated the opportunity, and they are in good hands with Damian Kirby, who has taken over leadership duties.

All of these activities, while gratifying, left little time for my normal cadence of posts. I’ve always enjoyed creating no-nonsense, interesting, unique content with a lot of detail. Testing, capturing observations, and investigating issues is fun and rewarding for me, but it is also extremely time consuming. I spent the past 8 years churning out this type of content at a clip of about one post per month. That doesn’t sound like much, but with the level of detail and testing involved, it was difficult to keep up the pace recently. This short reprieve has allowed me to rethink what I want my site to focus on. While much of the content I’m producing these days shows up in other forms, and in other locations, I’ll now have the chance to mix up the content out here a bit. Some new posts are in the works, and hope to pick up the pace soon, if for nothing else, to let everyone know I’m actually doing something. Smile

– Pete

Helpful Links