William Lam

Automate disabling @channel & @here notifications using private Slack API

10/17/2019 by William Lam Leave a Comment

Slack is a popular communication and collaboration tool which has been adopted by many organizations including the one I work for. I am a fan of Slack and use it on a regular basis. Like most users, I am a member of several different workspaces and a ton of different channels.

I think most Slack users would agree that one of the most commonly miss-used feature of Slack is the @channel and @here notifications which allows a user to broadcast a message that notifies everyone within a specific channel. I most often see this when a user is looking for immediate assistance and think that this is the best way to get help, it is not. In some cases, inpatient uses end up spamming multiple channels which can have up to 1K+ members! As you can imagine, this type of behavior is usually not well received.

This is the modern day "reply-all" email storms that I am sure many of you have at experienced at least once if not many more times within your organization 🙂 Slack does provide a few ways of disabling notification, either within the workspace but this would disable the feature completely and I do see value in this feature when used correctly or disabling notifications on a per-channel basis as shown in the screenshot below.

ESX 3.x on VMware Cloud on AWS?

10/10/2019 by William Lam 2 Comments

VMworld Barcelona is just around the corner and this week I started working on building out the different demo environments which will all be running on VMware Cloud on AWS. In one of the demos, I need to have ESX 3.0 running, yes you read that correctly! ESX as in the original version with the Service Console (cos), some of you maybe too young to remember these good ol days? 😉

First, Let me be clear, there really is no good reason for this except for the nostalgia purposes and for what I am trying to demonstrate in our VMworld session. If you are curious about the demo and attend VMworld, be sure to sign up for HBI1967BE Workload Migration Techniques for On-Premises and Cloud Infrastructures which I will be co-presenting with Emad Younis. Secondly, Nested Virtualization whether it is the latest version of ESXi or our very first release, is not officially supported.

USB Native Driver Fling for ESXi adds support for Multi-Gig (1G/2.5G/5G) Adapter

09/27/2019 by William Lam 3 Comments

Today, we have an exciting update to give on our USB Network Native Driver for ESXi Fling which has had two updates since releasing earlier this year and has been extremely well received by the VMware community. As many of you know, I am always on the look out for new and innovative tech that can help enable our customers, especially when it comes to building home labs to learn about the latest and greatest VMware software.

Several months back, I came to learn about a really cool USB-based Multi-Gigabit Network Adapter (QNA-UC5G1T) from QNAP which can negotiate with speeds up to 1Gbps, 2.5Gbps and 5Gbps. I was not familiar with the multi-gig specification but it it looks like it was created as a standard back in 2016 as IEEE 802.3bz. This initially evolved from advancements in wireless technology but more recently it started to make its way into ethernet-based devices.

Although this particular device is from QNAP, the underlying chipset is actually from Aquantia, now part of Marvell. If the name sounds familiar, it should as Aquantia is also the vendor to Apple for their 10GbE NICs in both the 2018 Mac Mini and new iMac Pros. In fact, their chipsets are also used in a number of Thunderbolt 3 to 10GbE NICs which also works with ESXi. Access to 10GbE is certainly more common these days but it certainly is not for everyone and not all platforms can be expanded to support it.

The QNA-UC5G1T device is not only small but because it is USB-based, you are more likely to have spare USB ports on your system than say a traditional PCIe slot or Thunderbolt 3 port. From a cost standpoint, this device is about half the cost of the 10GbE Thunderbolt adapter coming in at $79 USD and can be ordered from Amazon. As far as I know, QNAP is the only vendor who has produced a multi-gig USB adapter, but perhaps in the future, there will be other vendors.

Project Pacific – Workload Evolution in vSphere

09/10/2019 by William Lam 6 Comments

Project Pacific was definitely one of the most exciting and most talked about announcement at this past VMworld. In case you missed the big news, check out this quick snippet of the Day 1 Keynote where Pat Gelsinger and Joe Beda (one of the co-creators of Kubernetes, now at VMware) introduces Project Pacific to the world.

If you ask most folks what Project Pacific is about, they would probably answer something with Kubernetes and Containers in vSphere, which is a fair assessment, especially as Kubernetes was probably mentioned once or twice during the conference 😉

However, Project Pacific is actually more than just Kubernetes but with all the new lingo like Supervisor and Guest Clusters, one can easily get lost in the implementation or what I would refer to as the "how" part of Project Pacific. If you ask me, the "why" part is much more significant and Project Pacific is fundamentally re-defining what and how to deploy a workload in vSphere.

VMworld Startup: Hivecell – Stackable Edge Computing

09/05/2019 by William Lam Leave a Comment

One thing I really enjoy at VMworld when I have a few minutes to spare between sessions and customer meetings is to walk around the Solutions Exchange and learn about what our partners are doing in the VMware eco-system. I usually do not make it in very far before bumping into an old colleague or customer before having to run to my next engagement, but some times I get lucky.

While walking the show floor, I came across a really interesting company that immediately caught eye and you can probably guess why from the picture I took below.

The company is called Hivecell and they make it super easy for Global 500 companies to deploy and maintain software at the Edge without requiring a large IT team to manage the deployments which can be spread across hundreds if not thousands of sites with very little to no IT staff.

One of the biggest challenges with Edge Computing is being able to process the large quantity of data being generated in all of these remote locations on a daily basis. In some cases, the dataset can grow up to several Terabytes and it is no longer feasible to send all of this data to the Cloud or back to your Datacenter to extract the business intelligence and value. In fact, depending on the connectivity of your remote site, it can take weeks before the data is available. For any type of real or near-real time applications, the window where the data is of value can literally be hours if not minutes and it must be processed immediately at the Edge.

Speaking of use cases, here are some of the scenarios where Hivecell believes they can really help with their solution, more details about each use case can be found here.

Petrochemicals
Renewable Energy
Quick Service Restaurant Chains
Manufacturing
Healthcare
Weather
Data Science
Hotels

Direct playback & download URLs for all VMworld 2019 US Sessions

08/30/2019 by William Lam 11 Comments

VMworld US 2019 just wrapped up yesterday and it looks like the VMworld team has already processed and published a number of recordings! Similar to past years, I have put together a nice summary page that contains all the session recordings links separated out by the different categories which you can find by visiting http://vmwa.re/vmworld2019.

As of writing this, there are a total of 554 sessions with 496 published with recordings. I will check back next week when more videos and/or PPT decks are posted. Huge thanks to the VMworld team for getting this content out so quickly, be sure to give them a huge thanks if you are on Twitter. For those in the US, enjoy your three day weekend, I know I need a break away from the computer!

UPDATE 1 (09/03/19) - Added both Showcase Key Note and VMware {Code} sessions as well as initial Top 20 session stats by views.

UPDATE 2(09/07/19) - PDF decks are now available and links are published

Here is wget example:

wget --referer http://www.vmware.com https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/vmworld-usa-2019/HBI1967BU.mp4

Here is cURL example:

curl --referer http://www.vmware.com https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/vmworld-usa-2019/HBI1967BU.mp4 -O HBI1967BU.mp4

Here is PowerCLI example:

$headers = @{"referer" = "http://www.vmware.com"}
Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/vmworld-usa-2019/HBI1967BU.mp4 -Headers $headers -Outfile HBI1967BU.mp4

In addition, I have also published us.txt file which contains the name of the session + download URL which can then be used by this quick PowerShell script called downloadSessions.ps1 to automatically download. You can edit the us.txt file to only include sessions you want downloaded (make sure its copied from the original file) since it contains "#" symbol as a delimiter for the title and the download URL.