VMworld

Podcasts I listen to

11/12/2019 by William Lam Leave a Comment

In many of my conversations with customers, partners and colleague at this past VMworld, various topics about VMware software and solutions came up as you would expect. However, there were also many other topics that were discussed such as career, education, kids, tv shows, movies and podcasts.

One question that kept coming up over and over was around which podcasts I listen to on a regular basis? Like most, I listen to podcasts to help past the time while commuting into work, especially with our lovely Bay Area traffic. I also try to use this time as an opopournity to expose myself to other things happening outside of our immediate industry whether that is Bio, Retail, Healthcare, Economics, etc. I always enjoy learning about new things, especially the stories and innovations on how certain companies or things came to be, which is always super fascinating is usually the result of being passionate and having perseverance. Below are the podcasts that I listen to on a regular basis, a few like Worklife, Serverless Chats, Command-Line Heroes and TED Talks are recent ones which I have added and have only listening to a handful of episodes but they seem interesting so far.

I am also curious if there are other podcasts folks from the community would recommend? If so, please leave a comment as I am always on the look out for new shows!

How I built this with Guy Raz

The Indicator

Planet Money

Worklife with Adam Grant

Serverless Chats

Command Line Heroes

TED Radio Hour

Direct playback & download URLs for all VMworld 2019 EU Sessions

11/07/2019 by William Lam 3 Comments

VMworld EU 2019 officially wrapped up 45min ago (as of writing this) and this was another amazing VMworld. I really enjoyed all the great conversations from customers, partners and fellow VMware colleagues. Although many of us are running around the entire week for sessions and meetings, we certainly appreciate it when folks stop us and just hi or even ask for a picture.

I also want to personally thank everyone who attended my sessions and hopefully you got something out of it. Please consider leaving feedback on the VMworld Survey on what you enjoyed and things that we can improve upon for future VMworlds. Now that I am officially done, I figure I would have a beer and do some quick scripting.

Simliar to VMworld US, 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.

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.

Direct playback & download URLs for all VMworld 2018 Europe Sessions

11/09/2018 by William Lam Leave a Comment

It has been less than 24 hours since VMworld Europe 2018 has concluded and the awesome VMworld team has already published most of the VMworld 2018 Europe session 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/vmworld2018.

As of writing this, there are a total of 389 sessions with369 published with recordings. I have also posted some initial viewing statistics on the top 20 VMworld Europe sessions, huge congrats to the Chris and Daniel's ESXi on ARM session, I think it is going to be hard to beat this session (which I still need to watch myself :)). I will check back in a week or so in case more videos and/or PPT decks are posted. Please enjoy, especially for those that were not able to attend VMworld this year.

Note: For those wanting to directly download the actual video files from github repo (browser or through automation), you will get an access denied. It turns out the client performing the download must include a referer within the request (which is automatically done for you when you click open the link in my github but not the case using wget/cURL or other tools. Below are a few examples on how to include the referer for automated downloads which has changed from VMworld US.

Here is wget example:

wget --referer https://videos.vmworld.com/global/2018/videoplayer/26950 https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/vmworld-europe-2018/CTO3509BE.mp4

Here is cURL example:

curl --referer https://videos.vmworld.com/global/2018/videoplayer/26950 https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/vmworld-europe-2018/CTO3509BE.mp4 -O CTO3509BE.mp4

Here is PowerCLI example:

$headers = @{"referer" = "https://videos.vmworld.com/global/2018/videoplayer/26950"}
Invoke-WebRequest -Uri https://s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/vmworld-europe-2018/CTO3509BE.mp4 -Headers $headers -Outfile CTO3509BE.mp4

In addition, I have also published eu.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.