Myself and Barry were lucky enough to be invited to the first vRetreat event of 2019 recently. The event was held at Stamford Bridge, the home of Chelsea Football stadium. For more information about what Barry and I thought about the day, the technology and the stadium, watch our video below.
Read MoreFor businesses that have truly embraced workspace transformation, a snow day should be business as usual for roles that don’t require a physical presence in a specific location.
Read MoreToday was our second and final day at IGEL DISRUPT. Today was focusing all around the industry, what challenges people are facing, what technology they are seeing enter the market and ultimately what technology they think will be leading and interesting in 2019.
Read MoreBarry and myself were lucky enough to be invited to attend IGEL’s annual EUC conference DISRUPT this year which is taking place in Munich, Germany. The conference is all focused around changing the way we work, ripping up the rule book and innovating in ways we have never done before when it comes to technology and in particular Workspace Transformation.
Read MoreI’ve blogged about this for previous versions of VMware Horizon and with version 7.6 now GA I thought I would put all of the information together and hopefully simplify the process by removing some peripheral information.
Read MoreI am currently studying for the VCAP-DTM deploy accreditation and as such am going through the exam blueprint, which is a kind of a gospel for these exams.
Read MoreBarry Coombs of ComputerWorld met Steve Blow of Zerto at VMworld 2018 in Barcelona to discuss the latest updates coming to Zerto 7.X, including how Zerto wil...
In this video I (Barry) catch-up with Steve Blow Technical Evangelist at Zerto to learn more about what is coming to Zerto 7.X.
In the forthcoming 7.X release Zerto are further building upon their IT Resilancy Platform to include backup alongside their ability to other replication and mobility on premises and to and from the cloud.
One of my main focuses from VMworld 2018 in Barcelona was IoT, specifically I was looking to better understand use cases that are going into production, architectures for the ‘things’, gateways, edge computing, data storage and analytics and how to manage, maintain and secure the IoT environment.
In this short video Barry Coombs of ComputerWorld talks about the lessons learnt regarding IoT at VMworld 2018 in Barcelona.
You can see some of my thoughts from the sessions I attended in the Doodle below.
Use Cases
IoT use cases are driven by a business or a personal need to analyse data for insight or to monitor something. There were fantastic examples given during VMworld specifically around how IoT was being used in healthcare to help give patients freedom whilst the healthcare workers are still able to ensure their safety and well being.
Uploaded by None on 2018-11-08.
Infrastructure
The infrastructure for IoT is different depending on the specific use cases, the infrastructure starts with the ‘things’ or the senors. The specific requirement will dictate which sensors and the quantity however usually the sensors will interact with some form of a gateway due to the sensors either being propriety wired or using wireless using WiFi or more commonly a low energy form of wireless connectivity such as bluetooth low energy (BLE) or ZigBee. The gateway is able to aggregate the sensors from the differing forms of connectivity and forward on to the data storage and analytics location.
Depending on the use case you may also require edge computing to provide an element of analytics and decision making at the edge. These edge computing infrastructures will differ depending on the task but VMware are currently working on delivering ESXi on ARM based platforms to allow smaller, affordable but highly available virtual environments for these use cases. >> https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/27/vmware_esxi_ar64/
Security
If you manage to figure out your use case, collect the data with the correct sensors and infrastructure and you are able to get the answers you require with the correct analytics your work still isn’t done. We all know that security in end user computing and IT in general is a major concern, however if you look at the nature of IoT being disparate, involving many connected components and also not being directly monitored (Used) by humans the attack vector for IoT is massive. This is where VMware Pulse comes into play, VMware Pulse aims to be your management plane for your IoT infrastructure, on each of yours sensors or gateways an SDK Python based agent is deployed allowing the Pulse infrastructure to monitor and maintain your ‘things’. Pulse is able to ensure the ‘Things’ are communicating, working within normal parameters and are up to date, think of Workspace UEM (AirWatch) but for IoT.
VMware Pulse IoT Center is a secure, enterprise grade, IoT device management and monitoring solution that helps both Information Technology (IT) and Operational Technology (OT) organizations to onboard, manage, monitor and secure their IoT use cases from the edge to the cloud.
This is the very beginning of the IoT journey for myself, I would like to further understand the gateway and sensor technology as well as the management of the IoT infrastructure with Pulse. Watch this space as I learn more.
Today was my third and final day tat VMworld! I cannot believe how quick this week has gone and how much I have had! Take a look at my VLOG summarising my day!
Read MoreI was lucky enough to be interviewed by Martijn Smit for VMworld TV live at VMworld 2018. Martijn asked me about my career, blogging, the VMware Community and much much more.
Read MoreSo yesterday was the second day of VMworld 2018 and once again was packed with extremely good session, announcements and content. Watch my video to find out what I got up to and learnt on day 2 of VMworld!
Read MoreIn this video demonstration I will how you how to create new networks within the NSX environment and make them routable on an external network, all without making any changes to physical switches.
Read MoreToday was the first day of VMworld 2018 and what a start to the week it was!
Read MoreToday, myself, the rest of the ComputerWorld team and our customers who are out at VMworld 2018 were lucky enough to get a chance to hear about VMware’s EUC vision and strategy from the main EUC man himself, Shawn Bass, CTO of EUC at VMware.
Read MoreThis year I am extremely lucky enough to be out in Barcelona for VMworld 2018! Whilst there is so much going on, with announcements, hands on labs, product demos and of course meeting everyone within the community, I wanted to give myself a clear focus for the week and learn more about Workspace Transformation.
Read MoreService Composer is a component within NSX that allows the automation of security policy. In this video demonstration I will show you how to use Service Composer to configure a security policy that can isolate a virtual machine if a virus is found.
Read MoreNSX Manager can be integrated with Active Directory to allow Distributed Firewall (DFW) rules to be applied based on the used identity. In this video I will demonstrate how AD based security groups can be used with the DFW to allow access for the SSH protocol.
Read MoreRecently, I was fortunate enough to attend this year’s Barracuda Tech summit in the breathtaking scenery of the small remote town of Alpbach in Austria. Which sits at over 3000ft above sea level in the Austrian mountains
The objective of the summit was for Barracuda to deliver to their top 400 partners and customers a technical update on all their products line and business update on how Barracuda is doing and what they are planning for the future.
Read MoreUnified Access Gateway (formally Access Point) is used to secure external access for a Horizon View. There are numerous advantages over using Security Servers, which are still supported, noticeably the lower resources required to run and the removal of the necessity to pair with a dedicated security server. Not to mention the lack of Windows! In a multi-site environment with redundancy that is a significant reduction in deployed resource.
Read MoreI’ve recently been involved in several conversations with customers and within ComputerWorld regarding office space and the future of the office.
Whilst this isn’t an area I profess to be a specialist in, it does tie in with something that’s close to my heart. That is “workspace transformation”. Or to use a less fancy phrase, the way we work and get stuff done.
Read MoreJoin us as we explore the innovative world of Copilot, diving into its various versions, standout features, and the benefits they bring. Consider this episode your guide to integrating Copilot seamlessly into your organisation, equipped with essential tips on data governance and organisation-wide templates.
In this tech-packed conversation, we demystify the intricacies of modern management and unveil the power duo – Microsoft Intune and Windows Autopilot.
The home to all the latest news, innovations, insights and resources from ComputerWorld's crack team of experts and engineers...
In this episode, we're unravelling the mysteries of the latest Microsoft 365: Loop. Join us as we equip you with all the essential details to transform from a Loop novice to a Loop legend.
Join us as we explore the innovative world of Copilot, diving into its various versions, standout features, and the benefits they bring. Consider this episode your guide to integrating Copilot seamlessly into your organisation, equipped with essential tips on data governance and organisation-wide templates.
In this episode, we're unravelling the mysteries of the latest Microsoft 365: Loop. Join us as we equip you with all the essential details to transform from a Loop novice to a Loop legend.