Azure

Interrogating Public Police Data with open-source technology and serverless methods

  • simon 

Interrogating Public Police Data with open-source technology and serverless methods ##* Update, the dashboards are currently Online (July 6th).  This was built as an educational tools and to demonstrate the art of the possible.  If you are interested in funding or rebuilding within your own cloud subscription please contact me via @virtual_simon *## I’ll preface with a few of the resources I’ve used so far in my Azure study journey 70-532 Developing Microsoft Azure Solutions… Read More »Interrogating Public Police Data with open-source technology and serverless methods

Tanzu Mission Control – Adding a vSphere 7 Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster

  • simon 

Tanzu Mission Control – Adding a vSphere 7 Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster One of the great parts of my job is that I get to collaborate and learn from some seriously clever folk in my team and across the company.  Over the past few weeks I’ve been working in the same lab as Dean Lewis.  We’ve been exploring Cloud Foundation 4, Tanzu, Bitnami, Openshift and how those components integrate with the existing VMware SDDC portfolio. Tanzu… Read More »Tanzu Mission Control – Adding a vSphere 7 Tanzu Kubernetes Cluster

Import Azure Rate Card to vROPs

Import Azure Rate Card to vROPs I’ve been working with a customer over the last day or so to import their Azure cost information (or Azure rate card) into vROPs so that they can run a what-if analysis to plan a migration to the public cloud. Within vROPs we have the option to upload our public cloud rate cards into the service, so the the data that is provided from the service reflects the actual… Read More »Import Azure Rate Card to vROPs

How to get the available Azure VM sizes with – Get-AzureRmVMSize

  • simon 

How to get the available Azure VM sizes with – Get-AzureRmVmSize I was recently working with a customer who was struggling to get a list of available Azure VM sizes for the locations he wanted to deploy Az IaaS VMs.  Whilst I work mainly with VMware technologies a customer is a customer, so I was more than happy to help. PowerShell As luck would have it there is a PowerShell module to provide just the… Read More »How to get the available Azure VM sizes with – Get-AzureRmVMSize

The impact of gravity on the Cloud

The impact of gravity on the cloud, what am I talking about now… Gravity is defined as “the force that attracts a body towards the centre of the earth”, that can be extrapolated onwards to state “or towards any other physical body having mass”.  It’s a force that has shape everything in our universe.  Which is interesting. A topic that people take a life time investigating and exploring, but why am I writing about gravity… Read More »The impact of gravity on the Cloud

Cloud Migration Steps to Success

  • simon 

Cloud Migration Steps to Success The future for many services will be cloud hosting.  Services that are now hosted on on-premises infrastructure, will be able to be rebuilt and consume cloud architectures in new and innovative ways outside of the traditional data center.  Imagine you’re tasked with overseeing that development of business services, how do you get there? what are the Cloud Migration Steps to Success? Cloud Strategy Not all organisations have the same requirements… Read More »Cloud Migration Steps to Success

VMworld Europe 2018

  • simon 

I’m writing this from a lovely apartment in the medieval part of Barcelona, for I’m here to attend VMworld. This will be my third VM world event, having attended at the Moscone back in 2007 and Cannes in 2009.  It will be interesting to see what had changed with the event over the last decade.  God I feel old writing that, was it really 10 years ago I first attended one of these. This trip… Read More »VMworld Europe 2018

VMware EMPOWER – General Session Day One

Having worn both my fingers and my laptop battery down trying to keep up with the previous sessions in the day, I didn’t live blog the general session. In brief, lots of numbers about how well the various product streams within VMware are performing. However, in my opinion the session really started to ‘sparkle’ when Joe Baguley took to the stage. Joe’s presentation to the conference focused on the sheer volume of change that VMware… Read More »VMware EMPOWER – General Session Day One

Software Defined – How did we get here?

  • simon 

It’s widely acknowledged that to understand the present, and to try and predict the future you must know and understand the past.

The current data centre landscape is a complex place.  Virtualisation of compute resources with VMware has been the de facto standard for over a decade. The move to software defined infrastructure has been gathering momentum and VMware’s vision for the software defined data centre (SDDC) looks set to augment vSphere offerings and continue to dominate the private data centre landscape.

So how did we get here?  How did we go from that initial wow factor that came from first experiencing VMotion to the VMware SDDC?  I think it all comes down to one building block.Read More »Software Defined – How did we get here?

5 reasons why to consider Azure for your public cloud

  • simon 

As part of my day job I was asked to write a short article explaining why I think organisations should consider Azure for there public cloud services.

At a very high level the five reasons, that I believe are part of a compelling growing argument are;

  • Identity Management.
  • Microsoft Trust Centre and Security.
  • Azure App Service.
  • Azure Service Bus.
  • Azure Stack.

As you can imagine reducing the list of Azure services to just five bite size discussion topics was very tough.  It is probably no surprise to those of you that follow this blog, that I prepared information about more than the five!

So after the brake and in no particular order, here are the Azure reasons and services than didn’t quite make the final article, which appears on Xtravirt’s website.

Read More »5 reasons why to consider Azure for your public cloud