Let’s face it: keeping up with data center demands can feel like a constant uphill battle. IT teams are under pressure to deliver top-notch performance, iron-clad security, and smooth operations – often on a downsized budget. Sound familiar?

A comprehensive data center optimization strategy is the key to ensuring your IT infrastructure stays agile, adaptable, and secure. This strategy focuses on critical areas like operational efficiency, workload performance, security, and integration with DevOps practices.

We will dive into the key elements of successful infrastructure optimization and transformation. By implementing these, you can achieve a smoother workflow, enhanced performance, and improved security for your data center.

Why Do You Need A Strategy?

Data centers are critical in powering our digital landscape. They house the essential IT equipment that runs everything from complex enterprise applications to common social media platforms (have you yet?). However, data centers, like any engine, can become inefficient over time. This inefficiency can manifest as excessive resource consumption and struggling to keep pace with evolving demands.

A data center optimization strategy is your proactive approach to achieving peak performance. There are several compelling reasons to prioritize data center optimization:

• Reduce Costs: An optimization strategy can identify areas for improvement, such as consolidating underutilized servers or implementing more energy-efficient cooling systems. These steps can lead to substantial cost reductions over time.
• Enhance Efficiency: Streamline operations and resource allocation by eliminating redundancies and optimizing server utilization. As a result, your IT infrastructure functions at peak efficiency, delivering more processing power while relying on fewer resources.
• Boost Performance And Scalability: A well-optimized data center can handle increasing workloads more effectively. Optimization techniques like server virtualization allow you to dynamically allocate resources to meet fluctuating demands, ensuring smooth application performance and paving the way for future scalability.
• Improve Sustainability: The of data centers is a growing concern, especially as IT sustainability efforts are proving to save bottom-line dollars. Implementing a data center optimization strategy that prioritizes energy efficiency can demonstrably reduce your environmental footprint. This proactive approach also enhances your company’s brand reputation for sustainability – something consumers are beginning to keep at the top of minds.
• Minimize Downtime: Unplanned data center outages significantly threaten business operations. Organizations can identify and mitigate potential issues before they arise, ensuring the continued availability of critical applications for users.
• Support Innovation: Streamline operations and achieve efficient resource allocation. This frees up your IT team’s valuable time, allowing them to focus on strategic initiatives and develop new technologies.

From Optimization To Transformation

Optimizing data center performance is a critical objective for businesses of all sizes. VMware, a recognized leader in virtualization solutions, offers a powerful new tool designed to address this very need called VMware . This comprehensive enterprise workload platform empowers IT teams to achieve a fundamental transformation in their data centers.

VVF goes beyond basic management, streamlining operations, enhancing workload performance, and fostering innovation – all to position IT as a true business enabler. This solution addresses four key pillars of data center optimization:

1. Boost Operational Efficiency

VVF delivers predictive and proactive operations management:

• Intelligent automation and streamlined workflow by deploying pre-configured management packs for agentless monitoring.
• Identifies and resolves potential issues using machine learning to understand application boundaries, and collect performance data from all endpoints.
• Facilitates proactive maintenance through AI-driven proactive troubleshooting and streamlined remediation.

VVF empowers IT teams by providing comprehensive visibility and faster return-to-operations across their entire environment, from applications to storage. This simplifies management and maximizes resource utilization.

2. Supercharge Workload Performance

Have you noticed if lagging applications are slowing down overall business operations? If you haven’t, ask your end users. Application performance directly affects both user experience and overall productivity.

vSphere Foundation tackles this problem head-on with intelligent resource allocation and dynamic workload balancing. This powerful combination, achieved through DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduler), ensures your applications consistently run at peak performance. DRS automatically distributes workloads across available resources, eliminating bottlenecks and preventing performance slowdowns before they happen.

VVF also boasts significant improvements for larger, more demanding workloads:

• Enhanced GPU Support: You can now add up to 32 GPUs in pass-through mode, a 4x improvement over the previous limit of 8. This allows you to tackle more complex AI models by providing significantly more processing power.
• Scalable Virtual GPUs: For those who don’t require the raw power of dedicated GPUs, vSphere Foundation now supports up to 16 virtual GPUs per virtual machine. This offers a more scalable and cost-effective way to leverage GPU resources for a broader range of workloads.

VVF keeps your hybrid cloud running smoothly and cost-efficiently. Powered by operational and business insights, real-time predictive analytics, and AI, the platform automatically balances workloads and proactively avoids resource contention. This ensures seamless workload placement and balancing across VMware Cloud Foundation, vSAN, or VMware Cloud on AWS.

Additionally, vMotion allows for seamless live migration of virtual machines between physical hosts. This means you can perform maintenance or upgrades on your physical machines without disrupting service delivery.

3. Accelerate Innovation for DevOps

vSphere Foundation seamlessly integrates with leading DevOps services and solutions, enabling developers to provision virtual machines in minutes, deploy code efficiently, and easily roll back changes if necessary. This streamlined process empowers DevOps teams to focus on innovation and accelerate development cycles, ultimately leading to faster time-to-market for new features and services.

4. Elevate Security

vSphere Foundation prioritizes data security by laying a strong foundation for a comprehensive security posture. It achieves this through a combination of built-in features:

• Role-based access control (RBAC) and multi-factor authentication (MFA): These features ensure that only authorized users can access specific resources. RBAC grants access based on a user’s role, while MFA adds an extra layer of security by requiring a second verification factor beyond just a password.
• Modern identity federation and secure multi-factor authentication: vSphere Foundation allows you to leverage existing identity management systems, simplifying user access and strengthening authentication with multi-factor requirements.
• Governance and compliance with industry standards: vSphere Foundation helps organizations meet strict security regulations by providing tools and features that align with industry compliance standards, including meeting sustainability and ESG commitments.
• Data-at-rest encryption for workloads: This crucial feature encrypts data stored on virtual machines, protecting sensitive information even if unauthorized access occurs.

Additionally, vSphere Foundation integrates seamlessly with leading security solutions, enabling organizations to leverage a multi-layered defense strategy to protect their data and applications from evolving cyber threats.

Final Thoughts

Optimizing your data center goes beyond just hardware upgrades. It’s about creating a strategic framework that drives efficiency, performance, security, and innovation. By focusing on the four pillars of vSphere Foundation, organizations can build agile, adaptable, and secure data centers empowering them to achieve their digital transformation goals.

WEI, with its VCDX-certified professionals, can assist in your IT transformation journey, validate your business objectives, and ensure alignment with your technical strategy. Contact us to get started.

Next Steps: discover the vSphere with Tanzu services that WEI offers as well as an understanding of our deep certification portfolio. When you work with WEI, you get more than an innovative solution. You get a team of dedicated strategic partners and advisors who stay connected to ensure your long-term satisfaction and success.

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Has your on-prem virtual host environment become saturated? Many organizations don’t want to admit to this, so here’s a good truth indicator to help answer the question: If your IT team is forced to perform basic maintenance on your virtual host infrastructure during evening, night, or weekend hours because there is no capacity to bring down infrastructure components during normal business operations, your answer is probably yes.

Virtual Cluster Saturation

Virtual host saturation inevitably happens over time. A primary culprit is mission creep, which is where the goals, objectives, or scope of a project gradually expand over time. In professional sports, we see the reality of salary creep for athletes. In 2000, the average NFL quarterback made $1.9 million. Twenty years later, the average salary stood at $10.5 million for a 450% increase! But this salary rise is made possible through expansive league growth, rising team values, control over media markets, and the importance of finding a franchise quarterback to lead a team for the next several seasons.

This brings us back to the virtual cluster, and the mission creep is virtual machine (VM). Either the number of VMs increases over time or VMs are overprovisioned. There will come a day when an IT leader realizes that the virtual cluster that performed so well in 2016 will no longer suffice. That’s not because the original cluster design failed to meet the initial requirements seven years ago. Rather, as time rolls on, business needs have changed, and workloads have expanded. The SQL report that took one hour to create in 2016 now takes twice as long in 2023.

Do You Take Your On-prem Virtual Cluster For Granted?

It’s easy to take your virtual cluster for granted. It quietly does its job in the background. Outside of the system admins that support it, the virtual cluster ends up being largely forgotten. The cloud isn’t like that. Cloud customers are reminded every month of their growing workloads when they see the bill come in. A slight uptick is instantly felt in the pocketbook while your on-prem VM cluster was paid for years ago.

However, while the growing saturation in your datacenter may not be fiscally expensive, it is costly in lost performance and missed opportunities. What’s more, your business leadership may be oblivious to the saturated state due to the workarounds that your experienced system admins miraculously perform regularly. One day, there will be a reckoning in which a disruptive event occurs for which there is no available work around.

Is Your Virtual Cluster Designed for Perfection?

If your virtual cluster was professionally designed and implemented, it had slack built into it at one point. It contained vacant capacity that allowed system admins to perform firmware updates on a host server during business hours. Most hardware failures also did not disrupt business workflows because the cluster design was resilient thanks to excess capacity.

Unfortunately, now that your cluster hosts twice as many VMs than it did originally, your cluster is unintentionally built for perfection in the same way that an airliner overbooks its flights. In the case of the airline, the overprovisioning of customers on every plane often plays out fine in the end as there are usually a small number of passengers who never make their flight due to one reason or another. But then, occasionally, everyone does show up and that is when things get strained. Some customers must be enticed to give up their seat, which either costs money or causes customer dissatisfaction. Similarly, you might get away with the practice of overprovisioned resources on your virtual cluster, but eventually you get burned.

Other Reasons for Virtual Cluster Saturation.

VM creep isn’t the only cause of virtual cluster saturation. Other reasons include:

• Poor capacity planning due to unrealistic assumptions concerning workload growth.
• Misconfigurations of component settings.
• Persistent hardware failures due to aged equipment.
• Insufficient resource allocation to service expanding workloads.

The Importance of an Optimization Assessment

A monthly bill isn’t required to alert you of the oversaturation of a VM environment. You need an optimization assessment performed by a team of virtualization experts. WEI has a team of experts that can properly analyze your virtual environment to assess its ability to meet the workloads of your business. We can identify any discovered shortcomings and advise how to address them. Understand that assessment recommendations don’t have to include new purchases. Often, a cluster simply needs a retuning as its original configurations cannot accommodate the modified workloads it must handle now.

In the same way that your vehicle requires scheduled maintenance, you should have an optimization assessment performed on a quarterly basis. This is even more critical today due to the highly dynamic nature of business today. Your business depends on your virtual cluster, so give it the respect and attention it deserves. Contact WEI today about an optimization assessment today. It is as easy as sending us an email and including optimization assessment in the subject to ensure prioritization.

Next Steps: WEI’s Mark Gabryjelski, who has been practicing VMware since 2000, and ESX since 2002, explains in the video below why it is wise to regularly perform an optimization assessment on an enterprise’s cluster infrastructure.

The post Here’s Why A quarterly Assessment Of Your Virtual Cluster Is Recommended appeared first on IT 疯情AV Provider - IT Consulting - Technology 疯情AV.

Due to no staffing, our pharmacy will be closed on Thursday, December 21, 2022.

For months, signs reading like this have been a frequent occurrence at retail pharmacies across the country. Amid a national shortage of pharmacists and technicians, pharmacy closures and reduced hours have become the new norm. As a result, pharmacies have extended wait times to fill prescriptions, had less availability for vaccines and patient consults, and have seen growing customer dissatisfaction.

The sad reality is that the shortage is likely to worsen. But technology can help retail pharmacies weather the talent shortage.

According to the , the U.S. will see at least a 2 percent decline in pharmacists over the next ten years. Fewer workers and the upsurge in online retailers and tech-enabled startups entering the healthcare delivery space will make competition for qualified talent fierce.

Can Technology Help Retail Pharmacies Weather the Talent Shortage?

The short answer is yes. While there is no one perfect solution to overcome a worker shortage, implementing new technologies can alleviate many issues created by a lack of employees. For example, the manufacturing industry has struggled to fill jobs for more than a decade due to the “great retirement” of baby boomers exiting the industry and a lack of interest among younger workers to enter the sector. In response, manufacturers have invested heavily in Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to reduce human involvement in repetitive and physically demanding tasks. The impact has been greater efficiencies, fewer injuries, and less quality issues on production lines.

While the pandemic ushered in many technology changes for retail pharmacies, more opportunities remain available.

According to a survey by Surescripts, nearly half of pharmacists (48%) reported an increase in technology use in the 18 months following the pandemic. The survey concluded, however, that “there still appears to be plenty of room for technology to improve everyday workflows and frustrating processes.”

Five Areas Technology Can Make the Biggest Impact on Retail Pharmacies

Technology leaders feel a growing pressure to find technology solutions to combat their retail pharmacy’s staffing issues. Digital transformation initiatives may be considered across the company, but which ones can significantly impact labor-related issues? WEI has implemented solutions to tackle five of retail pharmacies’ most pressing needs, resulting in reduced capitalized costs, shortened time to market, minimized operational expenses, and an improved customer experience.

1. Reduce Prescription Fulfillment Delays
   

Prescription verification is a critical last step in the filling process that requires a pharmacist’s sign-off. When faced with a shortage of pharmacists, stores may be forced to delay filling patient prescriptions for hours or even days, worsening patient dissatisfaction.

Fortunately, new virtual verification technologies can alleviate this issue. A pharmacist working miles away can be sent a high-resolution image of the medication to verify the prescription remotely. The highly secure technology solution complies with state laws and is a game changer for retail stores, helping prevent delays and gain efficiencies with existing staff.

2. Eliminate Medication Dispensing Errors
   

A technician (or a pharmacist if technicians are in short supply) spends considerable time manually processing hundreds of prescriptions daily. Unfortunately, as with many manual processes, human errors occur, a study in Patient Safety News reported that 68% of medication errors occur during administration.

With the introduction of digital drug dispensing systems (DDS), pharmacies have experienced zero errors and accelerated prescription processing. Per a study published in Innovations in Pharmacy, manual processing generated an average of 2.73 errors per month, while the DDS yielded zero errors. In addition, the digital system filled more prescriptions per month than staff members did by hand.

Such systems, which involve medication management software and medication dispensing machines, provide a dependable approach to medication management across locations. And these systems free up pharmacists to spend more time on profitable offerings, such as point-of-care testing, medication adherence services, and personal consultations.

3. Improve Medication Inventory Visibility
   

Another area ripe for improvement is medication inventory management. The timely availability of medications for patients directly impacts patient safety, satisfaction, and outcomes. Unfortunately, many stores rely on manual, error-prone methods, such as “eyeballing the bottle,” to capture inventory levels, methods that can cost companies millions of dollars annually.

For pharmacies to successfully manage real-time prescription medication inventory and monitor prescription expirations, planning teams need the right tools and technology. Automated systems, including wireless digital scales that communicate with a company’s inventory management system, are being utilized to support chain-wide inventory counts, forecasting, and replenishment.

4. Eliminate Manual Monitoring Activities
   

Pharmacists and pharmacy technicians have enough day-to-day tasks to attend to without the added responsibility of checking refrigeration temperatures. But to ensure a pharmacy remains CDC, VFC, and FDA compliant, these checks are required.

The introduction of cloud-based wireless temperature sensors enables remote temperature monitoring of vaccine and medication storage units and automated validation and data backups for compliance managers. Such systems are easily scalable to ensure compliance across multiple locations.

5. Streamlines Processes and Clerical Tasks
   

As noted above, pharmacists are spending more time handling paperwork and other clerical tasks. The widespread use of mobile technologies has created new opportunities for pharmacies to digitize many paper-based processes. This assistance is vital for teams that may be shorthanded or are busy retraining green personnel.

Retail Pharmacies Turn to Technology Partners to Support Digital Initiatives

Developing and implementing the right solutions is a massive undertaking for most in-house retail technology teams. By partnering with WEI, nationwide pharmacy retailers have a knowledgeable technology advisor who proves solutions work and delivers efficiently and accurately to go to market quicker. Our tailored solutions can:

• Reduce capitalized costs: We standardize across locations by combining best-of-breed technology and award-winning expertise.
• Shorten time to market: By providing effective material planning and inventory stocking strategies we enable fast rollouts. Our integrated logistics drive efficiency and accuracy.
• Minimize operational expenses: Our solutions reduce in-store installation efforts and generate savings via custom integration, fulfillment, and delivery programs.
• Improve customer experience: With innovative, scalable, agile response to evolving in-store technology.

Next Steps: Would any of the above-mentioned technologies help your nationwide pharmacy retailer locations? Let’s talk. We have developed technology solutions that can be quickly implemented to solve these pressing challenges. Complete the form below to request a call from a member of our technology team.

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The landscape of today’s modern offices look nothing like they used to. Gone are the days of employees working from a single location on a single computer, accessing a single operating system – now they frequently switch between devices, is king, and applications are just as likely to be Windows-based as not.

Providing this anytime, anywhere, any device access can cause serious security and management challenges for IT teams. That’s where VDI as part of a comprehensive digital workspace strategy comes in.

What does a digital workspace look like?

Today’s employees regularly log in and out of legacy, desktop, mobile, SaaS, and web applications from a variety of devices, and expect to be able to do it without complications.

A modern model is needed that defines the following:

• How users leverage applications, information, and resources across devices
• How IT organizations deliver, manage, and secure these applications and services
• How businesses can capitalize on these new capabilities and styles of work to drive better business results

Just as the desktop computer was the dominant, defining model of end-user computing during the client-server era, so too will the digital workspace define the model for moving forward from today.

A digital workspace has the following requirements:

• End users want access to the applications they need, when they need them, and on the devices they choose to use.
• Lines of business are interested in delivering apps on whatever devices employees use in order to enhance productivity and improve customer engagement and collaboration.
• IT teams need to centralize policy management, maintain control, and service the organization across device types.

How does a digital workspace change IT priorities?

The digital workspace shifts the focus of IT away from managing things like phones, laptops and tablets, and towards delivering application and content experiences to employees. This outcomes-based approach to IT services decouples data and applications from the device and supporting platforms, so that any application can be accessed from any device. Untethering applications from devices delivers the ultimate experience in portability and gives users flexibility in how they access the applications and services they need.

By focusing on outcomes, the digital workspace also promotes efficient IT operations in three ways.

1. Simplifying access management

Today’s leading IT organizations are user-centric. IT must equip end users with quick and easy access to business-critical published apps, SaaS apps, and mobile apps, and create a flexible and efficient workflow by allowing simple access with barrier-free authentication across devices. This user-centric approach empowers users to choose the ways they work best, and facilitates delivery of a highly specific set of end-user services.

2. Delivering true application portability

Today’s users expect to access Windows applications alongside non-Windows-based applications, and demand the freedom to work anywhere, and on the devices and apps they choose.

To get the maximum benefit of a digital workspace, applications should be built for all popular operating systems, or otherwise abstracted from the endpoint to make them truly portable. For most organizations, this means many of the applications in their inventory.

3. Enabling unified endpoint management (UEM)

Migrating from device-based asset management to the digital workspace presents the perfect opportunity to rethink end-user-computing processes. Manual provisioning processes can be transferred to virtualized desktops and apps, with tremendous improvements in efficiency and compliance. With UEM, IT teams can also deploy and manage desktops, laptops, and devices, including OS deployment, configuration, user preferences, and software, from a central location.

The role of VDI in the digital workspace

Virtualization is a key component to providing a fast, flexible, user-friendly digital workspace environment while properly managing risk. When desktops or apps are virtualized, they run in secure data centers on-premises or in the cloud. In both scenarios, only the rendering of the user interface is transmitted beyond the firewall.

There are two primary methods for abstracting apps from their endpoints:

• Virtualizing the app itself with Microsoft Server Remote Desktop Session Host (RDSH)
• Virtualizing an entire desktop environment with VDI

To rise to the challenge of today’s sophisticated workforce, IT teams are now embracing desktop, application, and network virtualization as part of an integrated approach to security. Virtualizing network functions – such as switching, routing, firewall rules, load balancing, and VPN – provides security for east-west traffic inside the data center and enables IT to quickly respond to data breaches, minimizing their risk and impact.

(HCI) solutions offer a modular approach to building a VDI environment, which simplifies the planning, design, and rollout of virtual desktops and applications. These solutions should include compute, storage, network, hypervisor, and management resources all in a single appliance which is tuned and pre-tested for specific workloads.

VMware delivers on the promise of a digital workspace

is a digital workspace platform that simply and securely delivers and manages any app on any device by integrating access control, application management, and multi-platform endpoint management. It is available either as a cloud service or for on-premises deployment.

Workspace ONE automates traditional onboarding and laptop and mobile device configuration, and provides real-time application lifecycle management that bridges the gap between legacy enterprise client-server apps and the mobile cloud era.

With Workspace ONE, organizations can:

• Benefit from seamless integration across all end-user applications and services
• Provision a new corporate laptop out of the box, anywhere in the world, from the cloud within minutes
• Set and enforce access and data policies across all apps, devices, and locations in one place

Talk with WEI about building your digital workspace with VMware

In the age of mobile and cloud, the need to access any app from any device at any time is shaping how businesses drive digital transformation. VMware supports employee engagement by delivering a digital workspace solution that is both simple to use and secure. Contact WEI today to talk about beginning your transformation today.

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Over the past decade, drastic changes have taken place within the data center. Technological advances and innovative new products have revolutionized the way data centers operate. Virtualization is now a vital part of the modern software-defined data center (SDDC). While virtualization is enormously beneficial, it comes with a new set of challenges. Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) resolves many of the efficiency, security, and scalability issues facing today’s data centers.

What is HCI?

HCI is a next-generation architecture designed to meet the needs of the modern SDDC. Created to support cloud and software-first methods, HCI unites every aspect of the data center. Servers, hypervisors, storage, and data management are controlled from a central platform. HCI provides high scalability and agility while simplifying data center management. With HCI, enterprises can take a cloud-first approach without sacrificing availability and performance.

Data center convergence is not a new idea. There are many comprehensive solutions that link storage, networking, and computing devices. However, many of these solutions only serve to simplify infrastructure development and upgrades. Modern SDDCs require a solution that also addresses day-to-day management and operational needs.

Virtualization has become a key data center element. HCI simplifies the management of virtual machines and workloads, and solves many virtualization challenges. With HCI, IT can manage the entire data center from a single interface. HCI permits the clustering of systems, even across separate sites, creating shared resource pools. In turn, this helps maximize availability, agility, performance, and scalability.

Challenges and Industry Trends

Virtualization has redefined the data center, but it has its own challenges. New products and solutions are available each week. Enterprises often rush to employ every new device to ensure that their data centers are state-of-the-art. Many of these solutions are highly beneficial and meet specific needs. For example, deduplication appliances can significantly cut down on the storage space required for backups. The downside is that these devices are not all designed to work together. Each product must be managed separately, and each part of the IT department requires a dedicated specialist. This disconnect has made data center management complicated and inefficient.

IT departments often employ several solutions to maximize data efficiency and storage capacity. However, many of these products utilize the same methods, resulting in CPU intensive redundancies. For example, data sent to storage is deduplicated to maximize storage space. To create a backup, the data must be hydrated or returned to its original state. It is then deduplicated again when the system sends the backup to storage. This repeated deduplication and hydration results in extensive CPU and bandwidth costs. The intended benefits of the solutions are neutralized by the increased demands on the infrastructure.

Virtualization has revolutionized the way enterprises use and manage their servers. Unfortunately, few companies are using virtualization as intended. True virtualization should unite all resources into a single pool that users can access as needed. When IT departments use separate incompatible hardware and software components, the benefits of virtualization are reduced. Each component must be managed through its own interface. The result is separate groups of specialists managing different aspects of the data center. This creates a complex management system that limits the data center’s potential.

Benefits of HCI

HCI seeks to simplify data center management and optimize resources. With HCI, enterprises can eliminate the need for separate management systems and staff. HCI works by linking each aspect of the data center to create a single physical system with one comprehensive management interface. Data center management is drastically simplified, resulting in increased performance. HCI helps enterprises maximize:

• Data efficiency
• Scalability
• Data protection
• Application and workload mobility
• Data availability

Resource and management optimization also lowers operating costs and reduces IT expenses, making HCI a cost-effective solution. With HCI, companies can get more out of their data center investments.

HCI allows enterprises to realize the true potential of their modernized data centers. Tech innovations and changing business needs have transformed the data center and brought on new challenges. Incompatible devices and solutions are managed separately and often create intense system demands. IT becomes a multi-department division, with each group managing a different aspect of the system. This separation cancels out the unity that virtualization should bring. With HCI, every part of the data center is connected to and managed by a single interface. HCI turns the modern data center into the comprehensive, streamlined environment it is designed to be.

NEXT STEPS: Explore the major differences between converged and hyperconverged infrastructure in our white paper: Future Ready Data center: Converged vs Hyperconverged infrastructure.

The post The Basics of Hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) appeared first on IT 疯情AV Provider - IT Consulting - Technology 疯情AV.

VMware is a leading software and services company focused on cloud computing and virtualization. It also develops and accredits some of the most prestigious certifications in the industry. These certifications are referred to as . VCDX stands for VMware Certified Design Expert. This is for those that have earned a top tier certification from a VMware panel. For example, Cisco CCIE has always been recognized as a highly coveted certification in the networking discipline and VCDX is the equivalent in the virtualization space. Some people even think of this like getting a Ph.D. in virtualization. There are only 269 VCDXs across the globe. There are not very many VCDXs in the New England region and Mark Gabryjelski, WEI’s Virtualization Architect Ambassador, is the only VCDX in New Hampshire. He is VCDX #23.

There are four different VCDX certification areas. Each area focuses on a different VMware offering. The four areas are:

1. Data Center Virtualization (DCV): VMware vSphere focus. This is the core of server storage, network connectivity, and the VMware software stack (ESX and vCenter). It also focuses on some of the ancillary products on that set.
2. Cloud Management and Automation (CMA): VMware vCloud Suite focus. This one is centered around vRealize operations, vRealize automation, and some of the next gen stuff that people are taking their data centers to today.
3. Desktop and Mobility (DM): VMware Horizon Suite focus. This is specifically around user computing, how to do VDI, how to manage users, and how to include mobility and device control into that solution. It’s really around the end user computing space.
4. Network Virtualization (NX): VMware NSX focus. This is primarily for folks with a networking background that can come in and do virtualized networks.

It’s not very common for someone to go through and do more than one. There are a few individuals worldwide that hold three out of four certifications. There is even one individual that has all of them, but that requires a huge skill set and a huge undertaking to do so.

How Do You Earn One?

The only people who will give out VCDX certifications are people who have VCDX certifications themselves. Essentially, you are being judged by those who have attained that certification, very similar to the way Cisco programs handle CCIEs. It is an elite group to be able to join, making it seem only right that current VCDX certified individuals have a say in who else shares the same light.

As an example, we will look at how to go about getting one of the certifications. VMware outlines the six steps required to become a VMware Certified Design Expert 6 – Data Center Virtualization (VCDX6-DCV) with no prior VCDX certifications:

1. Earn the VCP6-DCV or VCP6.5-DCV
2. Earn the VCIX6-DCV or VCIX6.5-DCV badge
3. Review and understand the blueprint
4. Select and build a design, based on the guidance in the handbook
5. Submit and pass the application and design review
6. Successfully defend the design against three panelists

If you hold prior certifications, you just have to pass the exam to maintain an updated certification at the next level. For instance, this past example was for the VCDX6-DCV certification. That is the level 6 certification that aligns with the latest update. If you have no prior VCDX certifications, you have to go through all six steps mentioned above. If you have the VCDX5-DCV certification, all you have to do to maintain the VCDX certification and be level 6 certified is take the VCDX6-DCV certification exam.

Watch the following video, “” to hear about Mark’s journey to becoming VCDX #23, how it has benefited him, and to hear some tips he has for others hoping to earn a VCDX certification.

VCDX Certification Tips

1. Write a Detailed Design
   The certification requires the individual to write a design. Writing a design sounds simple and you could draw a few icons, but that’s not what they are looking for. They are looking for someone to come in and be able to articulate business cases, constraints, risks, assumptions, thorough design, articulate how the design is built from the hardware perspective, to the connectivity perspective, to the SLAs that come around it, backup, recovery, and DR, if that’s part of the design.
2. Be able to Justify your Design
   You have to design all that and justify your decisions about why you are using certain components versus others and why certain software settings are tuned in a certain way.
3. Create an Implementation Guide
   You also have to create an implementation guide. Not only do you design it, but you have to write the implementation guide that you would hand off to a team member with the expectation of them being able to fulfill your design.
4. Submit Your Design
   The next step is taking that design and submitting it to VMware for approval. Once you get approved, you either pass or fail at this point. If you fail, you just rewrite your design and resubmit. If it is approved, it means they see that you have the ability to be a VCDX. The next step is you have to go and defend.
5. Defend your Design
   A defense involves you going and sitting in front of three panelists that validate you created the design and that you understand the concepts, constraints, risks, and the things you articulated in that design. This is tested by taking park in an on the fly designed Q and A with them. It is not the easiest road to get certified, but it is an incredibly rewarding road. Many people do have the necessary skillset, but struggle with the documentation piece.

Where to Start

People start in different areas to work through these certifications. Many recommend starting with the data center certification because if you start with data center and then move onto the others, it seems like a more realistic journey. In order to do the cloud management or the desktop mobility certifications, you need to thoroughly understand vSphere. If you don’t have a data center vSphere VCDX, then you end up trying to do both of those in the same breath. If you can go and do a vSphere data center focused VCDX submission, you’ll have an easier time because then if you go and you do a second or third VCDX, you don’t have to do the defense. You have to write the same design, but then at that point it’s just a quick phone call to make sure that you’ve written the design yourself and validated it. If you went through the full Q&A and defense already, then the panelists have already proven, since you passed your first VCDX, that you can handle yourself in front of a tough crowd. They don’t need to do that again. That is a huge time investment for everyone involved, so now they just conduct a quick phone call to make sure you’re the actual person who did the submission.

Why is it Critical?

This certification validates you as a confident leader of your peers in the space. Many of the early VCDX certification holders have worked with Mark personally in the VMware ecosystem since 2001, 2002, or as they are boarded. As one of the earliest contributors, he has been around and practicing VMware’s virtualization solutions longer than most people have been employed there and he has seen the value it brings to certified individuals first-hand. Being able to say, “yes, I’m capable, and I’m confident I can lead my customers through a solution correctly,” is significant. As the 23^rd individual to get this certification out of 269 total, Mark has been a leader and helped many others along this journey. He even went as far as partnering with other experts to write a to help people through this process.

Partnering with an IT company with VCDX certified employees is a smart move. It is a comprehensive certification program handed out to only the most sophisticated architects and problem solvers. They have to know how the software applies to numerous real-world business problems to be able to offer best-in-class solutions. Partnering with a VCDX certified individual is the only true way to absolutely guarantee you are working with the most knowledgeable people in the virtualization world.

Next Steps: Stay up to date with VMware happenings and the evolution of virtualization by following Mark Gabryjelski on Twitter (@MarkGabbs).

Mark as a VCDX Panelist

Since 1996, Mark Gabryjelski has been involved in design and integration of solutions for clients in all markets. With a focus on datacenter optimization, he has worked with companies across all aspects of business. Mark has been leading the virtualization trend since 2001 nationally, with a focus in the Northeast corridor. He continues to be on the bleeding edge of solutions involving network, storage, server, operating system, and application virtualization. Mark is currently the Virtualization Practice Manager at Worldcom Exchange.

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By now you’ve heard about VMware vSAN, a solution that combines direct storage devices across a vSphere cluster to create a shared data area distributed across an enterprise network. With vSAN, the user is able to decide on the storage requirements, performance and availability and makes sure the policies put in place are upheld. These are not the only benefits of Keep reading to discover four ways your enterprise can benefit from it.

1. Agility: When discussing IT infrastructure, agility is one of the primary justifications for moving an enterprise to the cloud or to hybrid IT model. It is also a big reason why organizations are introducing hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solutions into their data center. In order to compete in the digital environment, they are implementing software-based solutions in place of their legacy hardware infrastructure. With vSAN, you can leverage your or SSD technology structure, upgrading it when business demands, or new technology justifies it. Using vSAN, you only buy what you need today, and tomorrow, next year and the foreseeable future – putting you in control.

2. Simplicity: Not only is vSAN agile, it is also simple to use and to enable on your enterprise’s existing vSphere That’s because it is already integrated with it. VMware gives you the flexibility to source your hardware and software independently, which can reduce your deployment costs. This has been illustrated in a variety of cost case comparisons to other solutions. VMware’s vSAN allows you to maximize your current vSphere environment so that installation and configuration are completed with just a few mouse clicks. VMware has set out to make the user experience of its HCI platform so simple that it can be managed by IT generalists, instead of dedicated experts.

3. Security: One of the most significant downsides to living in a digital age is the rise of hackers and cybercriminals who are constantly working to find new ways to exploit personal and confidential data. For this reason, security must be fully integrated into any IT component or device in order to protect the data that drives ideas for your enterprise. VMware vSAN offers the industry’s first native HCI encryption that protects and builds data-at-rest encryption into the kernel. It then enables it at the cluster level, and encrypts all objects in the vSAN data without the need for expensive self-encrypting drives. Whether you utilize hybrid or all flash configurations, your data is protected and complies with both U.S. Federal Security and GDPR requirements. Built-in security is one of the reasons VMware vSAN is identified as an HCI industry leader.

4. Total Cost of Ownership: Total cost of ownership (TCO) encompasses all aspects of ownership from equipment and installation to maintenance and running costs. Designed with the ability to deploy vSAN without having to purchase new hardware and the simplicity to allow general IT personnel to manage service delivery, makes vSAN’s TCO lower than other storage area networks that require new hardware and experts on the solution. Beyond the cost to deploy and run vSAN, security is another factor of total cost of ownership. Security breaches can cost enterprises hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages, repairs and labor. With the ability to encrypt data at the kernel level without having to invest in costly drives, lowers the total cost of ownership – saving your enterprise now and in the future.

Final Thoughts

VMware vSAN is the smart choice for enterprises with a VMware environment. Its agility allows modification as your enterprise needs it, it’s simple to deploy, and is easy to use by almost anyone on your IT team. It also safeguards your enterprise’s confidential data through kernel level encryption. All of these factors lead to a lower total cost of ownership through its lifetime, and makes it the obvious choice to fill your enterprise’s need for a virtual storage solution.

Want more information on vSAN?

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You’ve probably heard talk about but do you know what benefits it can offer your organization? While desktop virtualization isn’t a new concept, amazingly, these technologies have the power to improve user productivity and allow your team members to accomplish more at your enterprise. Read on for a look at VDI and DaaS, as well as ways you can put it to use at your company.

What is Desktop as a Service?

Desktop as a Service can be very helpful for organizations wanting to provide their end users with the benefits that a virtual desktop can offer. It can transform enterprises that allow and encourage BYOD, . Nancy Gohring notes, “DaaS delivers virtualized desktops from the cloud; desktops can be customized for groups of workers — say, around specific job levels or functions. Commercially available for nearly a decade, DaaS was initially intended to offload management chores and spread out the costs associated with traditional virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI).”

WATCH: To learn more about virtualized desktop solutions, watch the video below, where WEI’s Virtualization Practice Manager, Mark Gabryjelski, explains the difference between DaaS and VDI.

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While the DaaS concept has been around for a while, it has only recently begun to pick up at a steady pace. As Scott Ottaway, an analyst at 451 Research found, “Desktop hosting is now a $2 billion market for cloud service providers.” The market grew by 30% in the last year and should continue to grow at a similar pace through 2017.”

Because many enterprises are unable to fund VDI due to budget constraints or staffing concerns, they can employ a DaaS strategy to still gain the following benefits:

• DaaS is Cost-Effective: When compared to the implementation costs of VDI, DaaS is far more budget-friendly. IDC found DaaS can reduce hardware CAPEX by 56 percent annually. It also reduces OPEX costs.
• Tighter Security: With physical hardware, there is always an inherent security risk. If sensitive items are lost, stolen or corrupted, your organization’s information is lost, too. However, when desktops are hosted virtually, data is stored off-site and depending on your cloud provider, it can be much more secure.
• Quicker Recovery Time: If you need to restore your company’s data due to an unplanned incident, DaaS gets you back up and running quickly, due to continuous data backup and synchronization. This also helps to improve productivity in the workplace.

What is VDI?

Before DaaS, has traditionally been the only way to run a desktop virtually. It runs in your data center, so users control the desktop just as they can with a physical desktop computer. VDI brings robust operational properties and transforms how the desktop is managed. A few different cloud vendors control these operations and they are trusted to be functional when your organization needs to use them.

Many organizations are able to use hyperconverged infrastructure to effectively manage VDI. IT leaders were first drawn to this framework because of its ability to support VDI environments, and now the use cases for hyperconverged infrastructure have grown as organizations have learned about other ways this solution could improve efficiencies in their data center operations.

Both DaaS and VDI solutions allow your users to pick up where they left off and get back to work quickly. They can log in anywhere from almost any device which improves productivity.

Next Steps: Learn why enterprises rely on hyperconverged infrastructure to manage their VDI environment in

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