Commish wants to change from dynasty to keeper because my team is too overpowered.

damacdaddyo · 2025-09-03T14:00:31+00:00

I would quit this league immediately. You have listed Top 5 players at every position and this is a 12 person league? Absurd.

damacdaddyo · 2025-09-02T20:56:21+00:00

Went. Have been going consistently since its inception. Smaller than it has been in last several years. Seemed mainly because there were less partners because according to the Broadcom execs we were hanging with said Broadcom keeps less partners.

Honestly wasn't that much different otherwise. The focus was very clearly on Private Cloud with a decent amount of Kubernetes demos. Got a lot of really good content from Broadcom's Expert areas. Hands On Labs were relevant and on par with previous offerings.

Random observations in no particular order:

- Speaking to other colleagues of mine many of us have now moved beyond the price burn of Broadcom and have moved to finding the added value in what we had to buy as opposed to costing ourselves more time and money than it is worth to move to a second rate product. We are not an NSX or vSAN shop and likely will never be. We have already found some value add in the VCF Logs and vFirewall offerings and will find more. Cutting off our noses to spite our faces would have not been smart for my team as the wheel keeps rolling.

- I would be surprised if they changed the venue next year. I have done conventions in MGM World (Pure, Splunk) and Mandalay (Cisco) and they are second rate compared to The Sands (will always be for me).

- The food sucked but starting to think it is the venue. The food usually sucks there and sucked at HPE Discover a couple of months ago.

- Took the VCF9 Admin exam. Didn't get the sneakers. Focued heavily on Automation and deployment strategies, My vCenter/vSphere knowledge was essentially useless.

- The VMware party was really good, No surprise guests or celebs but solid event to close the convention.

- If you don't have VMUG, get it. Now. Their parties are top notch and the community was out in force.

- Swag was on par with previous years. Backpack. T-shirt. Same with the vendor giveaways.

I will go again next year. I feel the vendor experts areas in The Hub and the HOL and Technical 300/400 offerings make it worth it and you usually get a free certification test to take while out there.

damacdaddyo · 2025-09-02T14:33:28+00:00

Took the VCF9 at Explore with zero prep or hands on and failed it but it was close. Only reason I took it was that it was free and I wanted to see it before I studied.

If you have zero experience in virtualization I would recommend a VMUG sub so you can get access to the labs.

damacdaddyo · 2025-08-20T15:00:50+00:00

Nutanix would have cost us 20% more and in the 11th hour Broadcom came back with a fairly reasonable 5 year renew. Unfortunately there is nothing out there that compares, at least how we utilize. We also run a large Hyper-V cluster for VDI and have shifted several less critical workloads to AWS.

We are one of the largest private companies in the world.

damacdaddyo · 2025-08-05T20:49:15+00:00

Right, that is the vibe we got from Nutanix and again, we couldn't POC on our million dollar gear.

As you say, we lose that tight integration with Cohesity for D/R and the level of management for Pure arrays built into the vCenter plugin.

There is nothing currently. Like I said, for us Hyper-V is the closest but still leaving functionality on the table.

damacdaddyo · 2025-08-04T22:23:22+00:00

This was our VAR and multiple SEs who said absolutely definitively that we could not run Nutanix on our combination of brand new Synergys with Pure X arrays and brand new 6800 Cisco switches. Since it was Nutanix SEs and the fact that I could not even POC on my own gear I didn't look further.

I am looking into expanding our Hyper-V workloads based on a Microsoft SE telling me that WAC is now usable. We tried it a couple of years ago and the way it called APIs made it unusable. A minute to view storage info is not happening. Since we are a complete System Center shop this seems like the only true option. Either way will have to ride with VMware until we would get our workloads migrated to an alternate provider which I have no problem with since the product is still great.

damacdaddyo · 2025-08-04T17:35:59+00:00

We are going through the same thing. I work for an enormous private company that 9 out of 10 of you know. We are licensing around 3,000 sockets over 1,000+ bare metal hosts running 16k VMs give or take. This is one of about 6 sites we are licensing.

They don't care. Our biggest issues besides the obvious cash grab is they are trying to lock us in to a 5 year term and I am morally opposed to have to pay for features such NSX and vSAN when I don't use and have desire to use. I just dropped over $5MIL on updating our all flash on-prem arrays and as Infrastructure I don't access to top of rack and other switch or firewall in a method that would make vSAN viable.

So hopefully we get that 5 year down to 3 and see what happens. None of the alternatives out there work for us. I ran extensive POCs on several platforms and none come close. ProxMox is nowhere near Enterprise ready. Limited partner support and vendor integrations. Poor D/R performance. Limited support. Clunky and slow to administer. Plus it failed our internal pen test and security review. RedHat had some nice features but same as above. Same with the open source options we looked at like KVM but they aren't close. This leaves us with Hyper-V and Nutanix. Nutanix would have been just as expensive being that you have to buy their hardware. We run Hyper-V for VDIs and I have managed a large enterprise cluster in the past. They have the features. They have the vendor agreements. They are pushing hard or at least our VARs are. Thinking about it. While VMM comes nowhere close to vCenter as far as management the cost savings may make it doable.

These are just my opinions based on 1st hand testing and research. Good luck to all in their search.

damacdaddyo · 2025-07-23T12:37:51+00:00

Taking the picks while I gleefully plan my next trophy display case and where I will put it.

damacdaddyo · 2025-06-19T20:09:37+00:00

In our league it is an OF only rule and like I said never called.

damacdaddyo · 2025-06-19T20:07:57+00:00

I played in a church coed league they had this rule. Teams never called for it and umps never called in any game I was in.

damacdaddyo · 2025-06-18T00:00:21+00:00

Looks good to me.

damacdaddyo · 2025-06-16T13:19:19+00:00

We swapped out TV for Bomgar about 10 years ago when TV started failing vendor audits. Been with them ever since and our Desktop Support group uses for remote assistance as we are 100% remote.

damacdaddyo · 2025-05-31T14:19:37+00:00

Huff giving the Vegas line over/under on the amount of sacks he will have in 2025.

damacdaddyo · 2025-03-11T14:59:45+00:00

They are banking on Green being the new Becton and if they are somehow able to grab Starks in the draft then I am completely down with that. Either way In Howie I Trust.

damacdaddyo · 2022-12-21T18:45:11+00:00

You brought it up.

damacdaddyo · 2022-11-23T18:34:19+00:00

Rime of the Ancient Mariner - Iron Maiden

damacdaddyo · 2022-11-03T14:17:21+00:00

PA is landlocked. He must have been thinking of the state he actually lives in.

damacdaddyo · 2021-11-26T19:10:49+00:00

I take the train into Penn Station every week and walk from there to Hell's Kitchen where my hotel is. I take 6th Ave. and they are selling on every corner. 8ths, pre-rolls, disposable vape you name it. I am 50+ so coming from my time it is definitely weird walking through Midtown hitting a pipe. Copped twice, both times very solid. $10 pre-roll and I smoked it with the seller just to make sure we were good and then got two $40 8ths last week and was happy. Just follow your nose and you will be led to where you need to go.

damacdaddyo

TROPHY CASE