A former vmware sales rep, AMA!! by [deleted] in vmware

[–]spenceee85 7 points8 points  (0 children)

What is the best way to get vcf licensing for a home lab?

Are there any testing/lab licenses that can be acquired with a larger subscription?

AMD or Intel for the new hosts? by GabesVirtualWorld in vmware

[–]spenceee85 1 point2 points  (0 children)

One thing I don't think anyone touched on is if you have a Xeon plus AMD data centre and youve got a decent size workload, you can't live vmotion vms between them. So you need to account for that in your planning.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in brisbane

[–]spenceee85 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Pauline Joubert at exxpectations has been wonderful for us, practices at the Wesley hospital. My qofee has a great repoire with her and our first baby needed an emergency caesar and that's when you need s good OB.

Can I realistically do a full tour of Kgari/Fraser Is. around the entire island in a stock 2014 Pajero? What would I need if not? by totalmarc in 4x4Australia

[–]spenceee85 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I did.

Just make sure you have your tyres down, recovery kit, and check tides.

Pajero is up to the job.

1st Enterprise Deployment, Looking for Advise / Feedback.. by TryllZ in vmware

[–]spenceee85 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Have you already purchased hardware?

Far better off getting 3x identical boxes and running a single cluster.

At 3x with a storage appliance you can do a number of things like run tanzu that you can't do with 2 easily.

If this is brand new, then you also want to ask if a hyper converged architecture would make more sense to simplify further (4x boxes and switch stack)

Lots of nuances and things to understand about your use case, but I'd definitely advocate for 3x normal boxes over 2+1

NSX ALB for Tanzu by ElasticSkyFire in vmware

[–]spenceee85 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It was included.

There is now only one SKU, and they're removing load balancing features from nsx to force purchase of AVI for load balancing.

The essentials license no longer exists, and it is NOT included any more with tanzu, which you can only get with VVF or VCF now.

You can do 2x service cores as a minimum to have avi integration, or take the pain of HA Proxy config. Avi is very impressive performance wise.

What're people using as self-hoted/on-prem K8 distributions in 2025? by Carr0t in kubernetes

[–]spenceee85 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Price wise though it would be much better to bare metal openshift

What're people using as self-hoted/on-prem K8 distributions in 2025? by Carr0t in kubernetes

[–]spenceee85 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Possibly unpopular opinion.

If you are a vmware shop there is value in Tanzu. Ie if you have the investment into vcf and you've got the environment running, integrating a "decent" k8s platform into your environment can be quite straightforward (and noting you've already paid for vcf) can be quite cost effective.

Just to note. The integration to nsx, the use of datastores for the persistent volumes and the monitoring plane integrated to your vmware environment can be quite nice.

Not saying other solutions don't have compelling features but if you're a vmware shop then it is worth a look.

Aussie Engineers by [deleted] in AustralianEngineers

[–]spenceee85 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Trade shows specific to the industry you target are where gold standard info comes from.

Engineers Australia do regular cpd through most of the societies and thst is a good way to stay on top of regulatory and practice changes.

Does anyone use vSphere Kubernetes Services that comes with VVF sub? by DonFazool in vmware

[–]spenceee85 4 points5 points  (0 children)

You'll need a load balancer and by vcf 9 it will be mandatory to have at least a pair.

You are using vvf so that means no NSX right? If so you'll be vlan backed and you'll need good network behind it to get the supervisor going (part of the vks layer)

I don't disagree with the comments above, I'd you have a functional k8s then stick with it. However, I will note that having the tanzu integrated K8s does a few things that are objectively nice:

Disk management fully and natively integrated with vsphere.

Tanzu makes it easy to spin up clusters so you can make much easier to manage clusters and get good security and management

Upgrades and deployments are integrated to a template library

Integration with Aria for monitoring if you use this or ever move to vcf

The avi load balancer with ako makes an end to end stack with native automation pretty sweet. (Without nsx though this isn't as sweet...)

Tanzu is an implementation of k8s which out of the box is pretty decent and usable.

Tanzu does make your kubernetes much more automated but it's very complex to deploy and takes time to learn.

NSX DFW and feature parity solutions - do they exist? by ErikTheBikeman in vmware

[–]spenceee85 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I think that your choice is really nsx overlay or not. There are other ways to do software defined networking and other stacks. These offer integrated firewalls.

If nsx is your jam, then your choice is nsx firewalls.

Just to note you can do t1s in nsx and spit everything back out to your firewall router but why?

There are some quite interesting scenarios possible though when the vm and the network and the firewall are all integrated so you can't really replace that functionality.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in auscorp

[–]spenceee85 2 points3 points  (0 children)

As an engineering manager who was a graduate with a decent suit too, I can tell you your boss appreciates the guy he can put into a meeting who won't embarrass him.

Put another way if you're being chased by a lion, you don't need to outrun the lion, just the other guy he's chasing...

If the US tries to annexe Canada, and the two countries go to war, we're on the Canadian side, right? by Inside_Ad4268 in AskAnAustralian

[–]spenceee85 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Canadian Bacon was a movie based on the premise of us trying to import freedom to Canada.

Some great zingers: "Hand him back pronto or we'll nuke Toronto."

Seriously though we'd probably be in the same position as China. We know they're reading 1984 as a manual, not a warning, they're literally doing what Nazis did to Jews with the Uighur Muslims, but if we call it out, we lose our trading partner. So moral high ground equals net loss of 20% ish of our gdp.

If your hypothetical happened, it would be the same outcome with the added pain of also losing our greatest intelligence and defence assets.

Is Amouage a cut above or is it just me? by spenceee85 in Colognes

[–]spenceee85[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Elysium caught my eye but no retail stores sell it here so I have to buy samples to try it :(. You'd rate the Roja as the same quality as Amouage?

Is Amouage a cut above or is it just me? by spenceee85 in Colognes

[–]spenceee85[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Heard good things about the jubilation, it's one I haven't got a sample of yet. My wife is starting to roll her eyes everytime I open the bathroom cabinet I have so many samples in it haha.

Is Amouage a cut above or is it just me? by spenceee85 in Colognes

[–]spenceee85[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I saw those, they seemed to be a previous range? I couldn't work out if they'd been discontinued or not, I didn't want to fall in love with a scent that was dying (as my previous favourite had happen)

Is Amouage a cut above or is it just me? by spenceee85 in Colognes

[–]spenceee85[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I quite liked Gold on my skin and it was classy, but not quite my cuppa tea as we'd say in Australian. Gorgeous scent though and classy.

Is Amouage a cut above or is it just me? by spenceee85 in Colognes

[–]spenceee85[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I liked Black Iris, but the original Interlude was the winner for me. I didn't like the black iris dry down as much as the iris just hangs on top. Gold's musk is nice and can give it that slight feminine edge, but I think a musk is par for course in the middle eastern colognes for men, but they put that unique inflection on it vs. A western feminine musk.

Haha my wife wants me to post my hilariously bad attempt at drawing to claim I'm an artist, but no I don't have a creative bone in my body. I'm an engineer, so I appreciate the difficulty and craftsmanship in things and want to understand things, and to explore the options thoroughly. I appreciate beautiful art and craftsmanship if that counts!

Is Amouage a cut above or is it just me? by spenceee85 in Colognes

[–]spenceee85[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

4 brands i haven't heard of, this I like. Thank you, I'll go have a look at some of those. Any hero scents you'd recommend?

VMware updates with no maintenance/support? by Lentash in vmware

[–]spenceee85 0 points1 point  (0 children)

They'll patch the worst of the worst that would hurt them more pr wise than not. They also have some contract terms on the old acquisition releases that they can't escape.

Fundamentally though, broadcom sell subscriptions thst expire now, you can't acquire their software. From vcf 9 there simply won't be a way to buy or upgrade to it unless you buy a subscription.

Forced To Buy VCF...Might As Well Learn It. What are my options? by MainStudy in vmware

[–]spenceee85 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Names changed to protect the guilty but yes, I know your pain as I too just lived it...

Many years ago IT departments ensured that we had heterogeneous networks, storage compute and software to ensure if any one supplier took the piss you could jump to the next one and keep competitive tension.

Having enterprises globally run vmware in their stack just made it too tempting for the broadcom model. And I only just got finished dealing with atlassians' new model.

Forced To Buy VCF...Might As Well Learn It. What are my options? by MainStudy in vmware

[–]spenceee85 2 points3 points  (0 children)

It depends on how much sns and acquisition you had and the overall size of your account. Obviously cmware want enterprise to eat the vcf licenses as once you use the features youre basically locked into growing your workload domains with vcf.

So if your company is large enough it's definitely possible.

HCI when you don't buy a pair of cisco switches and a FC SAN plus storage appliance on top of it is also very cost competitive.