Building Nutanix Ready – Understanding Ready – Early On – Part 1

Updated 9/22/17
The Journey to “Ready”
Are you Ready?

This is my journey to building a world-class “Ready” Program and understanding what validation means to me and the customer….This will be a multi-part series of my journey.

Continue reading

Understanding Identity with ADFS – Part 1

Identity is always something of a taboo subject and is still not clearly understood out there and the IT security landscape keeps evolving.

One of the recent changes past few years is a move away from (Access Control Lists) ACLs on files in the NTFS file system to an access control system that is based on claims.

Claims based authentication is an industry standard security protocol to authenticate users. This is the underlying WS-* standards that describe the usage of Security Assertion Mark-up Language (SAML) tokens. Claims based auth requires these tokens, and by extension an entity that can issue the token.

This is the Secure Token Service (STS). The STS server can be based on Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) or other platforms that provide this service. This is where ADFS comes in and the highlight of this series.

Continue reading

Microsoft World Wide Partner Conference 2015…Picture Highlights

Gallery

This gallery contains 29 photos.

Microsoft World Wide Partner Conference 2015 WPC is the largest event for Microsoft partners When it comes to meeting the right people in the right place, bigger is better. The Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) brings together over 15,000 attendees … Continue reading

Symon Perriman….his thoughts on Hyper-V, Security and future of Virtualization on the Nutanix .NEXT community podcast

Hey everyone…I wanted to share a very cool update (and maybe a little of hero-worship 😀 ).  Well, anyways, my job at Nutanix had another highlight recently.  As many of your know, I love reading, breathing, consuming Microsoft technology. During my consumption of education, there  number of people I follow, but there are few that stand out…and one that I spent a lot of time listening to via podcasts; Symon Perriman

Symon Perriman

Symon Perriman
He takes complex technology subjects and explains it extremely well on many levels so everyone understands..He believes in the community….all things as technologists, we can all strive to achieve.

I recently had the lucky chance to interview him for the Nutanix .Next Community Podcast.  It was great honor to interview him with my colleaguebuddy @NutanixTommy as we both had different points of views.

Symon joined 5nine Software earlier this year as Vice President, Business Development & Marketing and is how I came to meet Simon as part of my job in Technical Alliances at Nutanix.

For those of you who are not familiar with 5nine Software, 5nine has a great alternative management product for Hyper-V with benefits of simplified vCenter type management without the footprint of System Center. They also are the only vendor with agentless security product via the Hyper-V extensible virtual switch. Think vShield for Hyper-V…Very cool…   😎

For those that are not familiar with Symon…a brief history…
With more than 12 years of experience in the high-tech industry, Symon is an internationally recognized expert in virtualization, high-availability, disaster recovery, data center management, and cloud technologies.

As Microsoft’s Senior Technical Evangelist and worldwide technical lead covering virtualization, infrastructure, management and cloud. He has trained millions of IT Professionals, hosted the “Edge Show” weekly webcast, holds several patents and dozens of industry certifications, and in 2013 he co-authored “Introduction to System Center 2012 R2 for IT Professionals” (Microsoft Press). He graduated from Duke University with degrees in Computer Science, Economics and Film & Digital Studies.

Enjoy the show……

Until next time, Rob…

Microsoft Ignite 2015 – Week in Review…

Gallery

Microsoft Ignite 2015 – Week in Review Well, it was a great show and finally recovering with some sleep under my belt.  Here we go…  Microsoft Ignite 2015 is where I had a chance to meet and talk with the industry leaders … Continue reading

Heading to Microsoft Ignite 2015…stay tuned….

Well, its been crazy days lately.  I am leaving for Microsoft Ignite 2015 in a few days.  My last few weeks been filled getting demo’s ready around Exchange, SQL, Azure Pack, and SCOM. Ignite is the biggest customer event of the year. My company Nutanix is a gold sponsor at the event this year and we plan to show off all of our Reference Architectures (i.e. Lync, SQL, etc.). We also are going to demo our new support of ISCSI on ESXi.

 

Continue reading

Heads down….;) Life and Times of a Microsoft Technology Evangelist

Life and Times of a Microsoft Technology Evangelist

Hello all…It’s been a few weeks since my last blog post…I have been to my HQ twice in San Jose, California for week at a time.  You would be surprised how 3 hour time differences and coming back east messes up your day.  Still working on a system for that, but what works so far is to stay on your schedule…Last time I went to Cali, I let myself slip into the Cali schedule and coming back east was brutal for a week. ;(
So far my schedule that seems to work, but always evolving, is to run the entire west coast workday.

Continue reading

NPP Training Series – Nutanix Terminology – Part 1

I started with Nutanix about 1 month ago and concurrently began my Nutanix training which entails going through the NPP (Nutanix Platform Professional) training course. I will be posting a series of blog posts on my learning track with Nutanix and will eventually tie it all together with the Microsoft Stack. My track commenced about 2 weeks ago and I have keep detailed notes on my learning progress. My plan is to post every few days in a multi-part series.

Continue reading