As my customers continue to embrace hybrid cloud environments, the need for efficient and flexible cloud management solutions becomes more critical. VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 5.2 introduces several enhancements designed to address these needs, focusing on improving lifecycle management, scalability, security, and flexibility. Let's dive into the key features and updates in VCF 5.2 and see how they can benefit your cloud strategy.

​One of the standout features of VCF 5.2 is the ability to import existing vSphere infrastructure into Cloud Foundation. This capability extends the SDDC Manager's inventory and lifecycle management to your current infrastructure, making the transition smoother and less disruptive. There are two primary use cases:

​VCF 5.2 offers a range of edge architecture options to cater to various deployment scenarios:

In the current landscape shaped by Broadcom's influence on VMware's trajectory, organizations considering staying with VMware might find it prudent to explore transitioning to a hybrid cloud setup. Opting for the right infrastructure becomes paramount to ensure optimal performance and scalability. Among the offerings in the revamped portfolio, VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) emerges as a favored option, thanks to its robust software-defined data center (SDDC) capabilities.

Amid Broadcom's streamlined portfolio, featuring VMware vSphere Foundation and VMware Cloud Foundation, loyal VMware customers have a compelling incentive to opt for a dedicated solution. Combining VCF with Dell VxRail presents an attractive proposition. Not only is VxRail custom-built for VCF, but it also offers the flexibility to integrate third-party storage alongside VMware vSAN. This is important for customers who have investments that are already made in existing external storage systems or have a use case in which external storage systems are required. This combination sets itself apart with its seamless integration, streamlined management, and enhanced performance. Consequently, deploying VMware Cloud Foundation on Dell VxRail emerges as the prime selection.

This blog is an exploration of the Ansible Tower interface, but before I dive in, let's begin with an overview of what Ansible is. 

Ansible is a software provisioning, configuration management, and application deployment tool that is also open-source from Red Hat. Ansible assists IT with the major challenge of enabling continuous deployment (CI/CD) with no downtime. 

With Ansible IT organizations can automate the provisioning of applications, manage systems, and reduce the complexities that come with trying to automate IT. With Ansible we can break down silos and create a culture around automation. My thought has always been that if you need to preform a task more than once then it should be automated.

Ansible integrates with the technologies you have already made investments within your organization, from infrastructure, to networks, security, cloud, containers, and applications. We all have infrastructure whether it be physical bare metal environments like networking with Cisco, Juniper, and Arista, to storage with products like Net App, and Pure Storage. 

Virtual infrastructure with VMware is also supported along with Red Hat Virtualization(RHV), and Xenserver.  Through Ansible organization can easily provision, destroy, take inventory, and manage across all virtual environments. 

Regardless of of platform, Ansible can help organizations with managing the installation of software, system updates, configuration, and managing system features.

Ansible Tower brings a web-based UI to Ansible which makes it a little easier for IT to perform the above mentioned tasks. Ansible Tower is the hub, of sorts, that gives IT a role-based access control, including control over the use of securely stored credentials for SSH and other services.

​Let's take a few minutes to look at the Ansible Tower interface.

On the left hand side of the Dashboard, you can see the resources menu and the objects that you can create. 

• Templates - A job template combines the credential, project, and inventory into an executable.
• Credentials - A credential allows Ansible to authenticate to the target hosts.
• Projects - A Project is a scope code repository containing Ansible objects such as playbooks.
• Inventories - An inventory is a list of target hosts.
• Inventory Scripts - An inventory script supports dynamic inventories. 

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Let us dive a little more into each section beginning with Credentials. In this section, you create a credential that Ansible can use to authenticate to the target hosts. 

Day 1 began with the general session, which was a lot different than the previous year where the VMware Executives laid out their vision for the partner community. This general session was focused more correctly on the audience in attendance.

Day 1 began with the general session, where VMware Executives presented to the partner community and reinforced the importance of the partner as the unsung heroes helping to drive the  VMware business and most importantly driving value for their customers.

Disruptive innovation, is a term coined by Clayton Christensen. The term describes a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves up market, eventually displacing established competitors. 

For example, take a look at what a company like Uber has done to the taxi service in San Francisco. They don't hire drivers like Yellow Cab. They don't own a fleet of cars. They built an application. An application that has been very disruptive to the taxi industry and is changing the landscape of ride-hailing services.

Thanks to Uber, San Francisco's largest yellow cab company is filing for bankruptcy. Yellow Cab Co-op President Pamela Martinez was quoted saying that some of the financial setbacks "are due to business challenges beyond our control and others are of our own making." Yellow Cab's drivers are flocking to Uber, an app-based enterprise, lured by the promise of more riders and better schedules. 

Yellow Cab has been turned on its head by a disruptive innovation. Uber has disrupted the ride-hailing service industry with a lasting impact which is now moving across the county. 

Why do I point this out? Because, you are either being disrupted or are the disrupter. Think about that for a second. Ask Yellow Cab how it feels to be disrupted in an industry they felt very secure in before an application took over. 

Look at companies like Blockbuster. I bet you can tell me who disrupted them? Got it in your mind?

Here we are in the future that Back to the Future predicted and I find myself contemplating what the past really looked like compared to now for IT. 

For those of you that live under a rock and have not seen the movies I will give a brief summarization of the second movie from the trilogy. In "Back to the Future Part II," Marty McFly travels to October 21, 2015, to save his children, yet to be born in "Back to the Future's" 1985.

The movie plot is tangled by fixing one thing, McFly, Doc Brown and the villainous Biff Tannen create a number of new mishaps but what remains is the film's vision of a year that was still more than a quarter-century away when the movie was shot and released in 1989. 

​In the IT realm of things I found myself reminiscing of what the data center looked like back in 1989 when the movie was released not to mention 1985 when the movie itself takes place. So, hold onto your hats, "Great Scott!!", we are going back to the past to revisit the data center before VMware's inception in 1998 and the impact we see today.

In order to bore my reader thoroughly I will give a brief history lesson on computing but don't worry I have added plenty of pictures to stimulate your brains. So, let's fire this blog up to 88 miles per hour and get to the past.