Videos from F5's recent Agility customer / partner conference in London
A week or so ago, F5 in EMEA held our annual customer / partner conference in London. I meant to do a little write-up sooner but after an incredibly busy conference week I flew to F5's HQ in Seattle and didn't get round to posting there either. So...better late than never? One of the things we wanted to do at Agility was take advantage of the DevCentral team's presence at the event. They pioneered social media as a community tool, kicking off F5's DevCentral community (now c. 100,000 strong) in something like 2004. They are very experienced and knowledgeable about how to use rich media to get a message across. So we thought we'd ask them to do a few videos with F5's customers and partners about what drives them and how F5 fits in. Some of them are below, and all of them can be found here.HP Discover and what F5 bring to the party
There are only a couple of weeks to go before HP Discover, taking place this year in Frankfurt on 4-6 December. HP is a big organisation with lots of end user and vendor touchpoints. The short video below, by F5's Alasdair Pattinson, lays out the main ways in which F5 and HP collaborate, namely in data centre consolidation projects, Bring Your Own Device initiatives, and smoothing and securing implementations of Microsoft Exchange.Context. SDN. Big Data. Security. Cloud.
That's right, something for everyone. F5 recently attended IP Expo in the UK. We had some speaker sessions at the event - some readers might have come along and seen them live. The event organisers did a nice job of filming the slots along with the slideware presented, and here they are: THE NETWORK FIREWALL IS REDUNDANT (NATHAN PEARCE) BIG DATA - A CONTEXTUAL GOLDMINE (NATHAN PEARCE) KEEPING APPLICATIONS RUNNING SMOOTHLY FROM THE CLOUD (NATHAN PEARCE) AUTOMATION & ORCHESTRATION - KEY REQUIREMENTS FOR SOFTWARE DEFINED DATA CENTRES (KEVIN WARE-LANE)VMworld 2012 Europe - Strobel's Scribblings, Part I
The first of what will be a series of reports from Barcelona...F5's Frank Strobel wraps-up Day Zero's events: ---------- VMworld EMEA 2012 – more exciting news from F5 At the evening prior to the start of the 2012 edition of VMworld EMEA, the F5 team is getting ready for another successful event - this time in beautiful Barcelona, Spain. No offense, Copenhagen, but the combination of sunshine, tapas, Sangria, and the Mediterranean has you beat. Earlier today we held a vmLIVE session with over 700 VMware channel partners in attendance (a new record for us!) interested in learning about what F5 can deliver in support of the Mobile Secure Desktop . Clearly, this is a hot topic and one that we will focus on during VMworld EMEA with a theater presentation in the solution exchange (Enhancing the User Experience for Multi-Pod VMware View Deployments -Tuesday, October 9th, 12:30pm) and our live demo in the booth. If you are evaluating VMware View for your VDI needs, you might want to consider paying us a visit to learn more. Also, today, we held a joint breakout session with VMware during the TAP pre-event day presenting on the VMware vCloud Automated Networking Framework: Network Extensibility (TEX1899) together with Ravi Neelakant. Charlie Cano delivered another standing room only performance. Those who have seen Charlie present before know why he draws large crowds. You will have a chance on Thursday to witness Charlie’s presentations skills during his own breakout sessions (SPO2069 - Solving the Application Provisioning Nightmare: Integrating vSphere and vCloud Director with Your Application Delivery Networking Services). Last but not least, stay tuned for more exciting news coming from F5 tomorrow. You don’t want to miss that one for sure. So, feel free to come by F5’s stand, G100, to check out our latest solutions and to participate at our really cool Motorcycle racing game. And, as always, there are cool prizes to be had… Viva Espana, Viva VMworld!Making VMware View fast, secure and available
VMware View is a leading solution for desktop virtualization offering simplified administration while increasing security and control. When deploying VMware View, there are several issues your business must deal with: from the management of a wide range of devices, to ensuring availability, scalability, and performance. F5 can help by making VMware View secure, fast, scalable, and available. More information about F5’s solution for VMware View can be found at http://www.f5.com/viewVMworld 2012 Europe - Strobel's Scribblings, Part II
Part II from our man on the ground, Frank Strobel, at VMworld Europe 2012 in Barcelona: What do motorcycles, tapas, and F5 have in common? Well, yes, that would be VMworld EMEA 2012. Let me explain... Today was the first full day of VMworld and we introduced the new F5 look & feel to EMEA. Not only do we have a beautiful new color scheme for our booth that aligns with the recently re-designed F5.com web site but we updated our messaging as well. The primary areas of focus are Orchestration, Management, and Control. One significant contribution to providing our customers with more control in their virtualized environments is F5's support for VMware's VXLAN we announced today. To gain a better understanding of what this means, please check out the blog entry from the fabulous Lori Mac Vittie:Getting You One Step Closer to a SDDC or F5’s latest press release here. As for motorcycles, we have a fun simulator in our booth. Come check us out at G100 and drive a Harley Davidson Fat Boy. Everyone is a winner and there are some special prizes for those driving the quickest lap! So, that leaves us with tapas. Those really have nothing to do with VMworld but because I love to eat, I thought that I should mention them. They are really, really good and the thought about enjoying another lovely dinner makes the long day at the event go by a little bit faster...Flexibility, Hyper-V and BIG-IP Virtual Edition
Many (most) people don’t want to depend on only one vendor for anything, whether that be security, storage or virtualisation, especially if it’s a critical application, platform or technology. This is one of the reasons that Hyper-V is growing in importance as a virtualisation platform. Being able to use several virtualisation platforms within a single organisation is added to the usual virtualisation benefits of cost savings and greater efficiencies to give an added benefit – that of flexibility. When your organisation is looking to adapt the data centre into a cloud environment, extend it to a hosting provider, or simply to virtualise on-premise, flexibility and being able to rely on several virtualisation platforms is good because this builds in redundancy and robustness. A potential drawback is the possibility of needing separate application delivery controllers per platform, which is whythis blogfromDamian Flynnis really interesting from the F5 customer perspective, detailing how the BIG-IP Virtual Editionworks well with Hyper-V (just asF5 works well with VMware and Citrix).VMware’s Mobile Secure Desktop Bootcamp…
F5 features heavily on Day 4 of the VMware View Mobile Secure Desktop Bootcamp. Click through to VMware’s End User Computing Blog here (or see below) for free-on-demand training. As F5’s Lori MacVittie posts here, “by combining BIG-IP Global Traffic Manager (GTM) to provide global delivery services as well as BIG-IP Access Policy Manager (APM) for enhanced security and streamlined authentication and authorization to resources, IT organizations can realize higher gains in efficiency while assuring higher availability and performance for end-users, regardless of location. F5 components of the VMware View Mobile Secure Desktop solution architecture provide services critical to the successful deployment of virtual desktop initiatives.”VMworld 2012 Europe - Strobel's Scribblings, Part III
More from Frank Strobel, live from VMworld 2012 in Barcelona. Today, 16,000 feet and a tale of two booths... At the end of another 10+ hour day at VMworld in Barcelona, my feet started hating me. At least, they clearly express their displeasure about being used too much. At the same time, however, there are 16,000 feet here interested in our story. Countless of those feet found their way to our booth today. And, speaking of booths, there are some that seem to be always full of attendees and some that are not so much. Can you guess from the pictures which of those are F5's? Many of the visitors to our booth asked about yesterday's VXLAN announcement and we were excited to share our plans with them. In addition, Charlie Cano co-presented with Adina Simu from VMware in a repeat performance from VMworld in San Francisco. Their joint presentation, vCloud Networking: an Extensible and Open Platform, was a technical deep dive describing the wealth of offerings the vCloud Ecosystem Framework provides from known vendors in the virtual data center realm, with easy provisioning, flexible insertion points, and automated lifecycle. Here’s a photo of Charlie in action! Last but not least, as I have shared with you in previous blog entries, F5's support for VMware View continues to grow. The latest member of the family is the Branch Office Desktop solution that the View team announced at VMworld just yesterday. Once more we asked Lori Mac Vittie to help us understand what F5 is doing and, more importantly, how this is beneficial to customers deploying remote and branch office desktops. Please find Lori's latest blog entry here: Bye Bye Branch Office Blues As we are wrapping up the business day in Barcelona, we are looking forward to tonight's party. Although, my feet have already told me that dancing is out of the question. No Flamenco for this VMworld attendee...Mobile Device Support for VMware View
End user computing means that a wide range of mobile devices from laptops to tablets and from desktops to smartphones are being used. The diversity of these mobile devices and the sheer number of them in the workplace can overwhelm IT and strain your resources. Access and performance are key support concerns. And, since many mobile devices are personal, security is absolutely critical. F5 provides intelligent mobile device support for VMware View. This benefits IT with greater access and compliance control, while at the same time, allowing your employees the freedom to use their mobile device of choice. F5 can help by making VMware View secure, fast, scalable, and available. More information about F5’s solution for VMware View can be found at http://www.f5.com/view
