 Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening wherever you may be and good morning Shannon. How are you? I am well. How are you? I am doing fantastic Besides the fact that my dogs have been going nuts and uh being in pain That's not what you want to wake up to uh one having an accident in the living room and in the bedroom and Ah A dog right get it get a pet and so I have cats Mine are notoriously Puking uh first thing in the morning. So, uh, I don't know what that's about either I often I ask them questions like why are you doing this and of course they're cats. They don't respond But uh, yeah, that's it's not a fun reality to wake up to yeah, so, uh For everyone watching, uh, this is my uh new Co-worker. This is our new teammate Shannon, I'll do pronounce your last name because I'm I'm french and I Well, and I would have never taken offense if you would have mispronounced it because it's very common with my last name So it's pronounced keen like peachy keen So the story is I suspect that when my family, you know immigrated over from germany They didn't really understand english phonetics. They understood german phonetics, right? And so they wanted to make it seem more american when they were, you know, kind of settling in central america and, uh, They just kind of said oh k and then ends in an n. Let's call it keen and Believe me, my whole family. We always are just like yeah, it's keen. Sorry. It doesn't look like it at all Because I was thinking I was thinking like coon keen like because there's a you in there and I'm So I put the emphasis on the wrong syllable all the time Yeah, so you would not be alone. I think it's more often mispronounced than pronounced correctly. So do not feel Uh, I guess yeah, don't don't worry about it because it's very much so a name that's always mispronounced So you are uh new to the it ops talk team You came from the, uh Azure vmware solution team. Yeah, so we called ourselves the enterprise platforms and tools team And then we started out with the azure vmware solution stack just because of the fact that The idea vmware is working with microsoft very closely with the solution was a super interesting proposition And we wanted to get out there and build content lead community events Deliver talks and just be involved in the community because I think there are a number of enterprises out there that have not yet Really embraced cloud and it's an opportunity for them to say hey, we can get on this boat to cloud or plane to cloud finally because it's the same platform that you have on premises It's just now living in azure. Yeah, and We went last time we were talking uh I we uh, it's it's a natural fit for you to come into our team because our your audience is our audience Like 95 of them Very much so yeah, and I think you know, you've got those enterprises that have been a little Slow to move everything and now they can think about moving everything and then sort of pick apart What they need to once everything's out of their on-premises data center and into azure And when you're closer to the arm apis it makes I guess integrations a little easier so you can integrate with things that are hard to do when your workloads live on premises Yeah, and and you say you say if you're not ready to go, um I personally don't believe that anybody at any point is going to be a hundred percent cloud We're there's always going to be a Some portion of of the workloads that are beyond prem so hybrid with that solution Is a wonderful way because you could have Basically, you managed your machine the same way on prem as you would in the cloud Right exactly so you can think about automation using vrealize you can think about automation using the power cli commandlet library You can templatize your vm deployments. I mean you get the same look and feel It's just you can think about moving some of your workloads from on-premises into azure Especially if you don't want to spend the money to to re up or or buy brand new servers. Those gets to be pretty expensive Yep, uh, just before we get started. I'm just taking a quick look at the chat room We have andrew mccallum with us again. Good morning andrew or good afternoon for you. You're in the uk. I believe We have rabid jr. I and I believe rabid is from, uh Africa or south africa. I'm think the last time we talked about that and So if you have any questions or anything like that, make sure you put them in the in the chat and we'll try to get to it through the show and that being said Let's go into our first item news item. So our first news item today Is uh at scale management of azure monitor alerts in backup center It doesn't look like much But when you have your uh, if you're familiar with azure monitor and azure backup center Uh, if you have got all your environments and and in traditional on-prem environment, you would have a limited number of backup Uh, like you'd have your convolt or you or have your your whatever backup Provider you're using you'd have one to manage like a lot of servers Right in the cloud you could have one backup center or one backup vault for every resource group or every subscription or every Um workload that you're you're pushing out there so that they they could be managed separately But now how do you start managing? Okay, the backup didn't Backup failed the the test restored failed or there's an error on it. There's a warning When you have all of these different Backup vault or recovery vaults Scattered across one or multiple Uh subscription Yeah, azure monitor is built to manage that or to Help you manage and and keep an eye on your workloads wherever they may be uh in in your hybrid environment so with Azure backup center starting to leverage the alerting Features of azure monitor Now regardless of where your backup center may be or your backup vault will be Uh, you're leveraging the alerting capabilities of azure monitor So that you can keep an eye on it at scale regardless where you may be In all of your environment, whether it's on-prem for hybrid or in the cloud and or multiple clouds So that's really really cool. Uh, and the fact that You can do this all from within, uh, azure backup center So you don't have to leave and go to azure monitor Set up your alerts then come back into azure Azure backup center to see what's happening. Everything is there. Everything is actionable So you click on the alert on the alert in, uh, azure backup center It'll take you right to the vm that where the problem was or the Uh, the the storage account wherever it may be Um, so it as it opens up a lot of possibilities in terms of streamlining your management of that And I I do like the fact that it's all the single pane of glass I think we've really listened to our customers They don't want to go to five different things to figure out what failed They'd write they'd like to have a centralized something that allows you to go in granularly So I like seeing that that's a an awesome win. I think for our customers. I think It's it's kind of like a common theme these days because we've realized that a few years back where the engineers kind of worked on it And now it's starting like every other product is saying okay now It's in preview where we've got integration where this part of this service is now available inside this part of this service and vice versa um I find it really really cool and It kind of makes you think why didn't we do this in the first place I mean we're kind of agile in real life, right like that's we're gonna want azure is all in um, I don't know. I I often feel like We do some things and we need that feedback right because what I think I need May not be what every customer needs or what every customer could potentially need so I feel like we kind of throw things against a wall we figure out if the pasta will stick And if it doesn't stick we we ask why and then we add some of the feedback in and I don't I don't know It's it's weird because it's not what we were used to Prior to cloud right we were used to kind of box products that kind of hung out in the world of The three to four year mark and things didn't really evolve or change too much now. They're changing I don't know sometimes it feels like daily Yep I was I was I'm laughing because I was building a demo for um, a EBC not too long ago And I'm running through my demo and like okay. I got all my steps and everything And the day before I start going through my demo and And the ui's changed they changed something in the portals or like ah go back and I change it and then the morning of I said, okay, I'm gonna run through it one more time Before we got my EBC in the afternoon and for people who don't understand Microsoft acronyms, uh, because we have a few The alphabet soup that we call the the microsoft, uh EBC is an executive briefing center Setting so it companies that comes in to see how we can help them And I run an hour before the session and they changed it again It's and it's hard when you support customers because they expect you to be the subject matter expert And you're walking them through something and you're like this completely changed. It was different yesterday, you know So um, so yeah, that's what we'll be living. It's very iterative. It changes yet It feels like daily sometimes right you just on our toes which is why I love uh infrastructure as code Oh, yeah big time because that way your your code is the same the the rest apis are the same the Arm templates are pretty much the same You don't you're not victim to the changes in UI because Somebody tweaked something somewhere in the in the in the portal. So command line for life Yeah, exactly. Well, and I think that's when I realized like I should get better at command line because I don't know if I think we had very similar backgrounds very infrastructure Focus we're used to wizards and gooey's and and this just changed everything in terms of our skill set So yeah hitting the rest api is easier, right? It's easier But there's a there's a drawback to using the rest api versus the the arm resource manager When you do that, right? When you're doing the rest api, you're bypassing all of the validation Right, if you're doing an arm template if you're submitting an arm template It validates that it's actually going to work before it tries to deploy it If you're doing a rest api, it just it assumes you know, you know what you're talking about and just does it Right, right It could have some issues with that right, right It's just it's a different world, right different world. We live in Well, there's so many ways this too. I was going to say something but it's not politically correct There's many ways of of of making this happen Yeah, I'm I'm lost for words because the expression that normally comes to head that I don't want to Say live on I'm an idiot. All right, uh Our second item is for you. So we're talking about uh, azure reservations Yeah, so we just announced a public preview So you can place azure reservations at the management group level and then the billing level, right? So if you've got a number of different resources in your subscriptions As long as it's part of this management group You can buy a reservation for azure sequel and it'll just hit every single azure sequel instance Within those groups of uh, within that management group, right? You can do that with azure vm or solution. Believe it or not, there's a reserved a reservation you can buy Uh, you can do that with storage with vm's. It's a pretty easier Well, it's it's an easier reality than it used to be because I can tell you when this first came around I was supporting customers pretty regularly and we'd have to get out excel spreadsheets to figure out how many vm's they had How many they should be potentially Accounting for now. It's sort of that one fell swoop once you've got everything grouped up in a management group You can apply that reservation towards the entire the entirety of your subscription layout So I feel like that should be an awesome win for the the customers that are tired of keeping track of things at excel spreadsheets Uh, you know, and it's it's sort of it sort of helps out, right? It makes things a little easier So before this changed a reservation would be applicable to the to the subscription where it was actually made Correct, correct. So if you have if you have an organization and you're splitting across multiple subscriptions for multiple business units, for example You'd have to keep track of how many reservations you've had for all of your subscriptions Yeah, and it was and I think some of the tooling to keep track of it has evolved But when it first came about it was a little bit more manual, right? And I think I think we had listened to customers when they had expressed frustration We're trying to keep up with their the reservations And so this is an awesome opportunity a unique opportunity for customers to lean on management groups Versus having to think about it subscription by subscription You know if you have a vm that lives in these groups of subscriptions and it's in a specific vm family Awesome, it'll be applied to all of those vms in that that family, right? If you've got a bunch of storage accounts in a group of subscriptions You buy some some reservation with the storage accounts and you're able to apply that to all storage accounts They get and it's net new too, right? So if you spit up a brand new storage account that'll automatically get applied to anything that that you know Get spun up after the reservation has been sort of applied to the management group So it seems like an awesome win on that front and the billing also Has changed so you can actually assign the billing as to the context of where the billing actually occurs Is not tied to where you are applying the reservations correct correct and that wasn't that that's an awesome Switch too so it feels like it's sort of the easy button Maybe this is probably where we should have landed but again, we're iterative We're trying to figure out the right way to have this match up with what an enterprise would be looking for So I think this is an awesome public preview to to see a launch Yeah, that's I'm uh, I'm actually keeping an eye on the uh chat room here. We've got a few a couple people sujit Uh, uh, she ditched a new viewer that I've uh, I've never really noticed the the name before so they're having a conversation on um The new microsoft uh exams that were announced a new certification. So Welcome aboard All right, so let's keep going with the news The next one is really close to my heart because uh, I am A couple years ago. I gave my my wife and my daughters that were going to university. Uh some surface pros Yep, and now We have the new eight new models of surface devices Just in time for me to be able to replace those surface pro 3s, uh that are still Very functional and working really really well still So I'm they're rock solid. These are going to be awesome to see though kind of evolve Yeah, I'm uh, I'm thinking a studio for me uh Some goes for the girls uh for school and uh, maybe a surface pro 3 surface pro 8 for uh for my wife for as a teacher She loves it too. She goes to school with it. She takes the keyboard out and she kind of she bought a Case that has like a strap behind so she can put her hand in it and keep it And she just as she goes into in class. She has her tablet with her and she uses her finger. She loves it Very cool. Yeah, I feel like there's a lot more flexibility that the surface pro lineup allows for when I was a consultant We we all were given surface pros and uh, super awesome to travel with very lightweight But they also pack a punch if you can actually hook up two additional monitors There's a lot going on in that that surface pro, right? So it they're they're pretty medium machines if you want them to be Yeah, and there's uh, they have some of them have the a lightning port on them Yeah, so when you're thinking about I got additional monitors with the lightning port you can you're gonna get some really good resolutions some really good Uh performance out of those like right out of the box Right, right. I have got three of them on my desk here. I've got the surface book surface book 2 Uh surface laptop 3 and my old surface pro Uh surface pro 3 That is just kind of like a it's almost like an extra monitor. It sits on my desk and kind of has a Microsoft learn tv on it all day I just keep track of what's what's going on and who's uh speaking So it's kind of cool So we're kind of looking forward to uh, these are going to be hitting they've been announced I'm not sure. I think they're already on the store I'm not sure if they're actually shipping just yet, but if you're interested go to microsoft.com and Check out the store And our last for a minute or my where's my oh, there it is My mouse kind of got lost in the multiple monitors that I had here Uh our last item for today is uh, so about some disaster recovery Yes, so Last week we announced the jet stream Components for azure vm resolution. So it's in public preview. You could enable the jet stream I guess service or functionality within your environment And so what it does is it leans on v-sphere replication And it will handle Replicating vms either from on-premises into azure vm resolution or azure vm resolution in one region to another and it's ageless So that's why a lot of customers like this and there were enough customers where it made sense to sort of build this integration And what we're seeing is we're seeing a lot of great third-party integrations Coming into the mix, right? So we see that most uh closely with all the backup scenarios This is the first dr solution. That is truly a third-party solution We also have site recovery manager two That's vm wears flavor of disaster recovery leaning on v-sphere replication that reached ga a little earlier in the year But uh, but you know, it's we're trying to meet customers where they are So if you are a jet stream customer You now have an offering where you can plug that into an azure vm resolution environment And lean on the same tooling that you're used to leaning on when it comes to your on-premises environment Well, I I feel that It's a natural progression considering The companies that we're trying to to support with giving uh, or providing the the solution on azure They may be using their third-party or their partner solutions to help them out with backup in dr as you mentioned So it's just a natural progression to say, okay Well, you all of you are using this so we're going to enable it in azure So that you can keep doing the work the way you've been doing it Right, right and that way it frees up. So prior to all of these services You had to sort of embrace ias at first or has and that's a hard proposition if you're used to your vm wear Ecosystem on-premises. Yes, it's sort of prolongs the inevitable But it also allows you to take on skilling at a time that makes sense for your company And I think that's the biggest biggest differentiator if you want to think about it that way, right? You don't have to learn about an azure ias vm first thing You can just have your vm's live in v-sphere on-premises Replicated into azure vm or solution have your whole ecosystem with backup and dr Taking care of and then you can start to pick apart and learn the technologies to help you Continue forward with your digital transformation. So it gets interesting Yeah, and and once you're in the position where you've got your vm wear on-prem And you've got your vm wear in an azure solution For your dr backup, whatever or just because of the expansion of your your your footprint And then you start deploying other workloads that are native to azure in terms of ias or paths They tie in really well with what you've already got in in vm wear. Yes. Yes, correct Yeah, so it's kind of like achievement unlocked, right? You beat a hard box. You've got everything in the azure faster and And now you're closer to the arm apis. So you can do things like You know, you can you can extend what you're doing. You can integrate with different third party Well, that's right third party different azure native services So you can start to think about expanding what you know and sort of embracing different azure services And learning about it versus drinking from the fire hose first thing, right? That's not a fun proposition I think a lot of customers were like I had to learn all this new stuff and and No, no, no, you don't but you probably still want to learn about the new stuff But you don't have to learn it as fast as you did if you didn't have a vm wear environment to move everything to Yeah, and andrew has a good comment in the chat saying that the dr and business continuity planning is often overlooked And out of date And a lot of organization Oh, yeah, and you you think about it when you're in a bad spot You're like, oh, what a made sense to plan for this before this disaster happened, right? That's always the way it works before I came back to To advocacy I was customer facing with microsoft and we did a review of an organization and i'm not going to name them because I don't want to shame them publicly Uh, and they failed the audit and it was not like a licensing audit. It was really a supportability audit And they failed the audit for one reason is they had no business continuity plan or disaster recovery plan Yeah, so when I got called into the director's office to, uh, discuss my findings So that was ominous, uh to start with so I would go all go in there and he's like Oh, what are you talking about? We failed this and I have to put that up to my boss and he's not going to be happy That we failed the supportability audit and I said, well You, uh, you identified all of the leads of all of your, um A circle of excellence in in your environment. So like all the the identity the security the networking And none of them had any idea about through the interviews in the in the review process. None of them had any idea about your Um disaster recovery he goes we have a plan And I said really? And he literally and I kid you not turned around Grabbed a binder out of his bookshelf blew the dust off the top And said here it is We spent a lot of money for a consultant to set that up for us, but nobody had ever read it Oh Oh, yeah, and I've I've worked for those companies and you're like, wow So you spent all this money for somebody to write this document that nobody's implementing Yeah, that's a hard one. That's a hard one. And if the guys that are supposed to be Taking care of a disaster don't know about the plan and have never practiced it It's not a plan, right It's a pipe dream an idea. It's just an idea at this point, right? Yeah, the only one that only like one or two people know about right so that's right Uh, so let's move on with uh the rest of our show because we've got uh five minutes left to go We you have some events coming up next week I do So first things first. I wanted to give a shout out to shabazz dar and I think I'm saying his last name correctly as well We are building out an abs zero to hero series. He did something very similar for abd I always want to say w vd and so look for that. We are in the process of filming that. Uh, so I suspect it will launch Probably maybe middle of october and the episodes will launch weekly So we'll start to give some amplification as we get a little closer to that point I will be doing a live stream with vmware next tuesday Um, and I think I've given you the youtube link. Yep. I'm putting it up right now You will uh show up and so this this is shabazz is uh our shabazz is a uh YouTube channel and then the vmware based one it will show up on youtube I believe they broadcast via youtube and facebook I have not yet figured out exactly where the facebook pieces are So I know the the youtube shows up here and so i'm live in four days I'll be showcasing some high level demos with azure bill more solution like how to deploy it how to integrate it With different azure services. So if you have time next week, uh, it'll be 12 10 central So it's 110 by pier and um if you can't catch it live It will be available on demand in short order I think it takes them like maybe a half a day or a day to get it up into their queue of all their videos And then from there i'm doing a cloud lunch and learn next wednesday and I think hugo has been Playing point on that front hugo and lisa clark. So they're the ones that reach out to me And it will be at 12 o'clock next wednesday So i'm not sure all of the right ways to grab the URLs to showcase But I know that a lot of folks have been watching the cloud lunch and learns So um, and if you're you know, lisa if you're watching or hugo if you're watching Or even dwayne natwick knows too They could possibly even add a comment and i'm not sure exactly where everything gets broadcast I just know that i'm going to be joining them next wednesday to go through some of that. Well, uh Shannon you're gonna uh, I so I didn't see those before I posted the the the blog article on it Don't worry So I will edit the blog post and I'll put these URLs in so if you're interested in any of these events aka dot mess slash az update And uh, you'll get all of the information as soon as I can put it up there Nice. Well, thank you. I didn't I forget that we do the blog posts as well for some of these shows So I was just thinking about that. I was looking at my calendar late yesterday and I'm like, oh gosh, I forgot about these So um, so yeah, so apologies for getting them in the the one note a little late Oh, no worries. No worries at all and uh To conclude our show this week. We have our normal Learn module of the week and for that Uh, we picked this week in honor of your illustrious presence The run vmware workloads on azure vmware solution because you wrote it I did I wrote it in conjunction with uh with with pumala So there are three different modules in here. The first one introduces the service The second module showcases everything you need to know about deployment And then the third module is how to build out and migrate workloads from on premises So it'll take you through the solution It's not like a lot of other learn modules where you get a sandbox But you get the sort of guided tutorial of how to set it up So if you've got an environment and you are able to get azure vmware solutions showing up in your world You could walk through this and get a get you know familiarity with how this gets deployed inside of a subscription That is wonderful. Actually, uh, I have to admit that I have never really been a vmware person Uh, but I have did put this one in my to-do list because I'm interested In learning a bit more about it Yeah at vmwares, I think how I uh, well a lot of us sort of cut our proverbial teeth, right? You know hyper v when hyper v was around back in the 2008 era It didn't share resources the same way that vmware did and so a lot of customers started with vmware I never really evolved towards hyper v. I feel like hyper v eventually got to where it was very much So like for like but at that point customers were so Into the world of vmware that it was hard to kind of pull them out into the hyper v realm So, um, you're you're not alone by any stretch of the definition. There's so many people who spent more time in the microsoft stack Yep, so All right, so we are at the end. That's been 30 minutes already Shannon. I it blew by It did so if people want to get a hold of you, where can they find you? Uh, so i'm on twitter my twitter handle shows up at the uh bottom of my little Video us and then linkedin linkedin's another spot to grab me as well Those are the two areas that I tend to communicate very, uh, very regularly with folks in the community Folks that are interested in trying to make sense of azure and you know, azure vmware solution has been something I've been focused on but I also know a lot about azure in general because prior to this role I was a an architect helping big enterprises embrace the cloud. So, um, so yeah, so you know either linkedin or twitter Okay, perfect and I have been and always shall be at wired knuck And both of us are also active on our discord server. So if you uh want to uh start a conversation Come and see us there And with that being said, thank you so much for spending the morning with us. Sure. Thank you for having me It's great. I've always had I always have a great time talking to you. You're funny And uh with all of you out there stay safe and we'll see you next week. Sounds good