VMware - Work Here. Transform Everywhere.

If you'd like to work with VMware, check out our latest openings at https://rolp.co/PSHBg

Life at VMware Pune

Last month marked completion of my 4 years tenure at VMware. And I must say that it has been an exciting and rewarding journey all throughout this time in our Pune office. At VMware getting opportunity to work on products which are leading or transforming industries is the norm. However I feel extra fortunate to be part of the NSBU R&D team here. In the last 4 years the NSX product line developed by NSBU has seen tremendous customer adoption and is considered as the new growth engine for VMware by the senior leadership in Palo Alto. Again, I feel proud that the NSX Edge VPN software developed by my team is an integral part of the backbone that enables cloud hybridity for our customers since the launch of VMC services (VMware Cloud on AWS). Another thing that impresses me most about working at VMware is how much innovation happens in-house. I had earlier written about Innovation at VMware and the list of innovation opportunities keeps on growing...

Borathon India 2016 Winners

Keeping the interesting innovation and challenging work stuff aside, there is a lot happening at VMware all the time. And I am happy to be involved in a lot of great stuff that happens here other than the daily work. The two aspects that I wish to highlight here are Service Learning and Employee Engagement.

I have been a firm believer of Giving Back to the society having engaged in social service activities for more that 15 years with the Art of Living Foundation. And I am glad that VMware's motives align well with those of mine. I have never seen more emphasis on Technology - Force for Good in my entire career with the for-profit corporate world. See the latest news about VMware achieving carbon neutrality 2 years ahead of the targeted goal!

Last week I participated in an Open Source Global Borathon (VMware's version of a Hackathon) whereby folks from various offices of VMware formed teams and contributed to open source projects of their choice - with no benefit for VMware in it.
Employees are also encouraged to participate in technology events outside of VMware such as the Smart India Hackathon organized by Government of India and Grass Hopper India events for women technologists to give back to the society using their professional skills. Not to forget that this year's India edition of Borathon was based on the theme of Sustainability!

The Service Learning scene at VMware Pune is ever budding. Every year we are actively engaged with half a dozen non-profits selected by the employees during the annual Foundation Day. This year we have Akshar Bharti, Being Volunteer, IDEA Foundation, Seva Sahayog amongst the most active engagements, and in the past we have had great partnerships with Akanksha, CASP, NFBM, SEDT, etc. As a core member of the VMware Foundation team I act as POC for a couple of non-profits viz. Akshar Bharti and IAHV. There are quarterly service learning events organized on-campus with non-profits like Akshar Bharti and NFBM to provide employees with in-house service learning opportunities during office hours. The other one-off in-house activities include school-kit assembly, solar-lamp assembly, scientific toy-making workshops, all of which are then delivered to needy students in and around Pune. We also have books and clothes donation drives in our office on a regular basis. And then there are outdoor service learning events such as tree plantations and conducting classroom training in nearby schools happening once in a while.

Service Learning Activity at VMware Pune with Akshar Bharati 

Apart from these there is a fund-raising expo with our panel non-profits during Diwali every year. And every year the employees contribute generously to gift all the office staff a Diwali present. On the CSR front, every year company funds social projects of a few non-profits of the employees' choice, and every once in a while employees are given an opportunity to nominate a non-profit of their choice for a grant from company. I'm delighted to share that this year I was able to complete 40 hours of service learning, and as a result was given the opportunity to recommend $1000 grant to a non-profit of my choice! Who says IT engineers are busy coding all the time and have no time and concern for the social good?

VMware Pune Foundation Team during Diwali Charity Drive 

VMware Pune team is an extremely talented pool of engineers. No wonder, as they are handpicked from the best of educational institutions in the country and lateral-hired from top companies such as Cis.. you get it :-) In the extra-curricular department, we have an active football team and not so active cricket team and a slightly dormant music band as well! We have a bunch of sports events happening throughout the year organized completely by our employees. This year I tried my luck in the badminton competition, was a member of the winning football team, and organized a chess tournament in our office. Thanks to VMware's fitness program many employees attend Yoga sessions sponsored by the company within office or at the Prana Yoga Studio within the office building.

Inauguration Match of Chess Tournament 2018

There is also an enthusiastic VMware trekking group, and every year I go on treks and run in local marathons with my team mates. Our team outings to nearby adventure parks are always loaded with high energy and fun. All events at VMware are amazingly well organized thanks to the super energetic admin Sophiya and the ever supporting site head Nitesh who are equally well supported by all the directors and mangers in Pune. In October this year we had a great event to celebrate the 20th anniversary of VMware and 10th anniversary of our Pune office. The stories shared by some of the early employees of VMware Pune during the history quiz in this event provided some interesting trivia. To wrap it up I think that VMware is a great place to work and the list of reasons abound :-)

Our Team @ 20th Anniversary Celebrations 

Quick News Flash...

Happy Holi Friends...

0. Had the time of my life earlier this month at the World Cultural Festival in Delhi, India. Feeling fortunate to be part of an event of such an unprecedented magnitude. Look out this space for more on this biggest celebration on the planet so far...

1. Launched my tech blog at WordPress starting this year at https://networkingthoughts.wordpress.com/
Check out this page where I maintain the list of hot SDN/NFV and Cloud startups on my radar: https://networkingthoughts.wordpress.com/sandys-sdn-cloud-hot-startups-list/

2. Started executing on my personal technical skill set upgrade plan of the year. The top skills on my priority list at this moment are Python & GO programming languages and POX & OpenDaylight SDN controllers on top of KVM/OVS.

3. Preparation is in full swing for the upcoming Borathon on the theme of MultiCloud... Happy to get the VM instances up & running in AWS EC2, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure. IBM Softlayer and VMware vCloud Air VMs are in the making at the moment.

What are the interesting things you are working on these days?

OVS/OVN Tech talk by Ben Pfaff at VMware Pune

Last week Ben Pfaff was among the folks from VMware HQ in Palo Alto visiting our Pune R&D office. Ben is a Principal Engineer in Networking & Security Business Unit, involved in development of the same product line which I work on at VMware. Ben came on board when VMware acquired the SDN startup Nicira Networks backin 2012. In case you didn't know the founders of Nicira such as Martin Casado are the inventors of SDN which is transforming the networking industry since last couple of years. Ben has been a lead developer of OVS project and recently Ben's paper on Open vSwitch won the Best Paper award at NSDI. He was kind enough to speak to the tech community in Pune on the topics of Open vSwitch and Open Virtual Network. It's kind of interesting how the idea of this talk came to life...

      

Off late I have started following twitter handles of the key players including Ben, involved in VMWare NSX and the Network Virtualization industry in general. So when I saw Ben's tweet on OvsCon 2015 about the OVS goodies he has, I asked him if he can send them over to Pune so that I could use them in evangelizing the project locally in the industry as well as academia. Within a few minutes came Ben's reply that he is scheduled to fly to Pune next week and will handover the goodies to me that time. It was pleasant surprise to me given that it was something like 2:00 AM in PA at that time. Ben showed a keen interact to interact with the students in Pune academic circles which I am associated with i.e. engineering colleges such as PICT, COEP, SIT, etc. where I either teach as a guest lecturer, guide under-grad systems projects or provide assistance to their campus hiring initiatives. Since the colleges are having winter vacations at the time, I gave Ben the option of doing a talk for the OpenStack community in Pune and I volunteered to organize the same! With that began the preparation to host the talk at Vmware in a week's time...

The channels used to contact the prospective interested folks included popular social media channels such as focused LinkedIn groups, Google plus announcements, facebook posts, tweets, google forms etc. The other way used to reach out to the audiences was through the VMware employees who had connections in the companies working in the domain of networking & virtulazation such as Red Hat, Cisco Systems, Calsoft, Intel, etc. Unfortunately the option of announcing OpenStack meetup did not work out in time, so we weren't sure how many folks would actually turn up for the talk on such a short notice, even though it was a free talk at a central location in Pune. With one day left for the talk, I had only about 25 confirmations in hand and so was wondering if we would have the hall full or empty or half full & half empty ;-)

Fortunately whatever little campaigning and praying we did in the whatever small amount of time we had paid off, and around 50 folks reached the venue to fill up the hall to its capacity! Ben's talk was great as usual and I noticed that he made significant changes to the slides he presented to the internal VMware audience to make it more suitable for the open source project community. Also this talk was more focused on OVN rather than OVS which he had covered in his presentation to VMware R&D team. Overall the talk was well received and there was a lot of post-talk interaction and networking before everyone left the venue. Here are a couple of picture of the event thanks to our in-house director of innovation, Girish Mujumdar...

If you missed this talk but wanted to learn more about OVN, then check out the video of a similar talk given by the OVN team at the last OpenStack summit in Vancouver in May 2015...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kEzXTq2fPDg

Happy holidays and a wishing you a happy new year in advance!!!

Flying... sorry, falling from 15,000 feet in the sky

In India, working for IT MNCs is usually associated with hi-tech work, flexible / long work hours, and the most important of all fat salary packages. Apart from these attributes there is the possibility of an all-expenses-paid foreign trip to some of the dream destination countries such as US, UK & France. At times such business travel is required for visiting clients if you happen to be in a services company like Infy. And some times it is done for collaborating with the cross-geo team mates if you happen to be in product companies like Cisco & VMware. The later was the case with me after I joined VMware from Cisco last year! I had a chance to visit the company HQ in Palo Alto, California for a couple of weeks in April this year. Since I had visited the same part of valley i.e. San Francisco bay area for more than a couple of times before, there were not many places of interest left to visit on my list. I have seen most of the popular tourist spots in the beautiful city of San Francisco, spent great weekend times at the wonderful Disneyland and Hollywood studios in Los Angeles and driven down the scenic roads down the pacific coast for hours. So this time I wanted to do something different, that kind of experience which is hard to get locally and that which you can not do when you are travelling with family :-) Thus having see the ZNMD movie, the idea of doing sky diving was born in my mind!

A bit of research on the internet revealed a good sky diving school in the bay area and the weekend spot registration over a phone call was real quick. The dent was 300 bucks for a 15K feet fall + 75 bucks for personal video shoot. After I shared the idea with my co-traveler colleagues from Pune, one of them got excited and signed up for this adventurous experience of a life time. So the next day we made reservations with the folks at Sky Dive Monterey Bay over the phone. We set out on a Sunday morning hoping that the weather conditions would be perfect, and reached the Marina airport to find a large group of enthusiasts already queued up take take jumps in batches of 5/10. After completing the paper work, each of us was assigned an instructor and a cameraman and we were briefed by a 60 year old veteran skydiver on how it is done. While the other batches were flown up & dropped down in front of us throughout the morning, we decided to grab a quick lunch at the nearby town and were happy to find a great family run mexican deli where we ate sumptuous portions of nachos and fajitas. After coming back to the base camp at the airport we were taken to the air strip by a bus where we waited to board the mini plane which was continuously making trips to throw people out of its belly every half an hour. It was fun to watch the expressions of the folks who landed after the dive in the lawn in front of our sitting area. Finally our turn came and before we knew the plane was in the air ready for the drop out.

My instructor Jason Inamura was a cool man whereas the video shooter was a super enthusiastic person. Both were jumping out of the plane 10 times a day, but each of them had a different air of personality around them. One common thing between them and all of the jump masters doing the tandem jump was the fact that they were enjoying their jobs to the fullest. As the red light in the back of the plane went off and the green light glowed, I could sense that the moment of truth had arrived. I was the 2nd person to get thrown out of the fuselage as the speed of the plain appeared as if it was coming to a standstill. We quickly walked to the exit door and off we jumped in a jiffy. And man what a view it was!!! On one side there was the serene blue water sparking up to the edge of the infinity and on the other side there were lush green farms in all sorts of shapes giving way to tiny lines of roads connecting herds of villages spread across the landscape.

Those 60 seconds were some of the most magical moments of my life. Floating out there like a bird with no worries just taking in the view was something I can't explain in words. The only sad part was that just like the instructor had said earlier during the briefing, the fall did not last long and Jason pulled the trigger right when I had started enjoying the views after giving a few poses to the cameraman who was continuously circling around us. The rest of the journey down as pretty fast as Jason got me ready for the landing. He even gave the control of the flight in my hands which was a unique experience watching the flight turn left & right with just a tilt of hands on either sides. The landing was much smoother than expected and the cameraman was there ready to cache my experience in the disk. Overall it was an out of the world experience worth every penny spent. And I would love to do it again on the next opportunity with my wife wanting to jump out with me this time :-) So here it is the flight that lasted not so long...