Updated: April 2025 - NT.B v2.0
Welcome to NotThe.Blog v2.0! This marks the shift of the blog to a new hosting platform just in time for lots of content to do with the impending launch of VMware Cloud Foundation v9.0 (VCF9) and its adoption by our Cloud Service Provider partners. You can read more about the new hosting platform in more about v2.0 if you’re interested.
NotThe.Blog (NT.B or, inconsistently NTB) is a personal blog covering virtualisation (mostly VMware) written by me, Steve Dockar. The blog’s name comes from the famous Obi-Wan Kenobi “These are not the droids you are looking for…” quote from Star Wars Episode IV. In the movie, Obi-Wan is using The Force to distract some StormTroopers from seeing Luke’s droids. In this case, unless you know this is the Blog you’re looking for, you can, most probably, safely move along, without needing to check its identification papers…
I’m a Cloud Solutions Architect at VMware (by Broadcom) by day, and have the pleasure of working closely with both Cloud Provider Partners and VMware’s own Product Development teams. This gives me the opportunity to write about topics of (hopefully) interest from things I work on with existing, and new, products and solutions alike. The views expressed in the blog are, as you’d expect, my own, and don’t necessarily reflect the views of my employer.
Updated: Jan 2024 - VMware by Broadcom
Since the completion of the acquisition of VMware, by Broadcom, there have been a number of important changes for VMware’s customers, partners and staff. Much of the content on this blog refers to my work at VMware and is shared for the benefit of the site’s readers. Broadcom’s Social Media policy is a fair document which allows for personal freedom of speech while at the same time requiring that posts from authors identifying themselves as Broadcom employees adhere to entirely reasonable professional and ethical standards. The older posts already meet those criteria, and as such won’t see any re-branding or re-editing but please be aware things may have changed since they were originally written. Major changes are likely to result in some “update” posts which will link to/from the originals.
Updated: May 20th 2021
While it’s been quiet on the blog during that year, at work things have not. I changed roles within VMware a few months ago, and now spend my time supporting Oracle Cloud’s Oracle Cloud VMware Solution (OCVS). I still get to spend my time working with customers and partners, but now with both VMware and Oracle’s Product Development teams as well. As a consequence, you might see more OCVS and OCI posts appearing on NT.B.
..two countries divided by a common language.
I live in the UK, but, as both VMware (by Broadcom) and our corporate website are based in the US, I write a lot in what I think is US-English [en-US]. In the past, there was a real technical author there to review what I hacked together, but here on NT.B, in the posts themselves, I have to fly without that particular safety net. That means that although I try to be consistent, you may stumble across a the odd stray UK-English (en-GB) spelling, phrase or other sundry corruption - Mea Culpa! / My bad!
If you did decide to stay and check the site’s identification papers, welcome! I hope you find what you read here entertaining and, occasionally, useful too. If you want to get in touch, you’ll find my contact details on the… err… contact page.