A lot of people had been waiting for this day. The Dutch VMUG Event, 12 December 2008! Over 500 people showed up, which is a great turn-up for such a small country. Not only was the place packed, the event was well organized. I want to thank the organization for all the hard work they’ve put into this event.
VMug is all about the Users and sharing knowledge so let’s talk about the sessions:
Viktor van den Berg kicked off welcoming everyone. Unfortunately I had to miss out on most of his presentation cause I needed to help out getting the VMware Demo Kit running. Richard Garsthagen was invited as the keynote speaker. Many of you know Richard of Run-Virtual.com but he is actually the guy with the coolest job title within VMware: Senior Evangelist. Richard talked about the future direction: Cloud Computing, vApp, VMsafe and more. He’s famous for his enthusiastic presentations and I think everyone will agree with me on this one.
Up next was John Spiers. John is one of the founders of Lefthand Networks. As you probably guessed he talked about the Virtual San Appliance but also about all the cool features that are included with Lefthand iSCSI SANs. Although it was a tough presentation to digest I do think Lefthand(HP) has got a great line-up of products and offers a lot of value. Advanced features like Storage Clustering, Network RAID, Thin Provisioning, Snapshots and Remote Copy are included in all of their solutions.
The famous Eric Sloof of ntpro.nl started his presentation on Powershell a bit to early so he did the “welcome” part twice. I can really understand why cause Eric is really really enthusiastic about Powershell. He’s so enthusiastic that it actually doesn’t matter what he’s talking about, he knows how to work the crowd. Don’t get me wrong, Eric created a great presentation which included several demo’s. Interaction, that’s what we Admins, Consultants and Engineers love to see! Great job Eric, but I didn’t expect anything less.
Lunch, well what can I say about the lunch besides the fact that it was sponsored by Vizioncore. Thanks guys.
Frederik Vos had the tough job to start his presentation when everyone was still digesting their lunch. Frederik talked about storage. NFS, iSCSI, Fibre and even FCoE. Why would you use iSCSI or NFS and when. Frederik is a really knowledgeable guy and I think that a lot of people enjoyed his session!
Next session that I had decided to join was Bouke’s session on the “vCenter Database”. Unfortunately Bouke was stuck in traffic so I decided to check the Site Recovery Manager session. Bob van der Werff(VMware) was scheduled but he called in sick and Jeremy van Doorn(VMware) took his spot. Site Recovery Manager is really simple to install, but there are still a lot of things that can go wrong during the implementation and that’s exactly what Jeremy addressed during this presentation. During the SRM presentation I noticed on twitter that Gabe(GabesVirtualWorld) was asked to do his presentation on Hyper-V vs ESX because there seemed to be some confusion on wheter Bouke would make it or not. I decided to switch rooms and watched the last 10 minutes of his presentation. Respect for doing this without a decent preparation, great job Gabe.
Last session I visited was about VIMSH. Viktor van den Berg, one of the main contributors of the Dutch VMug, was presenting. VIMSH is one of the most powerful tools in my opinion and Viktor displayed this during his presentation and demonstrations. Adding vSwitches, configuring iSCSI, configuring VMotion and even creating VMFS volumes… it’s possible with VIMSH / vmware-vim-cmd. Great job Viktor and Frederik. (Frederik answered a whole bunch of questions at the end cause Viktor had to close the event)
Like I said, Viktor had the honor to welcome us all but also the honor to thank everyone for showing up and making this Event and the VMug forum a great success. All there’s left to say is nice to meet all of you and thanks again for putting so much time and effort into this Event.
Eric Sloof says
Hi Duncan,
Many thanks for your review. 🙂
Eric Sloof