ITQ was represented BIG yesterday at the Dutch NLVMUG USERCON 2015 event in the beautiful Brabanthallen Congrescentrum 1931 in Den Bosch. What a great venue and what a great day. As always the event was very well and professionally organised. If you can’t make it to VMworld this is definitely the next best thing. A big, centralised expo where all the NLVMUG sponsors had the opportunity to display their products and services and a mixture of larger and smaller rooms where all the NLVMUG content was delivered. The opening keynote by Joe Baguley – CTO of VMware NEMEA – was great. An inspiring keynote – with a good doses of humor – on the big changes in IT which are taking place right now. Time flew by and that is a good thing when listening to a speaker on stage!
I attended a couple of break-out sessions throughout the day. My colleagues Christiaan Roeleveld and Dennis Hoegen Dijkhof delivered a breakout session on continious integration and continious deployment. Chris released some teaser pictures of a big red magic button on Twitter the last couple of weeks: what does this button do? Turns out, Chris set up a live demo where he could deploy a complete CoreOS cluster with Docker containers running a webapplication, including a HAProxy loadbalancer from scratch(!) with only the press of a button. He chained several webservices together and vRealize Orchestrator was used to tie everything together. With each press of the button, a new webserver node was added to the cluster. A great demo which showed the true power and endless potential of automation!
Rob Groenhuis from VMware Netherlands did a flyby on all the new stuff in vShpere 6.0, which was recently released. I think Rob did a pretty good job on touching all the new features but of course time did not allow him to go very deep in all the new stuff. This also was the case with the VSAN and VVOLs deepdive by Jan Smit, also from VMware Netherlands. Because this session was announced as a deepdive, I have to admit that I was a bit disappointed that Jan did not pick up the speed some more so he could dive a bit deeper in the technical bits and bytes of these very cool new storage features. I recommend you keep an eye out for in-depth articles on the ITQ website in the near future. If you have any specific questions on vSphere 6.0, VVOLs or VSAN, please drop me or one of my colleagues at ITQ a line.
The second keynote of the day by Joseph Oebelkas was a great surprise. What a story this guy has! Amazing how he was able to find inspiration and the strength to deal with life when it hit him in the head with a brick. He was innocently imprisoned in a Moroccan prison for over four years but came out stronger in the end. An inspiring story that really left an impact. I recommend you Google this guy to find out more about his unbelievable story and the books he wrote about it. On a sidenote: big kudos to the NLVMUG organization for choosing such a motivational keynote right after lunch. Everyone in the room was listening intently to Jospeph en I think everyone left the room with a lot of energy. Great choice!
There were lots of other breakout sessions and bootcamps so I suggest you have a look at the NLVMUG website where undoubtedly NLVMUG USERCON 2015 content will be released shortly.
I would like to thank the NLVMUG organisation, and of course my direct colleagues Arjan Timmerman en Dennis Hoegen Dijkhof in particular, for organising yet another great event. I’m already looking forward to next years edition!
