VMUGBE, the annual VMware User Group event in Belgium, is the place to be for consultants and engineers who love VMware and virtualization technologies.
This year’s edition was opened by Erik Schils, VMUGBE leader, with great news: a 10% increase of enrollments compared to last year, bringing the total to 225 participants. That’s the way to start the day!
ITQ was Platinum sponsor this year, and so where our friends from VMware. And the ITQ team was determined to make it an unforgettable day.
But first, there was the opening keynote by the one and only Joey Baguley, VP & CTO of VMware EMEA. And Joey made a few statements, like only Joey can: ‘All cloud architecture choices have their place: IaaS – CaaS – PaaS – FaaS – SaaS. And the higher up the chain, the more “infrastructure” is a dirty word. Also, the skinnier the jeans and the funnier the hat.’
But also: ‘Automation is no longer an optimization, but a design requirement.’ This is a very important statement, we at ITQ can perfectly relate to. Automation projects are the heart of what we do, and require proper architecture and design to be successful.
The afternoon keynote was presented by our own Johan Van Amersfoort, aka the Bearded VDI Junkie (vhojan.nl, @vhojan) and author of last year’s bestseller ‘The VDI Design Guide’. Johan presented a unique story that shows the power of technology on one hand, and how technology can be used as a force for good on the other hand. Johan explained how we are helping a research institute use VMware technologies to support medical research, by vMotioning compute power, as it were, to support different use cases: ‘VDI by day, compute by night’. Although this sounds easy, it is pretty complex and various roadblocks needed to be bypassed in an ingenious way.
Also great to see was the interest in the Community session, presented by Stijn Depril. The objective was to motivate participants to step up and become a vExpert. The Belgian vExpert initiative was launched exactly a year ago at VMUGBE 2018, and dynamism and enthusiasm have been growing significantly ever since (read more about the initiative here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/vexperts-vbeers-real-fun-tom-vallons/). During the second half of the session, Stijn asked a panel of vExperts, Maarten Van Driessen, Harold Preyers and myself, what drives us to be a vExpert and why we feel it is important and valuable to participate in an active and growing community. ‘Because there are many people, passionate about VMware technologies in Belgium, who have different opinions and interesting experiences to share with each other. Sharing knowledge is making everybody better!’
And several vExperts also delivered presentations at this year’s VMUG : Frederiek Van Hoornick and Maarten Caus (Workspace ONE, the intelligent driven workspace), Maarten Van Driessen (Unlocking the power of SPBM with traditional storage arrays), Stijn Depril (Operationalize vSAN and the vExpert Community Session), Luc Dekens (PowerCLI : the power of code) and I already mentioned Johan Van Amersfoort’s keynote and the vExpert panel (Maarten Van Driessen, Harold Preyers, Tom Vallons). Last but not least: Erik Schils, VMUGBE leader, is also vExpert.
During the entire day, there was a lot of activity by the ITQ team at the ITQ VMware Expert Bar as well. José Cavalheri (also a vExpert!) demoed the value of VMware vRealize Automation and positioned the community tool vROAST (check out https://www.vroast.io/blog/) to facilitate using VMware vRealize Orchestrator.
At the booth, we also demoed the game Unreal Tournament, running on a VDI environment, powered by NVIDIA GPUs, 250 kms away, on an Igel thin client. Always nerding out, when they get the chance, this ITQ crew!
In short, VMUGBE 2019 was awesome.
Stay tuned, an after movie will be released soon on the ITQ Consultancy Youtube channel.
Make sure to mark your agenda and enroll for next year’s edition, somewhere in June 2020.
The ITQ team will be there as well. For sure!
Tom
