VMUG Romania Archives

VMUG Romania – Race On

October 9, 2023October 9, 2023 Constantin Ghioc Leave a comment

On November 1st, the VMware community in Romania is shifting gears, quite literally! The VMUG Romania – Race On event promises an exhilarating fusion of knowledge sharing and adrenaline-pumping kart racing at the prestigious VMAX Karting in Bucharest.

Race On – Event Details

Date and Time: Wednesday, November 1 · 9am – 2:30pm EET
Location: VMAX Karting Bucuresti

Attendance is limited, so make sure to secure your spot by registering for the event here. Please note that participation in the entire event is a prerequisite for joining the karting session.

Race On – Agenda

08:30 – 09:00: Registration
09:00 – 09:05: Opening Remarks by VMUG Romania
09:05 – 09:50: Presentation by Cristian Stan, Pure Storage
09:50 – 10:00: Break
10:00 – 10:45: Presentation by Cornel Popescu, Veeam
10:45 – 11:15: Presentation by Adrian Birzu, Oracle
11:15 – 11:30: Break
11:30 – 12:30: Presentation by Cristian Radu, VMware
12:30 – 14:30: “Race On”

The Power of Community: A Personal Journey

October 2, 2023October 2, 2023 Constantin Ghioc Leave a comment

Communities hold a unique power. They bring together individuals with shared interests, creating spaces for learning, growth, and lasting friendships. Over the years, I’ve had the privilege of being a part of several vibrant communities that have enriched my life in countless ways. In this article, I’ll share my experiences with the Go community in Bucharest, Romania, my involvement in the VMware community, and my current role in Lenovo’s internship programs.

The Go Community: Close to 40 Years of Lasting Friendships

In the heart of Bucharest, Romania, I was 10 years old when I first stepped into the vibrant world of the Go community, drawn by a shared passion for this ancient Asian game. Beyond the strategic moves and intense competitions, what struck me most was the spirit of camaraderie that permeated every gathering. We weren’t just players; we were a tight-knit family, bound by a mutual love for the game.

Late-night discussions dissecting the nuances of each move and the jubilant celebrations of victories are vivid in my memory. These experiences forged bonds that have stood the test of time. Even now, after close to 40 years, I find myself reconnecting with those same friends, reminiscing about those moments that defined our shared history.

2022 – A Year Review in a Page

January 20, 2023January 20, 2023 Constantin Ghioc Leave a comment

A little late to this review party, but better late than sorry 🙂

If I would need to say in one word how was my 2022, I would probably say “Unexpected”.

VMUG Romania

Together with my colleagues Razvan and Mihai, we hosted three VMware User Group Romania meetings in 2022. We started early in the year, with an online meeting in February, sponsored by Pure Storage. Cristian Stan and Cristian Radu talked to us about VMware on FlashArray, Portworx as CSI orchestrator, and using Velero to backup a Tanzu cluster.

At the beginning of July 2022, we checked in at PointHub in Bucharest for a new meeting. Tanzu was the main speaking point, starting with the keynote speaker, Oren Penso, Field CISO at VMware Tanzu, and continuing with Kobi Shamama, Sales Director at VMware Tanzu, and Yaniv Norman, Senior Solution Engineer at VMware Tanzu. Cristian Radu And Adrian Lazar (both from VMware Romania) had a powerful conversation about journey to multi-cloud. I had my slot as well, talking about community power and about my journey from VMUG spectator to VMware Explore speaker.

Middle of October had us meet for the last time in 2022, in a special location, VMAX Karting track in Bucharest. Unfortunately Cormac Hogan, our keynote speaker, was not able to attend the event in person, so we had to stream him to the huge screen from the track. Cristian Radu told us about the news coming with vSphere 8, and then Razvan Ionescu, VMUG leader, told us a story from the beginning of the IT industry.

VMUG Romania Report – GPU, AI, and VMware News

February 16, 2020February 16, 2020 Constantin Ghioc Leave a comment

On February 11, 2020, at PointHub in the usual location, about 50 technology enthusiasts attended the first VMUG Romania meeting in 2020. We managed to start the year in force with two special guests, VCDX certified: Niels Hagoort (VMware) and Johan van Amersfoort (ITQ).

The winter edition of the VMUG Romania meeting was sponsored by:

VMware – Program Sponsor
Hewlett Packard Enterprise – Platinum Sponsor
Commvault – Gold Sponsor
Pure Storage – Gold Sponsor
Veeam – Silver Sponsor

Fighting Cancer with VMware Technology, GPUs, and ML – Niels Hagoort and Johan van Amersfoort

Niels Hagoort (VCDX # 212 and Technical Marketing Architect at VMware’s Cloud Platform Business Unit) together with Johan van Amersfoort (VCDX # 238, EUC Architect and Tech Marketing Manager at ITQ Consultancy) introduced us to a special world, that of the GPU devices. Johan started with a brief history of video games and the influence of GPUs. We listened stories about Doom (the Game) and Toy Story (the Movie), GeForce and Voodoo (the GPU cards), then switched to GPUs used for High Performance Computing (HPC), Machine Learning (ML) and Deep Learning (DL).

VMUG Romania Meeting – 11 February 2020

January 31, 2020January 31, 2020 Constantin Ghioc Leave a comment

VMUG Romania invites you to the next meeting held in Bucharest on 11th February 2020 in the same cool location, PointHub. I thought it will be interesting to have an informal name for each edition, so this will be “the 2 VCDX edition”.

This edition will be sponsored by:

VMware – Program Sponsor
Hewlett Packard Enterprise – Platinum Sponsor
Commvault – GoldSponsor
PureStorage – Gold Sponsor
Veeam – Silver Sponsor

The opening keynote will be held by Niels Hagoort and Johan von Amersfoort.

Keynote: Fighting Cancer with VMware Technology, GPUs, and ML

We will go into details about a medical research institution customer case that realized a way to discover and detect cancer cells in an early stage using photo analyses. We will demo how vSphere technology running a machine learning application utilizing GPUs helped to make this possible. In this session, we will explain the details about GPU architecture and elaborate on how VMware vSphere ESXi supports the usage of GPUs. Learn how you can benefit from GPU compute power when using machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) workloads.

VMUG Romania 2019 Review

December 7, 2019December 7, 2019 Constantin Ghioc Leave a comment

As one of the leaders of VMUG Romania, I thought it’s a good idea to have a sort of year review coming from the VMUG leaders, so here it it. For Romanian version, you can click here.

We are delighted that we managed to keep pace with 3 annual meetings and the fact that we managed to engage with more speakers from abroad: Joe Baguley (vice president and CTO EMEA VMware), Aylin Sali (CTO and founder of Runecast), Maciej Lelusz (CEO Inleo), Jacint Juhasz (VMware, ex-Alef / Netapp), Cormac Hogan (chief technologist VMware) and Todor Tsankov (Site Reliability Engineer at VMware). At the same time, we had a record number of participants in our activities, which honors us and for which we thank you!

February 12, 2019 – Spring VMUG

The first action of the year 2019 was the meeting on February 12 held at the Journey Pub in Bucharest. The sponsors of the event were DellEMC and Bitdefender. From the sponsors we had presentations covering hyper-converged solutions (The Power of Hyper-Converged – Cristian Stan, Dell EMC) and multi-cloud operations (Security automation, performance, and response across multiple VMware clouds – Gabriel Mazarache, Bitdefender). Cristian Radu, VMware, presented us a deep-dive session on NSX-V.

From the community side, the year was started in force, with 4 sessions: a new session from Victor Homocea dedicated to vSAN, a presentation on the management operations of vRealize Operations – Bogdan Mitu, Adobe, a scenario of ESXi servers migration presented by Corneliu Lefter, Neverfail, and finally a practical session of DCLI usage held by our colleague Mihai Huica, Orange. The event ended with a tasting of craft beer.

VMware vForum Romania 2019

November 25, 2019November 25, 2019 Constantin Ghioc Leave a comment

Wednesday 27 November 2019, Athenee Palace Hilton Hotel from Bucharest will host the biggest yearly VMware event from Romania, vForum Romania 2019.

The event will start with few global sessions:

Quo Vadis VMware, Colin Bannister, vice-president EMEA VMware
A story about yesterday & tomorrow – a glimpse on how technology will change the world, Valentina Frangu, Dell Technologies Romania
Build a secure and scalable Hybrid Cloud with HPE Synergy and VMware Cloud Foundation, Alexandru Vilcu, HPE Romania
Accelerating your cloud migration with VMware Cloud on AWS, Dragos Madarasan, AWS

Even better than last year, after the general sessions we will split in no less than tree tracks: Any Cloud, Any Application, Any Device; Software Defined Datacenter; and Hybrid Cloud.

Joe Baguley – Keynote Speaker at VMUG Romania July 2019

June 8, 2019June 8, 2019 Constantin Ghioc Leave a comment

Next meeting from VMUG Romania marks again some unexplored avenues: Joe Baguley, Vice-President and CTO EMEA at VMware, will be the keynote speaker of the event. Two more speakers from the international VMware community will attend the meeting.

Save the date announcement was already sent to the VMUG community, for a full day event on 18th July 2019 at Point Hub, Bucharest. You can already register on the event page.

The day will start at about 10:00 in the morning with the keynote speech from Joe Baguley. Joe will talk about the latest trends in application and infrastructure evolution. He will also talk about VMware directions in research and development area. Joe is a fantastic speaker, don’t lose the opportunity to meet him face to face in Bucharest! If you never listen to Joe before, you can head to VMware Carpool Tech Talk post and check last two episodes: Joe Baguley and Rory Choudhuri discuss their early years in IT and how times have changed; they then talk about electric cars (check their verdict!).

VMUG Romania February Meeting Report

March 29, 2019March 29, 2019 Constantin Ghioc Leave a comment

On 12 February 2019, VMUG Romania held its first meeting of this year in one of the best location we have seen so far: Journey Pub in Bucharest. More than 50 persons attended the full-day event. Two records here, one for the number of participants and the other for the event duration. Dell EMC and Bitdefender were the sponsors of this meeting.

My fellow leaders made me the honor of opening the meeting. After my short introduction, Razvan Ionescu made the announcement of the year in my opinion: the keynote speaker for VMUG Romania next meeting on 11 June 2019 will be Joe Baguley, VP and CTO VMware EMEA. Joe is an inspiring speaker, I’m confident we will have a lot to learn from him. You can watch Joe in few episodes of VMware Carpool Tech Talk. Mihai Huica then introduced a new tool we used for gathering feedback from audience.

VMUG Romania February Meeting

January 26, 2019January 29, 2019 Constantin Ghioc Leave a comment

Four months after the previous VMUG Romania meeting, we invite you to a new event dedicated to VMware technologies. Journey Pub in Bucharest will be our host for 12 February 2019. We will have presentation sessions, demos, networking and hopefully some interesting announcements.

This is the first full-day meeting for VMUG Romania, so be patient till the end for a non-virtual craft beer tasting session.

Next to VMware presentation (Cristian Radu – “Deep Dive VMware NSX-V”) and those of the sponsors Dell EMC (Cristian Stan – The Power of Hyper-Converged) and Bitdefender (Gabriel Mihai Mazarache – Security automation, performance, and response across multiple VMware clouds), we will have no less then 4 community sessions.

Tag: VMUG Romania