Tag: VMUG

2022 - a year review in a page

2022 – A Year Review in a Page

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.

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VMware Explore US 2022

VMware Explore – Confessions of a First-Time Speaker

Constantin Ghioc Leave a comment

2022 felt like a rollercoaster to me, in part due to an unexpected event. On August 30, in a big room from Moscone West, San Francisco, I presented my first session in a VMware Explore / VMworld conference: “Accelerate Time to Business Value and Achieve Faster Deployment with Lenovo ThinkAgile VX Deployer”, #MCLB1601US.This was an intense experience, so I feel that telling the story of a first-time presenter at Explore will be something interesting to my readers.

Wow! VMware Explore US

Close to the end of April 2022, answering an internal Lenovo call, I got the opportunity to submit a proposal for a VMware Explore session. Beginning of May, I submitted my proposal: a title no longer then 75 characters and a description no longer than 850 characters. I knew getting a session accepted is hard, so I got close to no hope of moving on to the next phase.

The morning of June 23 came with a big surprise:

Dear Constantin,
Congratulations! We are happy to announce that your session(s) has/have been accepted for VMware Explore 2022 US taking place at Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, CA from August 29 – September 1st, 2022.

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VMUG Romania February 11 2020

VMUG Romania Report – GPU, AI, and VMware News

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).

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11 February 2020

VMUG Romania Meeting – 11 February 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.

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VMUG Romania

VMUG Romania 2019 Review

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.

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VMUG Romania February Meeting

Joe Baguley – Keynote Speaker at VMUG Romania July 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.

Joe Baguley
Joe Baguley

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!).

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VMUG Romania

VMUG Romania February Meeting Report

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.

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VMUG Romania February Meeting

VMUG Romania February Meeting

Constantin Ghioc Leave a comment
Dell EMC

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.

Bitdefender

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.

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VMUG Romania October Meeting Report

Constantin Ghioc Leave a comment

Better late than never, so here it is the report for VMUG Romania latest meeting. On 16th October, 35 guests attended the last VMUG Romania meeting of the year. We held our meeting in the beautiful offices of our sponsor, Veeam. This meeting we added a new feature to our meeting: at the request of few remote colleagues, we streamed live on Facebook almost all the presentations. This allowed me to embed the videos into this article, so double win! We received cool feedback, so for next sessions we will have some sort of live streaming for sure.

I had the honor to present in the first slot of the meeting. As this year is the first year when Romania has not only one, but 2 vExperts, I thought this is a good opportunity to spread the word about vExpert program into the community. I talked about vExpert program, about the benefits of joining it and I showed the audience my path to vExpert. You can watch below my presentation in Romanian.

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VMUG Romania

VMUG Romania October Meeting

Constantin Ghioc Leave a comment

At VMUG Romania we have a busy October: on 2nd October we take part to VMware vForum Romania with a presentation booth, then on 16th October we will host our autumn meeting in a new venue, AFI Park 5, Bucharest.

If you don’t know what you can expect from such a meeting, you can read my report for the February VMUG meeting.

Agenda

Cornel Popescu  (Veeam) – Improve data protection with Veeam CDP for vSphere and Availability Orchestrator
Community session – Victor Homocea – vSAN in real life
Community session – Constatin Ghioc – All about vExpert
Community session – Razvan Ionescu – PowerCLI and bulding custom vSphere images
Cristian Radu (VMware) – VMware, what’s new

In the end we will host a raffle, be sure to be there to claim your prize 🙂

Location

AFI Park 5, 9th Floor
Veeam Software, Timisoara Avenue 4A
Bucharest, Romania, 061344

Participation is free. Registration is mandatory.

VMUG Romania meeting from 16 October 2018 is sponsored by Veeam.