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.
February 21, 2019 – VMUG Leader Summit
At the end of February 2019, together with Razvan Ionescu I attended the annual conference of VMUG leaders. Held on the VMware campus in Palo Alto, the conference proved to be an excellent experience exchange between VMUG leaders from over 30 countries. There were 2 days full of presentations and seminars for information exchange in order to improve VMUG activity. Among the presentations I noticed the following:
- The 5 L’s of Leadership – Pat Gelsinger, VMware CEO
- Public Speaking from the public speaker – Chris McCain, VMware chief technologist
- IT begins with VMUG leaders – Brian Graf, VMware senior manager
- Closing remarks – Ray O’Farrell, Executive Vice President and CTO VMware
July 18, 2019 – Summer VMUG
On July 18, 2019, in the beautiful location of PointHub, we managed to gather a large number of participants and a great speaker: Joe Baguley, vice president and CTO EMEA VMware. Joe is a naturally born speaker and he has shown us an excellent presentation on the latest developments in infrastructure architecture. The sponsors of the edition were VMware, NetApp and Runecast. In this edition of the conference we had no less than 4 presenters from abroad: besides Joe were also presenting Aylin Sali, CTO and founder of Runecast, coming from Czech Republic, Maciej Lelusz, CEO Inleo, from Poland , and Jacint Juhasz, Alef, from Hungary.
Cristian Radu, VMware, told us about NSX-T, Calin Damian, Temperfield CEO, showed us a way to use vRealize Network Insight to speed up the micro-segmentation migration process, and Corneliu Lefter, Neverfail, talked about how to get the best performance from vSphere. The last session of the day was that of Victor Homocea, NTT Data, about vSAN and Health Service.
October 15, 2019 – Autumn VMUG
On October 15, we returned to PointHub for a new meeting. The sponsors of the edition were: HPE, Commvault, NTT Data and Veeam. The conference started in force, with an introductory session to the new Kubernetes / vSphere hybrid world presented by Cormac Hogan, VMware Chief Technologist, co-author of the “Essential Virtual SAN” and “vSAN 6.7 U1 Deep Dive” books. The presentations continued with Alexandru Vilcu, HPE (vCloud Foundation on Synergy), Andras Pulai, Commvault (Protecting VMware with Commvault is easy), Cornel Popescu, Veeam (Automated Data Protection with Veeam Backup Portal) and Andrei Iancu, NTT Data Services (NTT’s Dynamic Workplace Services – Redesigning the employee experience).
Razvan Ionescu completed the circle with a “mysterious” presentation to the world opened by Cormac, that of containers. Finally, Todor Tsankov, VMware Site Reliability Engineer, introduced us to “A day in the life of SRE in VMware”. The evening ended with an extended vBeers, sponsored by HPE.
November 27, 2019 – VMware vForum 2019
On November 27, 2019, within the Athenee Palace Hotel in Bucharest, the largest event organized by VMware in Romania attracted several hundred participants. VMUG Romania took the opportunity and participated in the event with a presentation stand, promoting our conferences. Thanks to our friends from VMware Romania for inviting us and for all our collaboration!
What is coming in 2020?
We take the opportunity to announce the first meeting of 2020, on February 11. The first names we can announce are those of Niels Hagort (VCDX 212, Technical Marketing Architect at VMware, co-author of “vSphere 6.5 Host Resources Deep Dive” and “Clustering Deep Dive”) and Johan von Amersfoort (VCDX 238 , Technical Marketing at ITQ, author of the book “VDI Design Guide”).
We want to thank the sponsors of VMUG Romania from 2019. Also, we want to say a big thank you for everybody involved in our activities: speakers, collaborators, hosts, and visitors! We hope that you will all be with us in 2020!
