VMUG Romania held today the third meeting of the year (a record in itself) in the north part of Bucharest, practically in the area with the highest concentration of IT workers. The main meeting sponsor, Orange, hosted us in one of its modern headquarters.
As usual, Razvan Ionescu and Mihai Huica (the two VMUG Romania co-leaders) welcomed the participants and took care of all the logistics.
Inside the Agenda
Robert Joitoiu and Mihai Huica from Orange started the agenda with their presentation on “Evolution of Orange Cloud Services”. Robert explained us what Orange Cloud is (official name: Business Flexible Computing). Mihai took us in a journey to upgrade VMware vCloud Director from version 5.6.4 to the latest 8.20. We discussed about migration steps and decisions dictated by various prerequisites. We then moved to the issues (and their solutions) encountered during and after the upgrade.
Cornel Popescu from Veeam (the second meeting sponsor) took over with a presentation of the upcoming Veaam Availability Suite 10. We had a great discussion mainly on Veeam Continuous Data Protection (CDP) implementation, Scale-Out Backup Repository, and NAS Backup Support for SMB and NFS Shares. You can read more on Veeam 10 capabilities here.
I had the pleasure to come next with a presentation on how to build your VMware home lab. First, I talked about the benefits of having a home lab, followed by a discussion on the choices I had to make on topics like hardware and software (including a shameless advertising to VMUG Advantage program). I ended up with the design of my current lab. Expect a follow-up with a full article on this topic.
Coming last, Razvan Ionescu walked us through a cool history where vRealize Automation, NSX, and Checkpoint are working together to keep our environment safe. We saw how easy it is to configure NSX using vRA blueprints and then use security tags to work with your preferred intrusion detection system (Checkpoint in our case).
At the Close
I think it was a good meeting with a good amount of information on a multitude of subjects. Location was good, a little outside the walking path for some of the participants (but hey, you need to step outside your comfort zone from time to time!). It compensated with the availability of everything required for a good presentation (from both sides, presenter and listener). It was also a quiet and distraction free location, which is always appreciated.
We all had good discussions outside the main subjects and it proved again that we have plenty of people with interesting stories and experiences. I think many of these stories can make it on the stage. I know Razvan and Mihai feel the same. Call to action: think about your stories and come with a presentation at next VMUG Romania meeting!
