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).
Niels took the stage, and after a review of the various ways of consuming GPU in vSphere (vSphere DirectPath I/O, Nvidia vGPU) we were able to watch a brief presentation of a technology in the Tech Preview phase: Bitfusion Flexdirect. Bitfusion is a way of accessing GPU devices in a client-server architecture. In the final part of the presentation, Johan presented details about an implementation of the use of GPUs in order to improve the quality of the photos taken by a microscope in a medical research institution.
VMware and HPE, Better Together – Alexandru Vilcu
The session continued with a presentation on the integration between VMware and HPE technologies held by Alexandru Vilcu, Hybrid IT Category Manager. According to HPE data, more than 90% of the problems in the IT world appear above the storage layer, with hundreds of different variables defining the network, compute, and virtualization layers. The environment has already become far too complex for human resolution. The HPE solution for the problems described is the HPE Infosight product, an artificial intelligence implementation that helps IT operations with predictive analytics algorithms. Examples of actions suggested by Infosight are recommendations related to:
- performance improvement – apply QoS for volume 1 to increase performance for volume 2
- load optimization – move VM3 to server 2 because server 1 is overloaded
- capacity management – the available storage capacity will be exceeded on July 15, add at least 1 shelf of 150TB
With direct reference to the VMware infrastructure, Infosight can do full analysis: among other things it can determine if a virtual machine affects another one (the so called noisy neighbor issue), it can do an end-to-end latency analysis (storage device, SAN, server) or it can increase the visibility over underutilized virtual machines.
Fight Back Against Ransomware Attacks with Commvault – Dan Iancu
After a brief pause, Dan Iancu, Cloud Solution Architect at Logicom, told us about how companies can defend against ransomware attacks using Commvault technology. After a brief introduction to what ransomware means and about the biggest attack of its kind in history (WannaCry), Dan gave us a brief demonstration of Commvault’s anti-ransomware solution.
7+ Reasons I See PureStorage as a Great Fit for VMware Environments – Calin Damian
Calin Damian, Temperfield CEO, introduced us to some of the reasons why Pure Storage is a good choice in building a VMware infrastructure:
- good customer experience (NPS score 83.7)
- dedicated architecture for Flash storage devices
- all software capabilities always activated
- all software licenses included in the purchase price
- increased efficiency – data reduction, electricity, cooling, footprint
- predictable and flat support cost each year
- the possibility of free upgrade of the hardware every 3 years
- simplicity
- predictable performance
- no level 1 support; 15 minutes response time for support tickets with priority 1
Instant Recovery for Instant Business Agility – Cristian Suteu
Cristian Suteu, Inside Systems Engineer at Veeam, showed us Veeam Instant Recovery technology in VMware infrastructure. The technology allows to restore any backup using a physical to virtual (P2V) conversion by injecting the drivers in a few simple steps:
- updating VMware drivers
- adding Veeam low-level software (similar to replication software)
- network reconfiguration (optional)
vRealize Orchestrator 8.0 Jump-start – Constantin Ghioc and Mihai Huica
Together with my friend and colleague Mihai Huica, I presented more details about a VMware tool that is utilized too seldom in our opinion. After some general information about vRealize Orchestrator and after presenting what’s new in version 8.0 (launched about a month ago) we introduced to the public the new HTML5 interface and presented several demonstrations of using vRO:
- how to run PowerCLI scripts from vRealize Orchestrator
- how to run scripts inside a virtual machine even if it has no network connected
- how to launch vRO workflows from the vSphere client
What’s New with DRS and vMotion – Niels Hagoort
For the last presentation of the day we had Niels Hagoort on stage again. Niels suddenly reminded me that he is one of the authors of the deepest technology book I have ever read: VMware vSphere 6.5 Host Resources Deep Dive. In his unbelievable technical style, Niels walked us through a brief history of DRS and vMotion technologies and showed us how these technologies will improve in the near future (Hint – mark your calendars for March 10, 2020).
VMUG Romania – At the End – February 11, 2020
The last activity of the day was a vBeers networking session facilitated by Pure Storage.
What’s next? We hope that 2020 will be at least as exciting as 2019!
The next VMUG Romania meeting will be on June 4, 2020, our guests being Frank Denneman (VCDX # 29, Chief Technologist Cloud Platform BU @VMware) and Duncan Epping (VCDX # 7, Chief Technologist HCI @VMware)!
