The good things from Belgium: Beer, Frieten, Triggerfinger and…the VMUG Belgium!

Belgium, well known for its Beer, Frieten (fries), Triggerfinger and for the VMUG Belgium. On june 1st the first full day conference for VMUG Belgium took place at Cisco in Diegem (near Brussels). Erik Schills, leader for VMUG Belgium and responsible for all their meetings, managed to get more than 150 people to this gathering.

The agenda was very challenging with community speakers like Luc Dekens, Duncan Epping, Eric Sloof and Gabrie van Zanten. My colleague Sven Huisman and myself were also present at this day. Sven spoke about Troubleshooting VMware View, while I spoke about VMware vCloud Director.

After a welcome from Erik Schills, Erik Zandboer of vmdamentals.com/EMC enlightened us with a great presentation about SATA Disks versus SSD Disks, RAID sets and their read/write penalties.

After a short coffee break we had two parallel tracks: Duncan Epping and his colleague Lieven D’Hoore (both VMware) were talking about designing a vSphere infrastructure, while Luc Dekens of Eurocontrol, Erik Scholten + Alex ‘ with the impossible last name’  Muetstege (vmguru.nl) and Sven Huisman (virtualfuture.info/PQR) filled the other track with subjects like PowerCLI, vSphere versus HyperV and VMware View Troubleshooting.

After the lunchbreak we continued with Dutch vCommunity members Gabrie van Zanten (gabesvirtualworld.com/Open Line) and Eric Sloof who  busted a few mythes. Albert Kramer of Trend Micro talked us through the security challenges in cloud computing and also focussed on securing your mobile devices.

During the next break all the VMUG.BE members had the possibility to join Ramses Smeyers of Cisco on a very exclusive tour: The Cisco Belgium office is one of the few TAC’s in the World: a Technical Assistance Center. Because of this, Cisco is keeping all the different versions of their available products in a big ‘Cisco only’ datacenter; these devices are used to reproduce support calls and to help customers to solve issues they encounter. Ramses lead us through this datacenter, which was very impressive! From a simple catalyst switch, to big core switches: all devices were available. Very cool. A big thank you to Ramses and his Cisco crew for making this possible.

For the rest of the afternoon four sessions were planned: Cisco talked about their VCE proposition and Frank Denneman (VMware) had a nice session about Storage DRS.

The next session was from my side: I talked about Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS) and the role of vCloud Director. During my session I ran a demo. Everything went fine except the Belgian people love to use an AZERTY keyboard instead of a QWERTY keyboard. This makes things a bit more difficult, especially when you’re using somekind of difficult password. Despite the keyboard, the demo went great!

My presentation is available for download here. At the end of the presentation I mentioned the free VMware Disaster Recovery / Site Recovery Manager workshop which  will be running on june 14th. More info on that workshop can be found on the PQR website. The workshop is in Dutch.

The last presentation came from Arnim van Lieshout (VMware), Arnim was talking about the VMware Orchestrator.

Erik Schils closed the day with a nice raffle. After that we all had a little chat at the gettogether. The Belgian tradition requires us to drink a beer (yes, only one :)), because no other drinks were served. I like Belgium.

A big thank you again to Erik Schils for organizing this meeting, and of course to the sponsors Cisco, EMC, Global Knowledge and Trend Micro. Erik, we want more of this!

There are some pictures available of this meeting, check them out!

VMUG Belgium Pros:

• Challenging agenda
• Nice people
• Good location
• Good food and drinks
• Interesting sessions

VMUG Belgium Cons:

• Too many sessions were presented by the Dutch (including me :)), where are the good presenters from Belgium? Contact Erik if you want to present at a next VMUG Belgium meeting!