Last Friday, 1 June 2012, the 17th Belgium VMUG event took place. This event had the name “The Blogger Edition” due the impressive agenda!

The agenda of this meeting.
Technical sessions:

• RAID types and alignment impact on VMware workloads – Erik Zandboer
• “Designing a cloud infrastructure” – Duncan Epping and Lieven D’hoore
• “Beer and PowerCLI: you can’t live without them” – Luc Dekens
• “HyperV v3.0 vs VMware vSphere 5” – Alex Muetstege & Erik Scholten (VMGuru)
• “Troubleshooting VDI” – Sven Huisman
• “VMware Health Check” – Gabrie van Zanten
• “Busting a few myths” – Eric Sloof
• “Storage DRS” – Frank Denneman
• “Unleash the IAAS Cloud: About VMware vCloud Director and more…”
  – Viktor van den Berg
• “vCenter Orchestrator” – Arnim Van Lieshout

Vendor/sales sessions:

• “Mobile devices and Cloud. Bring ’em on” – Albert Kramer (Trend Micro)
• “VCE” – Cisco, EMC & Trend Micro

The event was ran by Erik Schills at the Belgium Cisco office and was sold out. A big congratulations for his work and effort!

The sessions I attended were very interesting and the crowd was very active with plenty of questions and ideas. Sadly this made it hard for certain speakers to finish their session and they had to skip certain parts, this was also something I feared at the start of the day.

Another great thing was a tour in the local Cisco datacenter. The Belgium Cisco office is one of their TAC’s (Technical Assistance Center). This means that Cisco is keeping all the different versions of their products ever released in the datacenter, all this is for troubleshooting customers problems. And this means not just one device per product, they even have minor firmware differences between the devices. It’s very impressive!

After the sessions Veeam decided to give us a sneak preview on their announcement the 4th of June. We can’t post the information yet after their official release but it looks great! I will make an update later on and probably dedicate a separate post.

It was a great opportunity to meet the experts (vExperts 😉 ) and in case you have missed it I can only tell you to be at the next VMUG. Something a few speakers mentioned was that even tho it was VMUG Belgium, most of the speakers were from The Netherlands. We will have to change this for the next VMUG!

Viktor Van Den Berg made some pictures and published them on his blog, you can see them here.

Update: all presentations are now available here.
Update: Veeam released Veeam Backup & Replication 6.1. More information can be found in my new post!