Once again i was lucky enough to attend my local quarterly Toronto VMUG meeting at the convention center in Toronto Since i missed the last one i was beginning to run short of my VMUG fix but this one certainly fulfilled that. All in all it was a fantastic day getting to talk to VMUG leader Angelo Luciani and fellow member ( and presenter for the day) Eric Wright (blog/twitter). Below are my thoughts and comments from the presentations for the day. As the slide decks come in i will be sure to add them to this post.
Angelo started off the day with a brief overview of what’s new and upcoming with the Toronto VMUG. Honestly, the amount of work and time this guy puts into making each and every one of these days informative and a success is amazing. He is a great advocate for the VMware community as he seems to be in the know about almost everything that is happening within it. The full day VMUG regional conference is coming up sometime in February and I can’t wait till that one, as they are always a huge benefit to anyone in any stage of virtualization.
Next up Mike from VMware Canada gave a brief presentation outlining some of the announcements and releases that came out of VMworld. Included in this was a great explanation on how VMware is perceiving the vCloud Suite as the building blocks or the infrastructure behind the cloud and more specifically the software defined datracenter. It’s too bad that these presentations don’t have audio because I found this slide deck very beneficial in my understanding of where VMware stands with these products as well the various pieces that are included within them.
And now on to the sponsors, McAfee gave a great presentation on how they have aligned a number of recent acquisitions and products to the complete datacenter stack and how each and every component of the datacenter requires an effective level of security. They spent a great deal of time displaying features and different configurations on how customers can deploy their MOVE AV solutions. This looks like a pretty solid piece of technology and has an interesting take on providing security by white-listing safe applications to protect against zero day exploits. As consolidation ratios continue to grow our perception on how to tackle antivirus will certainly have to change and I think McAfee has certainly taken a step in the right direction in providing customers with different options. As always, any presentation revolving around security sparked a ton of conversation within the room, and McAfee did a fabulous job at fielding all the questions.
PureStorage was the next sponsor on stage…well kinda. There was an unfortunate event (SANDY) which resulted in the presenter not being able to attend, however as always, Angelo did a great job at setting up a go to meeting with another presenter. PureStorage did a great job at attempting to present offsite as well as field questions (a tricky combo). They have a pretty niche product in their all flash array and have done a great job at keeping that price point down into an affordable range as well as providing some pretty nifty looking software management tools around it. I thought that the go to functionality worked fine (well, till the end) and hope this can help to open up more doors for the Toronto VMUG. Angelo’s already begun to envision the presenters and subject matter experts that we may be able to facilitate presenting in a web-ex fashion whom otherwise may not be able to.
And finally to cap off the day we had a great presentation titled BCP for VMware environments put on by community member and blogger Eric Wright. Eric first talked to the audience about BCP in general and how he has tackled setting up various teiring levels to protect his critical VMs based on RTO, RPO, and SLA’s defined within his corporation. He then went on to talk about how he has applied three separate products (Double Take, Veeam Free Edition, and vSphere Replication) to those different protection levels. Eric is a great speaker and I’m glad he decided to share this with the group. It’s always great to hear it from a community member as there are no sales or pitches included in the presentation, just what he has done, how he did it, what worked, what didn’t, etc… Invaluable to other community members like myself. If you don’t already I would recommend following Eric on Twitter and reading his blog. Hats off to Eric, great presentation!
So as always I encourage everyone to get out and attend your local VMUGs (not sure if you have one, find out here) ! Every time I attend one of these I always come back with some great takeaways and benefits that I can immediately begin to implement or adjust in my current environment. Big thanks once again to Angelo organizing this awesome day! As always there are multiple ways to stay connected with the Toronto VMUG (and they are always updated and active) including reading the blog, follow them on twitter, connect on LinkedIn and circle them on Google +. See you all in February!!!!
