Im just on my way home from another great #lonvmug (London VMUG) event. The event is held and sponsered by VMware and a wide variety of their partners. This VMUG had session by liquidware labs, trend micro, julian wood ( of wooditwork.com fame) and Ricky El-Quasem who session was describing how he (cough) developed his apps (Full Itinerary here).
VMUGs are regional events that take place every quarter and they are always a great way to network with your peers and meet the more prominent members of the VMware community. If you need any further encouragement to go there are usually one of two prizes to be had and the last national yearly VMUG event I went to they were virtually throwing ipads into the crowd.
If you have never been to one login to myvmug.org and find your local event, its most definitely worth a day out of the office.
I attended Ricky’s session where he discussed how he used the c# language to (cough) develop VDisk Informer and his other apps. Flexpod was another great session which Is Netapps version of a drop in datacenter using cisco UCS blades and netapp storage, EMC have similar offerings such as Vblock and VSPEX and I’m sure others will soon be doing the same to further commoditize the infrastructure.
I really enjoyed Julian Woods “Help, My VDI project is hell” which he outlined the major reasons why VDI projects fail to reap the rewards that are assumed to come with VDI. Rewards such as VDI offers an ROI that in a lot of cases simply isn’t true, not in the way you think of if you think that a VDI project is the same as server virtualization. I found this session particularly rewarding as I’ve recently jumped from support to consultancy and there is a lot of scope in the VDI space.
I then sat in the vCenter Appliance session which again proved interesting and whilst I have used it in the past I felt that the appliance wasn’t ready for a production enviroment which Hugh Phan kindly confirmed!
I love going to the VMUG’s as there is a fantastic atmosphere and you can always find interesting people to meet and new technologies to play with.
Author: Dale Scriven
