HRVMUG Meeting Report
Last night’s Hampton Roads VMUG meeting was the first “official” VMUG meeting with the new VMUG leadership. David and Michael did a great job running the meeting. There was good attendance representing a nice range of local industries including education, IT consulting, and defense contracting. This provided for some great discussions on how people are using VMware technologies and the challenges they are facing in their day to day work with the technologies (some great discussions on the move to public cloud services in the defense contracting space and the challenges they face with securing this). Thanks to everyone that attended, nice meeting all of you!
Special thanks out to the “Desktop Guys” from ODU for organizing the room and to ABS Technology Architects for providing the pizza and refreshments.
To kick things off David and Michael did a quick welcome presentation about what VMUG is and the many advantages of participating. David also covered the HRVMUG Workspace on the VMUG site. If you are interested in keeping up with what is going on with HRVMUG the Hampton Roads VMUG Workspace will be your best source of information (SO GO SUBSCRIBE TO IT!)
David then did a nice presentation on the vCenter Server Virtual Appliance. Several folks at this meeting were from defense contractors and there were some interesting discussions around the appliance security hardening. Very cool stuff.
My presentation was on VMware vSphere Data Protection (VDP). I provided an overview and comparison of VDP and VDPA along with a demo of using VDP to backup and restore a VM. There were some great discussions of use cases for VDP. A few questions, specifically around alarming and reporting, that I will follow up on in another post in the near future.
Finally John Edwards provided an overview of some of the challenges with the TCC classroom virtual lab environment. John covered how using vApps and virtual distributed switches has allowed for simplified management, better availability, and better student experience in the ITN lab environment. John also gave us a nice overview of how performance is being managed and optimized.
To wrap the meeting up there were a couple of raffle drawings for some great VMware Press books and my VMware vSphere 5.x Datacenter Design Cookbook
Great discussions, great presentations, GREAT MEETING!
The next HR VMUG meeting will be in early September, watch the HRVMUG Workspace for updates. Hope to see you there.
