Friday June 1st 2012 was the day of the 17th Belgium VMUG, a special bloggers edition. It was a great day, full of interesting sessions:

• RAID types and  alignment impact on VMware workloads – Erik Zandboer
• Workshop “Designing a cloud infrastructure” – Duncan Epping & 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
• “Mobile devices and Cloud. Bring ‘em on” – Albert Kramer (Trend Micro)
• “VCE” – Cisco, EMC & Trend Micro
• “Storage DRS” – Frank Denneman
• “Unleash the IAAS Cloud: About VMware vCloud Director and more…”” – Viktor van den Berg
• “vCenter Orchestrator” – Arnim Van Lieshout

I was honored to be invited to this event to speak about VMware View troubleshooting. As I had only 30 minutes, I didn’t do a deep dive session, but more of an overview of the VMware View components, what kind of problems you might run in to and a little bit deep diving troubleshooting the display quality using the PCoIP Logviewer.  It was my first time I presented in English and also the first time I used Prezi. But I think I did ok .

Now that I think about it, in a lot of sessions, free tools were mentioned which you can use in your day-to-day work as an virtualization administrator. For example tools to align your disks (uberalign), to automate tasks (PowerCLI), to troublshoot PCoIP (PCoIP Logviewer) or to automate workflows (vCenter Orchestrator, comes with vCenter). And there was also free beer! In fact, the entire event was for free!

As a special surprise, Veeam told us what is coming next monday. I can’t tell you what it is yet, but I will update this post as soon as I am allowed to (maybe it has to do with something I mentioned earlier in this blogpost?!?).

Update: Veeam announced VeeamZIP at the Belgium VMUG, a Veeam Backup Free Edition.

If you did not attend this Belgium VMUG event, I can really recommend to attend next time, because there were a lot of great sessions, great content, good conversations, it’s free, you can win prizes and there was Belgium beer!

Thanks to Erik Schils for organizing this VMUG event and also thanks to Cisco Belgium for providing the location and a great tour in the Cisco Lab environment.