I was also lucky enough to attend the VMUG UK UserCon which was held in the Hilton London Metropole. This was held the day after the VMware Explore On Tour London in the same venue.
After a quick coffee I went to the opening and welcome keynote held by Dave Simpson (VMUG Board). After the brief introduction it moved to the opening session Tech Talk. This was hosted by Paul Turner (VP Product Management VCF), Joe Baguley (CTO, EMEA), Prashant Gandhi (Senior Director Products, application networking and security division) & Paul Nothard (Principal Solutions Architect, UK).
Paul Turner started the session by talking about Cyber security and VCFs advanced cyber compliance. This consists of continuous compliance with automated policies for workloads and VCF components, enhanced platform security and incident reponse to increase cyber-risk posture, to meet regulatory requirements & provide automated ransomware and recovery.
Prashant then took over to discuss how vDefend & Avi (load balancer) work to provide a multi layer defence to VCF, protecting all VCF workloads and locking down lateral movement.
Then it was time for Paul Nothard who discussed VCF and EU data sovereignty compliance. This was talk on the data security regulation and compliance features of VCF.
Finally there was a short questions and answers session by all four.
Afterwards I went to the back to the VMUG lounge and met, talked and was scanned by all the sponsors, picking up some free bits of merch on the way. I also went to the VMware {code} lab: Running VCF 9 on a set of $799 AMD Ryzen 9 Mini PCs hosted by Eric Nielson (Broadcom).
He ran through how he and William Lam went through many different options of mini PCs with many different challenges before they came to the Minisforum MS- A2 devices. These Mini Pcs are pretty amazing and have an AMD Ryzen 9 9955HX,(16C/32T), Dual DDR5-5600Mhz,up to 128 GB, 3 x M.2 drives and also has dual 10Gbps SFP+ Lan & 2.5G RJ45 Lan Ports with WIFI 6E & Bluetooth 5.3 all in a small footprint machine. He currently had 3 devices connected together but advised that in the future they are hoping to move to one single unit hosting the full VCF stack! 🤯
I then took another exam (took the VCF 9 Administrator the day before and failed) which was the VCF 9 Support exam. Unfortunately I also failed that one as again I don’t really have any experience with using VCF 9.
I was then able to catch the final half of the session Garage to Boardroom, Scaling AI Innovation: Homelab to Enterprise Success with James Kilby (Broadcom) and Gareth Edwards (VMUG). In this talk the guys explained how they worked together using a fictional business to see what they could use in their homelabs to get AI working. They also explained about the power and configuration requirements and the challenges faced with different GPUs. There was also a live demo of it. They then explained how the understanding can help scale AI to business use.
After lunch I then attended Understand vDefend’s role in enhancing VMware security by Leaha Torres (Phoenix Software). In this session Leaha explained what vDefend was and how it could be used to secure traffic between VMs using the NSX distributed firewall to micro segment each VM\Container. She even ran a live demo of a before and after applying the policy to a VM.
As I’d failed 2 exams I thought it might be best to attend a session called VCP Certification Prep – What you need to know and expect by Maarten Van Driessen (Freelance Consultant), Dave Simpson (VMUG board of directors), Matthew Heldstab (VMUG vice president). The guys ran through the certifications that qualify for VMUG advantage keys & places that can provide free help. They also advised that VCF customers get free training via the Learning@Broadcom site. They also advised of helpful locations for the architect exam including a link to a very helpful Youtube video. There was also a helpful list of name changes between VCF 5.2 and VCF 9.
Again it was a really good day filled with lots of good informative talks and it was good to catch up with old colleagues and network with others. I really enjoyed the VMUG UserCon and feel it’s definitely the way forward for VMUG events. Fingers crossed for the future exams.