DEVMUG auf Schloss Strahlenburg

These are busy days for Runecast – on top of running the HCL beta and publishing a new vRO plugin, we are sponsoring 5 VMUG events within just 2 weeks – VMUG Stuttgart, Sydney UserCon, Toronto UserCon, Dutch UserCon and VMUG Scottland. As I am participating in 3 of those (Germany, Australia and Netherlands) I thought of sharing my experience.

First stop – VMUG Stuttgart.

The event was organized by the VMUG Stuttgart leaders together with our amazing partners of Idicos. In fact, the location of the event was not Stuttgart and, may I say, this was the most unique and beautiful venue for a VMUG meeting I ever attended: the Castle of Strahlenburg. With breathtaking views and great food, this was more than just a regular VMUG meeting.

The sessions were pretty good as well, including relevant topics like VMC on AWS, Cloud PKS, SAP HANA on VMware, latest Veeam features, ExaGrid, vSphere worst/best practices, and of course Runecast. Although the sessions were all in German, I was glad the slides and demos were in English.

My session, of course, was in English. The audience was mostly already familiar with Runecast, including current customers, partners or people trialing Runecast. After walking them through the main features of Runecast, I was excited to demonstrate the new Hardware Compatibility analysis, which is currently in Beta. The reactions were great and rightfully so – the new functionality solves a big pain for any VMware admin out there – many of the most frustrating problems you can encounter come from incompatibilities which could take days to discover. To quote Anthony Spiteri from his recent blog article "This feature alone literally replaces hours of work to extract the needed data and match each server from your environment against the HCL. ".

I was really happy to meet and chat with Lars Fiechtner who spoke about Best Practices of running SAP HANA on VMware. If you use SAP’s ERP and not using SAP HANA, you are on a deadline to migrate to SAP HANA by 2025. Although there are quite a few years left, we are in the beginning of quite a big migration wave to SAP HANA and some of those deployments would run on VMware. VMware already published a number of guides with best practices, which are quite needed – with pretty extreme resource requirements, SAP HANA VMs are a whole other animal.

Michael Melter of Idicos, who is a Veeam Certified Trainer, took the stage at some point to go over the latest and greatest in Veeam 9.5 U4. He covered Object Storage Support, Staged Restore, Secure Restore, SAP HANA and Oracle RMAN plug-ins, Direct Restore to AWS and Azure and did a live demo. Update 4 is really a major release for Veeam. The hidden gem in Michael’s presentation came after the Veeam part. He presented hypnOS – a product developed by Idicos, which integrates with your UPS devices and provides an orchestrated graceful shutdown of your VMs before they lose power. I think this can be quite useful for many organizations and I would recommend looking into it.

It was great seeing the in-depth live demo by Bjoern Brundert – a guru in Cloud PKS and Cloud Native Apps. I also enjoyed the presentation of Michael Schroeder, who covered some worst/best practices he is seeing in the field when it comes to vSphere clusters configuration. Michael gave out a deck of Runecast’s KB Hunt to an audience member who answered the resource pool question first.

Special thanks to Michael Schroeder and Andreas Wizemann for the detailed feedback on the HCL Beta – it really helps us tune things up before the release. And a huge thank you to our partners of Idicos - for their hospitality and continuous trust.

It was refreshing to meet known and new faces in this unforgettable venue. Now, making a short stop in Frankfurt, and then embarking on the long journey to Sydney UserCon.