A few weeks ago - I gave a session about how to deploy a full environment starting from a bare rack to a fully functioning environment with deployed applications.

Firstly about the VMUG event. I was fortunate enough to be invited by the VMUG organization to present at this years VMUG. I would like to extend my thanks to the VMUG organization for their hospitality and the effort they made to help feel at home (including kosher food)

There were approximately 400-500 people at the Event, the location was very nice and the the organization of the event was very well done.

The lineup of speakers, sponsors and vendors was very impressive, the local VMUG leaders and VMUG organization did an outstanding job.

Community was a big part of the event, just the way it should be.

I got to chat a bit with Joe Baguley, the VMware CTO, EMEA - about competition, "co-opetition" and what will happen in the future. We can never be prophets, but even if only half of what we talked about does actually come to be, then amazing things will happen.

I highly enjoyed the keynotes, both from Joe Baguley, and Greg Ferro - who surprised me with the amount of information he knows about ducks, and agriculture. They are both outstanding speakers.

Back to the session. Firstly I would like to thank the brave souls that attended my session. There were not many of you, because the slot I got was the same as three other VMware speaker sessions, one by Massimo Referre, the other by Cormac Hogan, and the last was a panel with Mike Laverick and Joe Baguley.

It not uncommon that one has to stand up an environment - of 8-50 hosts and 50-250 virtual machines. But is not quite common that you have to do this - when you have no existing infrastructure at all. This was the case I was presenting. Standing an infrastructure from complete zero to a fully deployed virtual VMware environment - in the most automated fashion possible.

There are a lot considerations that you have to take into account, for example - Autodeploy is more or less out of the question - seeing that you have no vCenter environment up and running yet.

How do you get vCenter up? How to deploy VM's? How do I configured the underlying storage array, the network switches, so many questions and dependencies.

The process is not ideal, not fully automated, but it will become so - not too far in the future.

In the meantime - here is the slide deck from my presentation.

Hope to see you all at another VMUG event soon!