Portland VMUG February Meet-Up

On February 12, 2025, the Portland VMware User Group (VMUG) met at Presidio in their training room in Lake Oswego. The event was well attended by VMware User Group (VMUG) members from all over the Portland metro area and beyond. Pure Storage provided a delicious BBQ lunch.

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The event started with a presentation by Tom Stephens from Broadcom on the VMware Cloud Foundation 9 (VCF) roadmap. My big takeaway is that memory tiering over NVMe, which allows ESXi to use an NVMe device as a secondary tier of memory for workloads, is going to be big. He also touched on VCF Domain, support for up to 200 snapshots without materially affecting performance and then he covered VMware Validated Solutions.

One of the great things about meetups like this is the sharing of tools. Tom mentioned that he has been working with Jupyter NoteBook, a web-based interactive computing platform. The notebook combines live code, equations, and narrative text, which is a cool way to assist in coding.

Tristan Todd of Pure Storage Storage gave an informative presentation on all the cool things that Pure is doing, including Vvols. I am a sucker for a good Sankey diagram, so when Tristian showed off the capabilities of the Pure1 monitoring system, it piqued my interest. Pure1 is something I would like to spend more time investigating; it sounds like it is a free tool for Pure customers.

Presidio provided the training room for the event and gave a presentation on how they are helping their customers. Eric B. did a great job and covered more ground than I can summarize here, but I loved his take on the private and public cloud.

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He also mentioned Presidio’s RapidAI project, in which they collaborate with customers to implement AI projects quickly, sometimes in as little as two weeks.

After a short break, we had a raffle for the world's smallest ESXi server, a Raspberry Pi. Dennis won the devices. I have written a few articles on them, for Virtualization & Cloud Review here, and I even wrote a book on running ESXi on a Raspberry Pi!

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Senior Solutions Architect at Broadcom, Bryan Sullins presented a session entitled Infrastructure as Code.

In it, he discussed his three must-read books: Infrastructure as Code, Site Reliability Engineering, and ?The Phoenix Project.

He also discussed the tools that he uses.

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Overall, it was a fantastic meetup, and we exchanged a lot of information.

Thanks again to Presidio for hosting the event, Pure Storage for the food and beverages, and Tristian Todd for arranging the speakers.

I'm looking forward to the next Portland VMUG meetup!