London VMUG – April 25th 2013

There’s still time to register for the next London VMUG on April 25th 2013. As usual some excellent sessions are lined up – hope to see you there!

PowerCLI 101 at North East Bytes, Wed 20th March 2013

While on my working sojourn up North my good friend and fellow PowerShell MVP Jonathan Noble asked me to present a PowerCLI 101 session for the North East Bytes User Group he helps to run. So on Wednesday 20th March you can join us for this event at Newcastle University, session abstract and sign up details are below:

NEBytes March 2013 – Power The World With Imagination

PowerCLI 101
IT Pros are starting to come to grips with the idea of managing Microsoft products with PowerShell, but it’s not just Microsoft who are making use of the powerful automation capabilities on offer. VMware have been developing their own PowerShell-based management shell for some time – PowerCLI. In this session, Jonathan Medd, a Microsoft MVP for Windows PowerShell and VMware vEXPERT, will introduce PowerCLI and show you how to really take control of your virtual infrastructure.

Automation Station at the UKVMUG 2012

How do you provision, manage and decommission your (sprawling) infrastructure? Running around fighting fires while interesting project work falls by the wayside? Spending long evenings and weekends carrying out maintenance tasks while others are tweeting pictures of what fun they’re having in their spare time? Hiding from the bosses while they hunt you down to deploy a private cloud before Friday afternoon? Or even just figuring out what the heck infrastructure you have got and what underlying issues can you report on…..

Maybe you should consider some automation within your environment. If you’re coming to this year’s UKVMUG on November 15th in Birmingham then come visit Alan Renouf, William Lam and myself at the Automation Station, part of the extensive range of additional community content available at this already great event.

From provisioning / decommissioning physical and virtual servers, users, storage, networking and applications, through maintenance tasks, workflows and software testing, to what tools such as PowerShell, PowerCLI, vSphere CLI, Orchestrator, Python etc, you should or could use for different scenarios. We’d love to hear what automation you are already carrying out in your environment and have an opportunity to discuss what other things you could do.

If you ask nicely we might even write some code for you to take away to carry out an automation task.

Look forward to seeing you there and also highly encourage you check out the other community content available on the day (times subject to change, but we’ll be around all day )

UKVMUG 2012 – Agenda Published

The agenda for this year’s UKVMUG has been published and looks tremendous. I know how much effort is put into organising this event and they look to have surpassed themselves this time. One great thing to highlight is the amount of community content there is amongst the published sessions, definitely putting the User back into a User Group.

Watch out too for a further announcement about even more community content to be included as part of the day. I’ll be helping to provide some of this and suffice to say if you have an interest in automation then there’s going to be plenty of brain power on hand to help you out!

Check out the current published content, you can register here and watch out for further community related announcements in the next couple of weeks…..

UK VMUG User Conference – Registration Open

Registration for this year’s UK VMUG User Conference is now open. This was a great event last year and from what I’ve heard it’s shaping up to be at least as good this year. The agenda so far is below. I highly recommend you attend the evening before, since again there will be a vCurry and a chance to network with attendees before the event.

VMUG is pleased to offer top notch education at our user conferences. Attendees will able to access information in a variety of formats and be able to enjoy the following features:  

•  Keynote Sessions Presented by VMware Experts
•  Sponsor Breakout Sessions
•  VMware Educational Sessions
•  Interactive Discussion Sessions Such as Focus Groups and Panels
•  Exhibitor Area with VMware Partners
•  Complimentary Breakfast and Lunch

There will be a Pre-Event vCurry Reception on Wednesday, November 14, 2012 sponsored by Veeam.

While registering I was given the opportunity to indicate which kind of sessions I would be most interested in seeing, so register early and you have an opportunity to influence the content of the event.

UK VMUG Call for Papers – Nov 15 2012

Last year’s UK VMUG was a fantastic event and the guys are already planning this year’s event, scheduled for November 15th.

They’ve just put out a Call for Papers, so if you have a good virtualisation topic, whether a good story from your workplace or info about a particular area of interest, then go fill out this form and you’ll be in with a chance of taking part.

If you haven’t contributed to an event like this before, then here are a few reasons why I would encourage you to do so.

It looks like I may be helping to contribute in a some fashion (details to follow when confirmed) so hope to see you there.

London VMUG 19th July 2012

The agenda for the next London VMUG on 19th July 2012 has been posted, looks like another great event – in particular I reckon you should get there for the NDA session.

• Centrix Software Presentation
• Fusion-IO Presentation
• Whiptail Presentation
• EMC Labs Throughout the Day
• Lee Dilworth – VMware Availability Update: vSphere Replication, Stretched Clusters and BCDR
• Darren Woollard and Gregg Robertson – vSphere Nerdknobs
• Chris Evans – The Storage Architect’s View
• Chris Gale – Fusion-IO More Desktops. More Virtual Machines. More Data-Intensive Applications. Faster. Cheaper. Simpler.
• Matt Northam and Simon Hansford – Government Can Run vCloud, How Skyscape Did It
• Martyn Storey – VMware NDA Roadmap Session      
• PLEASE NOTE:  Entrance to the NDA session is strictly dependent upon the following criteria: Signed, personal NDA; Photo ID and proof of where you work; not working for a vendor, partner, or competitor

Sign up here.

London VMUG May 17th 2012

The next London VMUG takes place this Thursday May 17th and there’s still time to register. The line-up looks great as usual and in particular some excellent community content is on the agenda from well known regular faces at the VMUG.

Hope to see you there.

London VMUG Meeting

Thursday, 17 May, 2012
Meeting: 08:30 – 17:15 London Chamber of Commerce and Industry 33 Queen Street London, EC4R 1AP  Click here for directions
Networking Reception: 17:15 Pavilion End 23 Watling Street, EC4M 9BR  Click here for directions
The London VMUG Steering Committee is delighted to invite you to our second VMUG meeting of 2012. Thank you to our Gold sponsor Trend Micro, our Silver sponsors Liquidware Labs and Tintri and our Lab sponsor VMTurbo. Registration and the first lab of the day begin at 08.30, so come along early and make the most of the labs before we start our meeting promptly at 10.00. Be sure to visit our new London VMUG Workspace! Connect with your fellow VMUG members in te forum, ask and answer questions about VMware, and get involved in your VMUG community.
Registration is open and included as part of member benefits for all VMUG members. Registration for this event will close on Wednesday, 16 May.
Meeting Highlights
Using vShield to Drive Efficiency and Costs Savings – Stephen Porter, Trend Micro Desktop Transformation with Liquidware Labs – Dan Falconer, Liquidware Labs Solving VM Storage Cost and Performance Challenges with VM-aware Storage – Tintri VMTurbo Labs The vCenter Appliance – Hugo Phan, VMware Climb the Stack and Pimp your Cloud with VMware vFabric – Peter Holditch, VMware Flexpod: The Flexible Converged Infrastructure – Chris Kranz Help, My VDI Project is Hell! – Julian Wood Management and Orch’n – What, Why & How – Steve Bryen The vMarket – Skills in Demand for the Next Five Years – Neil Mills Over to You: Design Me a Highly Available Virtualised Infrastructure – Darren Woollard Writing VMware Apps for Novice Programmers – Ricky El-Qasem

Your Local Technical User Group Needs You

I started attending technical user groups around about four years ago, intially with the UK PowerShell User Group and swiftly after the London VMware User Group. These are the main two groups I have stuck with in that time, but have also sampled others such as Windows Server, AD and Exchange user group events among others. The amount of real world experience I have picked up, great discussions had and excellent contacts made, has made them an invaluable resource for improving yourself and your career. The first time I attended one I was half-expecting a group of bearded middle-aged blokes sat around a table talking about things I had no idea about. As it turned out only Richard Siddaway had the beard (sorry Richard!) and had in fact managed to arrange for the inventor of PowerShell Jeffrey Snover to present via an online meeting. (I still had no idea what they were talking about, but I was still blown away at the level of technical content and figured I would understand it at some point if I kept going along!) The reason for this post is to encourage you to not only attend a user group yourself, but to present at one!

Typically a user group may have a vendor sponsor (which helps to pay for the cost of running the event) with some of their own content, however the main focus is on what real people have been doing in real situations in their daily jobs. This is the best content because you tend to find out, warts and all, what are the good and bad parts of a particular product, product area, design decisions, deployment type etc..  . The point being you are not listening to a vendor saying that Product X is better than Product Y and will solve all your problems, but stories you can trust.

At the last London VMUG some prizes were given out for the best community presentations at the four London VMUG events during 2011, Simon Gallagher who helps to run the VMUG posted up the results yesterday . I was fortunate enough to get second place which should be a great encouragement to any of you out there thinking that you couldn’t do this yourself. I’m by no-means a natural presenter (which if any of you saw my early efforts at user groups will certainly agree with), but have worked very hard at improving and also spending a lot of time watching other people’s presentations at these events and picking up good points about their own style that I might use (Julian Wood’s scheduled tweet linking to a scheduled blog post with his presentation, to coincide with the end of his session is probably the coolest one yet!). Seriously, I’m your typical system administrator, not naturally better at presenting than anyone else in a similar job role, but it is possible with some effort to make yourself reasonably good at it.

User groups are always looking for new presenters and are better for the wider variety of speakers they can get. In Simon’s post there is a request for new speakers at the VMUG in 2012 so if you have a decent work story to tell or are particularly passionate about a certain product I encourage you to offer to present. I guarantee that:

• You will inevitably get to know the topic better (you need to, to be able have the confidence to stand up in front of a group of people and expect they may ask you questions about it)
• Improve your presenting / communication skills. It’s amazing how this will translate to other areas too. For example, if you can present a topic in front of 40 or 50 people, it’s not surprising that showing up for a job interview with 1 or 2 people how you naturally appear pretty confident and it may seem a whole lot easier than it used to.
• Increase your own self-confidence. It still can be a bit nerve wracking presenting in front of a group of peers, but audiences at VMUGs are typically pretty friendly and once it’s over you realise it was nowhere near as daunting as you thought it might be. People will also give you a nice round of applause at the end, even if you think you didn’t do that great, because inside they may well be thinking “I’m glad it’s not me doing that!”
• On purpose or accidently you may be seen as something of an expert on a topic which can lead to all kinds of opportunities!

So I hope to see some new people volunteering for this either at the London VMUG or your own local user group of choice. Personally I’m keen to check out some new user group type events such as the London Cloud Camp, which describes itself as an unconference and typically has very short talks (5 mins). I’ve heard really good things about this so intend to try and make it next time.

One word of warning, if Alaric Davies ever calls you the week before the London VMUG then only answer the phone if you are prepared to be presenting at it…….

London VMUG – 26th January 2012

The next London VMUG will take place on 26th January 2012. The agenda is below and as usual there is a fantastic line up of well known members of the community to give you some knowledge from their real world experiences. I’m planning to attend so hope to see you there