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

UK VMUG Nov 2011 Review

A few weeks ago I attended the first ever UK based VMUG at the National Motorcycle Museum in Birmingham. Put together by the same folks who arrange the London VMUG events, it was a great day out and obviously a lot of hard work had been put in by Jane, Alaric, Simon , Stuart and Martyn. I know they had put the best part of 6 months into arranging it, so a lot of effort. By staging the event in the Midlands and involving other VMUGs from the UK, including the North of England, Scotland and Ireland there were over 300 attendees.

I travelled up the night before and just about made it in time for a pre-show vCurry being held at the Museum. This gave a good chance to catch up with various tweeps, since I figured (and I think it panned out) that people wouldn’t hang around too long after the main event the next day, like they normally do at the London VUMG, with longer journeys home.

There were also more sponsors than the London events and with involvement from the Official VMUG organisation there was even a posh looking programme to accompany the day’s events. How things have come one since I attended my first London VMUG about 3 years ago!

The event centered around the main area below with the keynotes from the stage at the front and vendors around the outside. This was accompanied by breakout sessions in rooms off to the sides. The only downside of the day was the lack of WIFI or 3G access since we were a couple of floors down, but thanks to the distribution of some BT OpenZone cards it was possible to stay reasonably well connected.

I had volunteered to assist Alan Renouf with a PowerCLI lab he had put together, which took place at the back of the main room.

We turned this into a drop by area for questions about PowerCLI and PowerShell as well. While the lab proved pretty popular, the best part was taking people’s questions and showing them how PowerCLI and PowerShell might help them out in their jobs. It was quite surprising to find that there were many questions such as ‘What are they?’, ‘What can I do with them?’ and ‘How much do they cost?’ – and a lot assuming I was a VMware employee! A lot of these conversations spurned off into Alan sitting them down, demonstrating some coding and often writing a script for them to take away.

I managed to get away to a couple of the sessions and in particular enjoyed Julian Wood’s session on upgrading to vSphere 5, which was really well attended. One of the other most intriguing parts of the day was a mock VCDX panel organised by Simon Gallager. This was an opportunity for people to practise defending a vSphere design (with a lot of onlookers for extra pressure!). You’ll notice that Duncan Epping was helping with this so the volunteers were grilled, but also received excellent feedback. The PowerCLI drop by area was positioned right next to this while it was going on and I know a number of people found the experience really useful when I talked to them as they walked away from it.

I really enjoyed the day as a Community Booth Babe and now know how draining it is being on a stand all day (you can probably tell from my dishevelled look below!). The best thing for me was answering people’s PowerCLI and PowerShell questions, really kept me on my toes. The highlight being one guy who was driving into work every Saturday, carrying out a few tasks inside a VM, powering it off, taking a clone, powering it back on and then driving home – I showed  him how he could schedule this with a script and get his Saturday back

Hopefully the team will arrange another UK centered VMUG next year after the success of this one. In the meantime, details have just been published of the next London VMUG on January 26th. I highly recommend you attend this.

To round things off I made my way home in very ecological style with a lift from an ex-colleague and and his awesome company vehicle

UK PowerShell User Group December 2011 – Use the WSMAN cmdlets to retreive WMI information

The UK PowerShell User Group for December 2011 will take place at 19.30 GMT on Thursday December 15t. The topic is ‘Use the WSMAN cmdlets to retreive WMI information and see a demo of the new WMI API’s CIM cmdlets in PowerShell v3 CTP 2′. I’m looking forward to seeing the new CIM cmdlets from V3 CTP2 since I haven’t had chance to play with those yet. Details from Richard Siddaway’s blog are below:

When: Thursday, Dec 15, 2011 7:30 PM (GMT)

Where: Virtual

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Discover how to use the WSMAN cmdlets to retreive WMI information and see a demo of the new WMI API’s CIM cmdlets in PowerShell v3 CTP 2

Notes

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What’s New In PowerCLI 5.0 – Slides from UK PowerShell UserGroup

As promised, here are my slides from this evening’s UK PowerShell UserGroup – What’s New in PowerCLI 5.0.

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What’s New in PowerCLI 5.0 – UK PowerShell User Group 22nd November

A quick post to let you know that I shall be presenting for an online meeting of the UK PowerShell User Group on the topic of ‘What’s New in PowerCLI 5.0′ at 21.00 GMT on Tuesday November 22nd.

Details on how to join in are available from Richard Siddaway’s website.

Hope you can join us.

PowerCLI Drop In Area at the UK National VMUG November 3rd

There are a lot of great reasons to sign up for the UK National VMUG on November 3rd 2011, full details are below.

One reason to highlight is that during the day, Alan Renouf and I will be staffing the PowerCLI Drop In Area. We’re currently finalising the details, but this will likely consist of pre-prepared PowerCLI lab content for you to work through and also an opportunity to ask PowerCLI or PowerShell questions. We’ll be there throughout the day so there should be plenty of time for us to help you out with them.

Sign up here

Look forward to seeing you there

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This event will feature:

• Wednesday night pre-event networking reception beginning at 7:00 p.m. at National Motorcycle Museum – hosted by Veeam Software
• Keynote with Joe Baguley – VMware Chief Cloud Technologist
• Exhibitor area with:
  • VMware partners
  • PowerCLI Drop In Area
  • Expert Bar

Meeting Agenda

Save Time With PowerCLI, London VMUG July 2011

Thanks to everyone who came to my session today, always enjoy presenting here. Here are the slides:

Presenting at the July 2011 London VMUG

The next London VMUG on 14th July 2011 is only a few weeks away and again looks like it will be a great event. This will be the second time it has been run as a full day event with split-track breakout sessions in the afternoon, so that there is more of a choice for those topics your are particularly interested in. There will also be a vCOPS focused lab and a Genius Bar staffed by VMware GSS to help deal with any issues you might bring along.

I have been very lucky to be asked to present one of the afternoon breakout sessions entitled ‘How to Save Your Time With PowerCLI’. I’ll be looking at some of the PowerCLI techniques you can use to become a more efficient and effective employee. I will also have a couple of copies of the PowerCLI book to give away

You can register for the event here.

Agenda
10:00 a.m. – 10:15 a.m. – Welcome, Alaric Davies, Chairman
10:15 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. – Cloudvision for the Virtualised Environment, John Peach, Arista Networks, Sention System Architect
11:00 a.m. – 11:45 a.m. – Private Cloud Management Made Simple, Martin Sajkowski, Embotics, EMEA Operations & Colin Jacks Senior Solutions Specialist
11:45 a.m. – 12:15 p.m. – Break in Sponsor Expo
12:15 p.m. – 13:00 p.m.– Double-Take by Vision Solutions – Christian Willis, Technical Director: Meeting the Availability Challenges of physical, Virtual and Geographically Dispersed Systems
13:00 p.m. – 14:00 p.m.– Lunch in Sponsor Expo

Track 1

14:00 p.m. – 14:50 p.m. – vCOPS Advanced, Mark Stockham, VMware
15:00 p.m. – 15:50 p.m. – SRM Futures, Mike Laverick
16:00 p.m. – 16:50 p.m.- Cloud: Can You Compete? Mark Craddock

Track 2

14:00 p.m. – 14:50 p.m. – Thinking, Building & Scripting Globally, Julian Wood
15:00 p.m. – 15:50 p.m. – Managing IT as We Evolve to Cloud Computing, Colin Fernandez, VMware
16:00 p.m. – 16:50 p.m. – How to Save your Time With PowerCLI, Jonathan Medd

17:00 p.m. – Close
17:00 p.m. – Onward Drinks at Pavilion End

Slides from UK PowerShell User Group Session on Modules

I was luck enough to be given the opportunity to present a UK PowerShell User Group session on PowerShell Modules. If you want to check out the slides from this session then they are below:

I have also included the 4 demo text files which contain the commands I was using during the demos.

Demo1 Demo2 Demo3 Demo4

You can get the recording from Richard’s blog

Hope you find it useful