Last friday (june 1st) VMUGbe went big! For the first time we had +150 people attending. #VMUGbe went through some changes lately: Erik Schils, VMUG leader of Belgium finally joined twitter (VMUGbe) and we became part of the VMUG.com . For the ones that don’t know how this works: every VMUG is is free to chose between staying independent (like VMUGnl still is!) or joining the global .COM community. The (dis)advantages are obvious. For a smaller community like ours being part of a bigger organisation is definitely going to help us grow faster. For VMUGs that are big enough on their own, the rules & regulations of a larger community might sometimes be a constraint.
How could this event become so big? Invite the (Dutch vMaffia) bloggers and you get all the attendees for free 🙂 See the lists of sessions for yourself and imagine you could have been there. You won’t have any second thought I assure you.
- RAID types and alignment impact on VMware workloads – Erik Zandboer
- Workshop “Designing a cloud infrastructure” – Duncan Epping & Lieven D’Hoore
- “Beer and PowerCLI: you can’t live without them” – Luc Dekens
- “HyperV v3.0 vs VMware vSphere 5” – Alex Muetstege & Erik Scholten (VMGuru)
- “Troubleshooting VDI” – Sven Huisman
- “VMware Health Check” – Gabrie van Zanten
- “Busting a few myths” – Eric Sloof
- “Mobile devices and Cloud. Bring ’em on” – Albert Kramer (Trend Micro)*
- “VCE” – Cisco, EMC & Trend Micro*
- “Storage DRS” – Frank Denneman
- “Unleash the IAAS Cloud: About VMware vCloud Director and more…” – Viktor van den Berg
- “vCenter Orchestrator” – Arnim Van Lieshout
The two greyed out sessions were sponsored. Most of you know my strong opinion on sponsored sessions: make them interesting or don’t make them at all! This VMUG was a very long day full of interesting sessions and these two just didn’t make it to the requested level. I have two very short tips for any vendor/reseller who will present at a User Group event:
- Don’t tell us the problem! We already know the problem.
- Leave the marketing/sales people behind their desks and bring in the architects! The people in front of you are techies, convince them and the sales people will get their own invitations automatically.
Got you attention? Read this full blog post of the Tech Field Days with all do’s and don’ts of presenting to technical people.
As you might have noticed we only had 2 Belgian bloggers (Lieven D’Hoore & Luc Dekens). Normally we should have had another session by Gert Van Gorp but he had to call off being sick. Some of the bloggers said I should be ashamed I was not on stage. So I already promised Erik I will prepare a session for next VMUG. Maybe I could do something around new storage products for that fit well in the VDI space. More on that later without a doubt.
Vendor spoof: at the end of the sessions “a” vendor gave us a spoof on their release of a new product that came out today. Although I love the guys bringing it I couldn’t sell out cheap here, blindly repeating their marketing message. Next time if I have some more time to work on the product in advance I might do a specific product special. Sorry for the missed Wodka bottle opportunity 🙂