I wanted to remind everyone about this years Australian VMUG User Conferences, we’re in the final planning stages and the events are shaping up to be something amazing for the community in this region.

Please show your interest by registering and attending one of these events now:

Sydney Tuesday 5th February
Melbourne Thursday 7th February

P.S. the agendas are now available for both events and can be viewed in the above links!

This will be the second Melbourne VMUG User Conference, last year we shared the space with Brisbane and this year Sydney will be joining Melbourne!

I’ve always been a big advocate of the all-day User Conferences and it was my original goal to host an event in Melbourne when I first become a VMUG leader, so being in a position where we are organising our second is amazing!

The Melbourne VMUG have some awesome guests attending this years events:

Stephen Foskett, who’s an Independent storage blogger will be one of our keynote speakers, learn more about his blog here, you can follow Stephen on twitter @SFoskett.

Mike Laverick, who’s a regular to your conferences will also be a keynote speaker, Mike recently joined VMware as a Senior Cloud Infrastructure Evangelist, learn more about his blog here, you can follow Mike on twitter @Mike_Laverick.

Michael Webster is a VCDX#66 and works with the VMware Professional Services Organisation, his blog longwhiteclouds.com is a fantastic technical resource and you can follow Michael on twitter @vcdxnz001.

Alastair Cooke is an independent blogger and works as a freelance trainer for VMware, Alastair is a member of the vBrownbag crew you can learn more about his blog here and you can follow Alastair on twitter @DemitasseNZ.

That’s the line-up of guests, now let’s look at bit closer at the Melbourne content specifically:

Keynote Sessions

This year there will be Keynote sessions from both Mike Laverick and Stephen Foskett.

Sponsor Sessions and Solutions Exchange

As well as Sponsor technical sessions, there will be a solutions exchange where delegates can learn more about each sponsors offerings directly.

VMware Technical Deep Dive Sessions

There’ll be some fantastic VMware technical sessions covering: –

• vSphere Performance
• Upgrading to vSphere 5.1
• vSphere Distributed Switch
• vCloud Networking and Security
• vCenter Operations
• Horizon Workspace
• VMware Mirage
• Building ITaaS Strategies
• SQLFire
• vSphere Technical Comparission.

Community Sessions

This is something new this year, I got the idea of this from a really good bunch of people who run the LondonVMUG (sorry, imitation is the highest form of flattery). I just wish we had these kinds of people in our steering committee 😉 Anyway a big shout out to @alaricdavies, @Rimmergram, @vinf_net and the rest of the team, hope to meet you all again at VMworld this year!

Here’s the details of the community speakers:

Josh Odgers is VCDX#90 and works as an IBM Virtualization Architect, learn more about his blog here, you can follow Josh on twitter @josh_odgers.

Daniel McIndoe has worked in the IT industry for 12 years, the last 5 as a virtualisation specialist. Originally working through daily management of ESX2.0 and many upgrades over the years and versions, focus is now on architecture and design and delivering a valuable platform for organisations to use to run their business. 2.5 years were spent with VMware as a Technical Account Manager, Strategy and Operations consultant and a technical consultant. Currently working at the Bureau of Meteorology delivering a vSphere 5.1 upgrade and consolidation project across multiple departments and multiple sites.

Adam Selwood is an Infrastructure Architect with experience in the design, delivery and operation of solutions across all levels of the stack. Having successfully delivered a number of major initiatives within Aurecon, Adam now holds the Global Infrastructure Design and Delivery Stream Lead role with responsibility for architecting and implementing Infrastructure services across a rapidly growing and evolving global organisation. Still largely hands on, he is passionate about Infrastructure services and the increasingly important role they are playing in today’s business landscape. You can follow Adam on twitter @adamselwood.

Justin Warren is Managing Director of the PivotNine consulting firm. His particular speciality is in applying evidence backed concepts (SCIENCE!) to boring but important problems like “”why does the business hate IT?”” He’s familiar with the latest business jargon, but prefers to deliver actual, measurable results instead of crapping on about “”leveraging core synergies””. Justin received his Postgraduate Diploma in Management from Melbourne Business School, and is currently studying for his MBA, majoring in strategy and marketing.”. Learn more about his blog here, you can also follow Justin on twitter @jpwarren.

Chris Jones is a VMware Architect with IBM. and his role is to design, implement and manage large scale VMware environments for customers in the finance and banking industry. Chris is based in Melbourne, live in the eastern suburbs and like long walks on the beach. Learn more about his blog here, You can follow Chris on twitter @cpjones44.

Erwin van Londen is a storage engineer and has been for the last 17 years. From large scale storage management operations to architecture and design via pre-sales and support engineering to sharing the knowledge with the interested. Learn more about his blog here, You can follow Erwin on twitter @elonden.

Hands on Labs

This year there will also be BYOD access to the same HOL provided at VMworld & vForum thanks to @VMwareHOL.

Steering Committee

Finally lets show some appreciate to the Melbourne VMUG steering committee, this event wouldn’t take place without their support: –

Damien Calvert @theatretwit
Tony McPhail @tmcphail
Andrew Dauncey @daunce_

If you’re Melbourne based and want to get involved, please let me know?

So that’s it, look forward to seeing you there and please come over and say hi, there’s nothing more I like than meeting new people at the VMUG (or connecting people), it’s what our community is all about 🙂