With just a few weeks to go before the Melbourne VMUG User Conference I wanted to share with everyone more details about the event, provide insight into some of the decisions made around content along with my own personal activities during the day.
Melbourne VMUG UserCon Attendees have a chance to win a Home Lab Storage Upgrade! This exciting prize worth over $1,800 includes: –
- Synology DiskStation DS1515+ 5-Bay Scalable NAS
- 2 x Samsung SSD 850 PRO 2.5″ SATA III 128GB Drives
- 3 x WD HDD Red 3.5″ SATA III 3TB Hard Drives
- VMUG Advantage Subscription, including NEW! EVALExperience.
The great thing about this is that all you need to do to win this is register, attend and be present at the closing session, simple! So why not register now http://www.vmug.com/p/cm/ld/fid=7366.
VMUG App – Agenda details of all activities on the day are now available offline through the VMUG app which is downloadable from all major smartphones app stores, make sure you get this before you attend!
Speakers
Firstly, a User Conference wouldn’t be complete without an impressive lineup of international speakers and as with previous years we’ve gone for a mixture of completely new presenters with John Troyer (@JTroyer) and Chad Sakac (@sakacc) along with some returning regulars Vaughn Stewart (@vStewed) and Alastair Cooke (@DemitasseNZ).
We’re honoured to have these guests attend our event and look forward to learning about their unique perspective on the IT Industry.
We wanted to find a balance between high technology and building community, we hope these guests hit the mark and appreciate feedback on who you’d like to see? You can contact us at @mvmug or via the User Group landing page http://vmug.com/melbourne).
Content
We’ve continued with the 4 main tracks at this years event: –
- Sponsor
- VMware
- Education
- Community.
Along with a solutions exchange in the main Foyer, these are the staple diet of VMUG events and provide VMware with a vehicle to educate attendees along with Sponsors the opportunity for direct engagement with attendees via speaker presentations and the solutions exchange.
We’ve opted for longer breaks between sessions this year, while this does mean the event is longer in duration, we really wanted to promote greater networking opportunities along with being able to offer extra content during these breaks in the way of Ask the Experts (where community specialists can whiteboard your technical questions).
This year we’ve tried to focus more on topics that we think are important to attendees, there’s be a greater level of scrutiny with sponsor content along with the topics VMware are presenting. We’ve tried to balance content between what we believe is important to IT Professionals right now compared with what’s new with topics like Tools of the Trade and Efficient Application Delivery through to vSphere 6 What’s New and VVOLs. We’re also repeating sessions as we’ve been asked to do this at several previous events.
We’re continuing with the dedicated Education sessions, Alastair will be presenting Your Role in the Software Defined World, which is an overview of all VMware courses, delivery methods etc. We’re also doing a VCP-DCV Exam Workshop for anyone interested in pursuing their VCP, so if that’s something you are actively looking at then this will be of interest to you! Again both sessions will be repeated so attendees get the chance to choose when to attend.
Finally we welcome the return of the community sessions, these sessions are presented by local members of the community who all contribute to the User Group in some way. I typically put out a Call for Community Sessions and then based on the number of responses the steering committee reviews the abstracts, votes on the most relevant topics which we then use at the event. Any community sessions that are not selected will be used at future Quarterly meetings, so really this is a win for everyone!
My Personal Activities
Finally I just want to touch on some of the things I’ll be doing at the event, not only will I be involved in making sure the event runs smoothly, but this year I’m also co-presenting the Pure Storage session with Vaughn Stewart titled – vSphere 6 and Flash: Revolutionising your data centre. I’m really excited to be presenting this session as it represents an evolution of my career development via public speaking and other activities. It’s been really interesting seeing the event from a sponsor’s perspective.
You can join Vaughn and myself at both of the Sydney & Melbourne VMUG User Conferences at the following dates/times: –
Sydney – Tuesday 24th February 2015 – http://www.vmug.com/p/cm/ld/fid=9489
2:10pm – 2:50pm (Albert Room)
Melbourne – Thursday 26th February 2015 – http://www.vmug.com/p/cm/ld/fid=9491
10:40am – 11:20am (Clivden Room)
craigwaters.org 