2014 Holiday Round-up

In addition to our regular meeting on Thursday, December 18th, we’re working on some additional events to bring the year to the close and have some fun during the end-of-year holiday madness.

First up is the small-format movie premiere sponsored by SimpliVity. We’re being treated to some product information and a private showing of the new Hunger Games movie, Mockingjay, Pt1 on Friday, November 21 from noon to 5pm. Attendance will be extremely limited and managed through EventBrite registration rather than the VMUG website.

Second is a vBeers/Happy Hour following the movie event—regardless of whether you attend the movie event or not—coordinated by the KCVMUG Volunteers committee. Unline your typical vBeers, we’re requesting donations (suggesting $20) to help the committee reach a goal of $700 to donate to The Salvation Army’s Childrens’ Shelter. This event is being held at Rock & Brews on W 135th Street in OPKS. We will be able to collect cash donations as well as have a couple laptops available for you to make a donation either directly to the Salvation Army or via another private EventBrite page. (If you plan to make a direct donation before the event, just bring a copy of your confirmation with a date from this month and we’ll count it towards our goal.)

BikeMS Volunteer Event

It was a cool morning that greeted our intrepid group of VMUG Volunteers as they set out to Basehor, KS to staff a pair of rest stations along the Century Route for the Bike MS: Kansas City 2014 area ride.

Bike MS passes through the Kansas City Metro into the back roads of Kansas’ finest countryside. The routes include fully-stocked rest stops every 10-15 miles, a great lunch stop on Saturday and safety provided by volunteer EMT’s, HAM radio operators, the police department and bicycle repair from our partner bike shops. We will conclude the day at South Park in Lawrence, KS, where you will be treated to a fun Gears & Grooves Festival featuring massages, musical entertainment, food and Boulevard beer. Everyone is up early on Sunday for a free pancake breakfast by Chris Cakes and on the road where the route heads you back to Olathe, KS for a finish line celebration and a great feeling of accomplishment.

After dividing assignments for staffing the second rest area (south of Tonganoxie, KS), the two teams preped their rest station to serve the ~400 riders that would pass by.

Staffing a rest station consisted of prepping edibles—trail mix, bananas, oranges and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches—and keeping water & Gatorade mix handy for the riders. Additionally, visiting with the riders and checking on their general condition—the Basehor rest stop was ~67 miles into the ride, while the Tonganoxie stop was ~86 miles—as well as providing encouragement was part of the duties.

Although there were some headwinds to fight, the riders had some of the best weather a September weekend could offer.

KC VMUG would like to acknowledge the following folks—members, family & friends—that helped us pull off this activity:

Aaron, Ben & Nate Spiegel
Chris Hildebrant
Chris Keithly
Colin Pestinger
Denise Decker
Jim Millard
Kourtney Dierking
Kyle O’Mara
Kylie Couvelha
Rachel Tinsley
Stephanie Parker 

August Update

The KC VMUG Volunteers (yet another ‘vvols’!) had a great day with the Sleepyhead Beds service project, completed on August 2nd. A big shout-out to the members who helped:

David Daniels
Chris Hildebrandt
David Huggins
John Hurd
Eric Lee
Colin Pestinger
Stacy Reeves
Aaron Spiegel
Rachel Tinsley

You can expect to see more great opportunities to give back to the community without needing to commit to IT projects…

We also have our next half-day meeting around the corner—14-Aug, 1-4pm—with our friends at PernixData sponsoring and giving a rundown of their ground-breaking FVP storage acceleration software. Registration for the meeting is open.

Inaugural Volunteer Day

The VMUG is all about community, and here’s your chance to give back—not just to the VMware community, but the more-needy local community.

The brainchild of KC VMUG founder Colin Pestinger, VMUG Volunteers is all about giving back—and not necessarily with your technical skills!

The first volunteer event is scheduled, and you can read about it in the Volunteers blog on this site. 

Annual Conference

While this post may be a little late to the game, it has been appropriate to wait on this until more of the major details had been finalized.

As many already know from both Twitter and the main VMUG website, the date for the annual conference—previously in the winter near the holidays—has been moved forward to Tuesday, June 10, 2014. The leadership team had wanted to move the conference into a different part of the year (to get away from the holidays) and was working to slowly accomplish this; however, there were simply too many conflicts in the fall. We simply “bit the bullet” and moved it to summer, which is what we’d had in mind for a goal all along.

Registration for the conference is open!

Satyam VaghaniAs in previous years, we have a great list of sponsors, break-outs and guest speakers planned. Our opening keynote session will be delivered by “Mr. VMFS” himself, Satyam Vaghani. Satyam is currently the CTO and co-founder of PernixData, delivering a new wave of distruptive technology into the VMware ecosystem; expect a walk down memory lane as he recounts some of the early days of VMware and the development of the game-changing shared filesystem which allowed shared-storage clusters and—arguably the most disruptive of all tech—the development of vMotion.

Kevin MitnickOur lunchtime keynote will be a special question-and-answer session with VMware security maven Mike Foley and the man infamously known as “the world’s most wanted hacker,” Kevin Mitnick. While he may have a storied past, Kevin is now a principle in a successful security consulting firm, has written several books and is an engaging speaker for both technical and non-technical audiences alike. Expect a mix of history—Mike was on the receiving end of one of Kevin’s “adventures”—and current practices to be covered in this unique session.