March Madness!!

As mentioned earlier, we’ve been working on something special for VMUG members!

Come join the Steering Committee and our sponsor—PernixData—and get away from the small screen as we host an afternoon of college hoops on the big screens of the 810 Zone in Leawood (119th & Roe) on Friday, March 21st from 11am to 5pm.

Registration for the event is open now http://www.vmug.com/e/in/eid=1281

April Meeting

It doesn’t (yet) show up in the main VMUG local meetings list, but registration is open for the April VMUG Meeting on Thursday, 24-April.

We will be spending a bit of time looking at VMware’s soon-to-be-released VSAN product, as well as EMC’s XtremeIO product: chances are, one or both could be useful for your datacenter storage needs!

As noted before, we’re now meeting at Dark Horse Distillery (11740 W 86th Terrace, Lenexa KS). We’re going to make some adjustments in the meeting space to get around the issues we had at the February meeting, so we don’t expect the same acoustic issues we had before.

Keep your eye on this website, too: we hope to make an announcement about a special March Madness event we’ve got cooking!

Hello New Year!

As we roll into 2014, your KC VMUG steering committee has lots of changes in store for the group, and we hope you’ll all be along for the ride…

The first big change is our regular meeting location. As indicated in a previous post, we were looking at having meetings at Dark Horse Distillery; we’ve been able to come to an agreement with them, and our first meeting in the new space is already taking registration. Additional dates for the year are posted in the calendar, so you can add “save the date” entries for the year.

The second big change is the date for our all-day Superconference. We’ve traditionally (if five years makes a tradition) held it near the end-of-year holidays, but that’s been a repeating challenge for staff, speakers, the steering committe and attendees in one way or another since our first year. We’ve had great attendance & feedback, but we’ve always wanted to get it earlier in the year to avoid that holiday mess. We took our first step last year by holding the event in November instead of December, and had hoped to move it to October in 2014, but it just didn’t work out logistically. We looked at a number of alternatives for times & venues, but it just wouldn’t play out; September and August were also bad due to VMworld, so we looked even earlier in the year and were able to settle on Tuesday, 10-June.

We like the mid-Summer date; we’ve always been shooting for that timeframe, where minimal industry conference conflicts will be occurring. While this year it’s a big jump—and leaves us far less than a year between dates—we’re working hard to bring great content to Kansas City for another spectacular event.

Closing out 2013

As announced yesterday in the August Meeting, our final small-scale meeting of 2013—not including the all-day Regional Conference on November 5th—will be a special one for many reasons.

Scheduled for the afternoon of Thursday, October 17th from 1:30 to 4pm, it’s going to be our first social-only networking event. While technical discussions are expected and welcome, there will not be any official presentations from that perspective. In fact, other than some housekeeping details—and the inevitable must-be-present-to-win door prizes at the end—there won’t be any presentations at all.

This is about the community: we’re basically doing one big “Beers with Ben.”

It’s also a special meeting because it’s the last meeting at the Boulevard Brewing Company for the foreseeable future. Don’t worry: it’s not because we did anything wrong, or because the fine folks at Boulevard doesn’t like us. Boulevard has made the business decision to stop hosting meetings during the workday so that they don’t have to worry about tours causing disruptions of meetings. It’s the simple reality that Boulevard’s tours have become so popular that they run them pretty much non-stop during the day: this is a good thing for our longtime hosts, and rather than whine & cry about losing our favorite meeting locale, the leadership of the VMUG salutes their success!

What’s next? We’re in discussions with Dark Horse Distillery in Lenexa for our bi-monthly meetings, starting in February.

Finally, it’s also a special meeting because this is the first time we’re openly inviting recruiters to play a role. Don’t worry if you’re not looking: interaction with the recruiters will be purely voluntary. But if you’re ready for a change—or are just looking to remind yourself of how happy you are where you are!—this should be an added reason to make this meeting a priority.

Recruiters: if you’re interested in taking a part in this special event, contact Tony Lux for sponsorship details.

August Around the Corner

Holy cow! 2013 is already half over, and we’re about 5 weeks away from VMworld 2013 (US)!

We’ve got another meeting scheduled for mid-August, and we’re bringing in one of the established kings of automation—Puppet Labs—to give us a peek at their tools for bringing your manual processes back under control.

As usual, we’ll be quaffing the fine products at the Boulevard Brewing Company’s Muehlbach Suite, with a social hour preceding the technical presentations.

Registration is Free! Come and have a beer with Ben and talk automation of your vSphere environment with the gurus from Puppet!