Third Conference a huge success, breaks records

Packed room for Veeam’s breakout sessionThe third annual Midwest Regional VMware User Group conference, held on December 6th, 2011 at Kansas City’s famous Arrowhead Stadium, wrapped up shortly after 5:30pm local time. The final tally of checked-in attendees stood at 526, breaking the previous year’s numbers for the event, and setting a record for the recently-renovated venue as well.

According to Arrowhead event coordinator Ashley Netzer, the VMUG event was the largest non-NFL event to be held at the stadium since the $375 million renovation was completed in time for the 2010-2011 NFL season. It was those renovations that made it possible for indoor events at the scale of the VMUG conference to be possible. Although the stadium originally included indoor facilities that would support events such as wedding receptions and the like, nothing pre-renovation would have supported the number of attendees and booth space of the exposition area. In addition to stellar support from the Arrowhead event staff, the catering staff did a superb job of feeding the crowd with hot buffet meals for breakfast and lunch, as well as snacks and soft-drinks in-between.

Attendees in the expo area

The conference boasted an exposition area with booths for 40 sponsoring organizations, including VMware and Platinum Sponsors HP, Hitachi Data Systems and Riverbed. In addition to the conference-opening general sessions featuring VMware veteran Irish Spring and EMC’s Chad Sakac, 22 breakout sessions were presented across 5 tracks of interest: VMware, Backup, Network, Storage & Cloud.

Gold Sponsor EMC also provided 6 stations for cloud-based hands-on labs, hosted using VMware’s premier cloud computing services from the sponsor’s Durham, NC datacenter: proof that cloud computing’s promise can be fulfilled.

vBeers with the vStorage ExpertsVMUG events are all about “serious fun,” and nothing showcased it better than the final 90 minutes of the event. Thanks to Platinum Sponsor Riverbed, a panel session titled “vBeers with the vStorage Experts” concluded the educational portion of the day with an “open mike” format where storage questions and various beers were served to attendees and panelists Eric Siebert (HP), Nick Rieker (Dell Compellent), David Robertson (EMC), Theron Conrey (Nexenta), Scott Baker (NetApp) and Pieter Teeling (Dell Equallogic). Irish Spring’s deft moderation of the session kept the mood light, and attendees that were willing to stand up and ask questions for the panel found themselves with the additional reward of random goodies from ThinkGeek that the VMUG team had on hand.

Additional goodies in the form of ThinkGeek items, copies of Scott Lowe’s Mastering vSphere 5 and Mike Laverick’s Administering VMware SRM5 books, and various high-desire electronic devices like Apple iPads were raffled off to the ~100 remaining, dedicated attendees from both sponsors and VMUG prize bags.

Special thanks from the local VMUG leadership team to Ashley Netzler and the Arrowhead event & catering staff, the Chicago-based Global VMUG support staff (Amy, Frances, Victor, Bret, Dave), and of course, the Platinum, Gold and Silver sponsors, without which we couldn’t have made it happen.

Keynote Session with Chad Sakac

This morning, EMC’s Chad “Virtualgeek” Sakac addressed a crowd of nearly 300 from the 450+ attendees of the Regional VMware User Conference in Kansas City, held at Arrowhead Stadium, home to the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs.

Whether you missed the keynote or not, Chad shared his slide deck with us for general distribution.

Midwest Regional, 6-Dec-2011

Midnight has been passed, and it’s officially zero-day for the Midwest Regional VMUG, held in Kansas City at the nationally-reknowned Arrowhead stadium, home to NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs!

The stadium was renovated around 13 months ago, and the Regional meeting will be one of the largest events—outside of NFL football, of course—to be held at the stadium.

If you’re interested in more history on the venue, what better place to look than the Arrowhead website!

The entrance to the event is the “Tower Club” entrance, on the South side of the stadium. If you’re new to the venue, you’ll be aiming for Parking Lot E as the primary choice for parking. If that is full (or you have a problem with stairs!), you’ll want to choose Parking Lot D instead.

The most direct access to Lot E is Gate 5, off Raytown Road. While it may appear that there’s no access from the I-435/Raytown Road offramp, a quick u-turn will have you passing the Chiefs Practice facility and on to Lot E in short order. If you’re approaching the stadium from any other direction, you still want to aim for the south side of the stadium: given the weather forecast, you really don’t want to walk from any other parking lots if you can avoid it.

This is the third all-day, regional-class event to be hosted in Kansas City, and the KC VMUG is incredibly proud to have grown—roughly doubling each year—from our humble roots at Cerner’s Riverpoint facility in 2009.

Local Event: Starfire's "IT Strategy Lab"

Local VMware partner Starfire Technologies is hosting their annual “IT Strategy Lab” on Wednesday, October 19, 2011 at Johnson County Community College. This all-day seminar will be of interest to VMUG members; there is both a storage management and a virtualization track on the schedule. 

Registration Open for 22-Sept-2011 Meeting

With all the chaos of going to Las Vegas for VMworld, your leaders at the KC VMUG did the unthinkable: we forgot to get the registration page opened for the next meeting!

That’s been corrected, and you can register now. We meet at Boulevard Brewing Company’s Muehlbach Suite, and we kick it all off at 1:30pm with “vBeers with vBen,” an open discussion session primarily aimed at new users, but everyone is invited.

The agenda includes a presentation from EMC’s backup team on leveraging “changed block tracking” to supercharge your VM backup scheme.

We’ll also have a rundown of VMware’s recent announcements, directions and a recap of other cool bits from VMworld 2011.

See you there!