March 20th 2013 Meeting Wrap Up

Posted by Eric Shanks in Community, Events, VMUG | 0 comments

We had another successful meeting on March 20th in downtown Chicago.

Another huge “thank you” to our sponsor EMC!  We can’t have these meetings without you so thank you for your support.

Fellow Chicago VMUG member Larry Orloff  (Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn) did a nice presentation on VDP.  He explained the differences between VDP and VDPA and had a nice rundown on some use cases and how this differs from the old VDA.

We thank you for taking the time to present for the group.  Any time a member presents it’s a big plus for the users group.  This is what it’s all about.

His presentation is here if you’d like to see it again: VDP Whats New

Lonnie Aanden (LinkedIn) was a guest speaker from EMC and gave a great talk on Avamar and Data Domain.  He gave some insight on source and destination based deduplication and change block tracking.  Thank you for speaking!

As always we had an expert panel at the end of the session for any questions or topics that members wanted to discuss.  Larry and Lonnie were joined by Raj Jethnani from VMware (Twitter, LinkedIn) for these discussions.

Please stay tuned for our announcements about the June 5th meeting at Dave and Busters in Addison!

Chicago VMUG Party

Posted by Eric Shanks in Community, Events, VMUG | 0 comments

Party to Kick off Chicago VMUG 2013

We are having a party at Dave and Busters January 30th to celebrate a great year in 2012.

Please Join us between 5 and 9 P.M. for some great conversation, free drinks, food and billiards.  Where else could you share a beer with colleagues and discuss virtualization?

Register Here:  http://vmugchicagovbeers.eventbrite.com/

Location

1155 North Swift Road  Addison, IL 60101

View Larger Map

2012 Chicago VMUG User Conference Results

Posted by Eric Shanks in Events, VMUG | 0 comments

The Chicago chapter of the VMware Users Group had their annual users conference at the Renaissance Hotel in Schaumburg Illinois on September 27^th.

Over 620 attendees showed up this year which was over 100 more than the previous year.  Hopefully this is an indication of how popular the Chicago VMUG is becoming, and we hope to see more and more faces at the quarterly meetings.

Over forty vendors showed up this year and helped to make the conference a huge success.   A large banquet hall was filled with booths and experts that were available to answer questions, give product demos, and most importantly give out swag. Thank you again to our sponsors.  We couldn’t have done it without you.

Among the guest speakers we had Chuck Hirstius, Cody Bunch, Eric Seibert and Scott Lowe just to name a few.  Along with the guest speakers, there were plenty of VMUG members and vendors giving presentations on a variety of topics relating to virtualization.

Here is Scott Lowe giving his Keynote on Thoughts on Staying Sharp and Relevant in front of a packed house.

Cody Bunch explains why orchestration is so important.

If you are looking for any of the slide decks used during the presentations, they’re located on the VMUG site.  A login is required.  http://www.vmug.com/p/do/sd/sid=965&type=0&source=5

At the end of the day we also gave out a ton of prizes including books, VMUG advantage memberships as well as a host of giveaways from our sponsors.  For those who stuck around to the end, there was also an expert panel where attendees could ask questions about anything they wanted and hopefully got some good answers.  The expert panel included Chuck Hirstius, Scott Lowe and Chicago VMUG members Justin Lauer, Raj Jethnani and Eric Shanks.

We would love to get your feedback on the conference if you attended.  Please fill out the survey so that we can make next year’s conference even better.

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/ChicagoFollowUp

Sneak peek at the Chicago VMUG User conference on Sept. 27 2012

Posted by Brian in Events, VMUG | 0 comments

I thought an update on what is being planned for the upcoming user conference in Chicago was in order. I’m sure everyone would like a little peek into what exciting things the VMUG team is lining up for all of you. The event is set to take place on Thursday September 27th at the Renaissance in Schaumburg, this is the same hotel as last year. Last years conference was a huge success with 500 people showing up at the conference which was the first one for Chicago.

This year we are working on making the User Conference bigger and better for everyone. First we hope to attract more people to the conference and become one of the larger ones in the US. To do this we are lining up some big names for speakers and are working on trying to secure live labs for the event.

Some of the speakers that we have lined up so far are listed below with their background details. They are each experts is different VMware products and it would be worth the trip to the VMUG conference to see any one of these. So the chance to catch sessions from multiple should be a no brainer.

Chuck Hirstius -Chuck works in the EUC office for the CTO of VMware. This is a very impressive team and we are lucky to have Chuck come to speak to our users about VMware View and his extensive PCoIP knowledge. He writes for his blog here and even created a solid tool to help monitor PCoIP.

Cody Bunch – Cody is well know in the VMware community for two things. First he is the guy that started the vBrownBag sessions that are hosted weekly and help people prepare with others for VCP and VCAP exams. Cody also publshed a book this year with VMware press on vCenter Orchestrator the best little product that few people know about. His sessions will be covering Orchestrator.

Eric Siebert – Eric is a well known blogger in the community, book author and a Storage Solutions Manager at HP. He will be talking about how storage and VMware work closely together. He will explain how different storage tech works and some methods that you might use to diagnose performance issues. His blog can be read here.

So we want everyone to get registered HERE and come out and attend the great sessions that we have planned for you. There will also be a VMworld review for those of you that were not lucky enough to make the conference this year.

June 18th Local VMUG Meeting: The Results

Posted by Eric Shanks in Community, Events, Photos, VMUG, VMware | 0 comments

The June meeting of the local VMware Users Group was a success at our new location at UBS Tower! Just under 70 members attended to hear presentations from the sponsors, Zerto and Vision Solutions, as well as members Raj Jethnani and Eric Shanks.

A Huge Thank You to our Sponsors

We got some great demos of Double-Take and Zerto, not to mention that they took care of all of our expenses for the meeting.  Please take a moment to check out their websites to learn even more about what their products can do to help your your company.

Event Photos

   

Raj Jethnani reviews what SRM is and features involved.

Eric Shanks goes over his experiences with SRM in a production environment

Slide Decks

Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 5 Technical – Chicago

EAF DR Failover Test Experiences

June 18th – Local VMUG Agenda and Registration

Posted by Eric Shanks in Events, VMUG, VMware | 0 comments

The third VMUG meeting of 2012 will be held on Monday June 18th at the Conference Center at UBS Tower.  We have presentations scheduled focusing on VMware Disaster Recovery and High Availability, as well as presentations by our sponsors Zerto and Vision Solutions.

Location

Meeting Time 10AM – 2:30 PM