March 1st – Local Meeting Registration and Agenda

Posted by Chris Wahl in Events, VMUG | 0 comments

The March 1st meeting of the Chicago VMUG is now officially live on the MyVMUG event site. Click here for registration details.

Additionally, the agenda is as follows (download):

Make sure to register today and tell a friend!

Additionally, a big thank you to our meeting sponsor, VKernel! 

2012 Schedule

Posted by Chris Wahl in Events, VMware | 0 comments

We’ve been a bit quiet for a while, recovering from the fantastic success of the first ever Chicago VMUG User Conference, but not resting on our laurels. Fear not, my fellow Chicagoans, as we have put the next Chicago VMUG Local Meeting on the books! Thursday, March 1st, will mark the first meeting for this year, and should provide a much needed start to gain momentum to the User Conference that wraps up the year. Our current plan is to put together a good amount of information, presentations, and expert panel covering vSphere 5, with the hopes of demo’ing some of the new features in 5, along with answering your questions.

2012 Chicago VMUG Local Meetings

This year we have gone through the calendar and selected all of the dates up front. This should give you a better idea of availability. We’ve specifically avoided any major VMware events, such as Partner Exchange and VMworld.

• March 1st (Thursday) – Downtown Chicago
• April 25th (Wednesday) – Addison Suburbs
• June 28th (Thursday) – Downtown Chicago
• September 12th (Wednesday) – Addison Suburbs

2012 Chicago VMUG User Conference

The major event, the User Conference, has been tentatively scheduled for November 8th (Thursday). The location is TBD.

First Chicago VMUG Conference a Big Success

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The Chicago VMUG held its first ever regional conference on Monday, October 31st. By all accounts, the event was a huge success – we had 10 VMware breakout sessions, 15 sponsor sessions, well over 50 sponsors in our exhibition hall, and set a VMUG record for “first event attendance” with 500 attendees present! Way to go Chicagoland – Also, thanks to those VMUG members from outside our area!

Attendance to the event reached 500 members!

You should be receiving a survey request by e-mail from VMUG – please make sure to fill it out to help us get an idea on what you liked or did not like at the event, and to help steer future events with session and speaker topics. Additionally, we will be distributing a VMUG Advantage membership to one random person who fills out the survey.

The sponsors ready their booths

The VMUG leadership team was very confident that we would have a good turnout, but we’re all very pleasantly surprised in just how popular it ended up being. In fact, we ended up running out of nearly all supplies – lanyards, programs, and badge protectors (fortunately a VMUG staff member was able to snag some more lanyards from HQ and the hotel printed extra programs for members).

An emergency shipment of lanyards arrive.

The morning keynote

Finally, congratulations to those who won at the vendor raffles and the the grand prize winner who will be attending Install, Configure, Manage on vSphere 5 courtesy of the Chicago VMUG!

Media and Presentations

Here are some links to shared media such as photos and presentations. The list will be updated over the next few weeks.

• IDS Flickr Photo Set

Chicago VMUG User Conference – October 31st

Posted by Chris Wahl in Events, VMUG | 0 comments

The Chicago VMUG team is happy to announce that we will be holding a User Conference on Monday, October 31st. This is a much larger event than our normal Local Meetings and will feature a number of great vendors, speakers, breakout sessions, and prizes. We’ve lined up a number of folks to come out and speak to you on a variety of technical topics, including vSphere 5, End User Computing, and Performance Tuning.

As a reminder, we’re also sending one winner to the VMware Install, Configure, Manage (vSphere 5) course, which is a prerequisite for obtaining VCP5 certification if you do not already have your VCP4. Click here for Event Information and Registration, walk-ins also welcome.

Event Details:

7:30 a.m. – 3:45 p.m.

View Google Map

Twitter Hashtag: #chivmug

Chicago VMUG meeting on July 13th 2011 come out and participate

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It’s that time again fellow Chicago VMware people, the VMUG group will be having our next meeting on July 13th in the Addison, IL area. Stay tuned here or our Twitter account for the upcoming registration and location details.

The meeting will be focused on Virtual Desktops (VDI) and security both are hot topics.

9:30am – 10:00am – Registration
10:00am – 10:45am – Impact of VDI on traditional storage (Xiotech)

•             Impact of virtual desktops on traditional

•             Looking at storage in terms of IO Density (IOPS/GB) like a vehicle’s

•             SSD technology overview (benefits, pitfalls, etc)

•             Effective tiering of data storage

10:45am – 11:15am – vShield Technologies Overview (Elias Khnaser – Artemis)

•             Benefits of using vShield

•             How to justify vShield solution in existing environments

•             Customer references

11:15am – 11:45pm – vShield Technical Deep Dive (Keith Luck – VMware)
11:45pm – 12:15pm – Lunch
12:15pm – 1:00pm – Introduction to Virtual Security (Michael Davis – Savid/Hacking Exposed Author)
1:00pm – 1:50pm – VMware/vShield Security Q/A Panel (Xiotech, Michael Davis, Keith Luck, Eli Khanaser)
1:50pm – 2:00pm – Prizes & Giveaways

VMware Forum 2011 coming to Chicago June 15th

Posted by Brian in Events, VMware | 0 comments

The traveling one day conferences known as VMware Forum is coming to Chicago on June 15th. I personally have not had the opportunity to attend one of these yet and I am looking forward to it.

You might be asking what is a VMware Forum and who should attend. These are one day conferences that are focus on people starting on virtualization and people that are well seasoned in the virtual arts. The sessions and labs are designed for virtual administrators and management level. So if you working with VMware and Cloud and want to this is a great opportunity to learn more and network with your Chicago community.

Here is a copy of the schedule for the day. Looks like some great topics and the labs are worth your time alone.

You can register for the event at the VMware Forum Site.