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! 

First Chicago VMUG Conference a Big Success

Posted by Chris Wahl in Events, VMUG | 0 comments

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

Posted by Brian in Events, VMUG | 0 comments

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

Chicago VMUG March 2011 meeting recap

Posted by Brian in Photos, VMUG, VMware | 0 comments

Sorry for the delay in writing up the summary, things have been a bit crazy and these pictures have been sitting on my phone for a few weeks now. We had our last meeting on March 23rd at the Tech Nexus in Chicago. The turnout for the meeting was close to 100 people that showed up to learn more about vCloud Director.

We had Bill Call in from VMware to cover the plumbing of VMware vCloud Director. Bill is a local VMware employee that specializes in Cloud technology. During Bill’s session everyone got a detailed discussion about all of the different pieces that make up the vCloud offering and how things come together to make a very strong product that is 1.0 product offering. I snapped a couple of pictures during Bill’s talk and pasted them below.

The next session at the meeting was Chris Cicotte a vSpecialist from EMC. This session provided us with an idea of how vendors are positioning vCloud Director to their customers. Chris’s talk was more focused at a higher level that explained things in a manor that you could use in talks with your management when they come to ask about this new thing called Cloud.

After some tasty food that was brought in by out meeting sponsor BlueLock, they took the floor. The BlueLock session was focused on what they offer as being one of the official vCloud Director partners in the US that was selected by VMware. The session included a demo of their offerings and some open discussion.

The meeting wrapped up with a open discussion panel that was lead by our speakers. This always proves to be a popular session at the meetings. During this part of the meeting the attendees can ask any question related to virtualization and have it answered by the experts or someone from the audience. This is a great time to ask those questions that you have been thinking about in the early hours sitting in your cubicle.  It’s not very often that you get this much brain power in one room so we encourage everyone to bring their questions as they really help the meeting be a success.

Join VMUG for our upcoming ThinApp Overview webcast

Posted by Jason in VMUG | 0 comments

Date: Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Choose from two time slots: 12:00 p.m. CST or 6:00 p.m. CST

This session will detail new features and enhancements to the ThinApp™ product including the 4.5 and 4.6 releases. The second half of the session will review VMware’s vision for the future of application virtualization and provide demonstrations of possible future technology.

Speaker: Travis Sales, Sr. Product Specialist SE, VMware
Technical Level: Beginner

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