While riding the GO train into to the Toronto VMUG yesterday I was frantically editing some presentation slides as it turned out I needed to do a little “filler” time at the meeting since we had a sponsor drop off last-minute. The presentation was nothing big, simply a guide if you will on how to get the most from the VMware community! Turns out it was a pretty decent topic since the whole day really revolved around community, more specifically community involvement.
First up for the day was Toronto VMUG member Joel Gibson (Blog / Twitter). Joel gave us a great presentation titled “The four issues I encountered deploying vCenter and SRM 5.5 in a Windows environment”. This was most definitely the best session of the day! The engagement that Joel had with the audience had everybody participating by asking questions, offering suggestions and participating in an all out troubleshooting scenario. By the end of the presentation everybody was voicing their own problems and trying to work through troubles within their environments. This was a truly a “user-group” presentation. Thanks so much Joel and I hope this isn’t the last we hear from you.
Next up was our gracious sponsor PernixData! Pernix hit the ball out of the park (wait it’s Canada, they, uh, went roof daddy on a Vezina winning goalie ?) speaking about their flagship software FVP! Andy Daniel (Blog / Twitter) was the speaker from Pernix and he was handling all of the questions (and there were a lot of them) from the audience like a boss! I can’t speak enough about Pernix and how they have come to market with FVP. I’ve not yet used the product myself but have had many close peers recommend checking them out! Needless to say when the time comes that I need to look at accelerating my storage with SSD, I’ll probably have a look at Pernix before jumping head first into placing flash in my array!
From there I took the stage for a brief 10-15 minute discussion about the VMware community and how to get the most from it. It was nothing big really, just an outline of some of the great blogs to watch, podcasts to listen to, and people to follow on Twitter. At the end I placed a challenge to everyone that wasn’t currently on Twitter to set up an account and simply watch the VMware community interact through social. I think it would certainly be a great way for VMUG members and leadership to stay in touch in between these quarterly meetings, helping to really shape our half day and full day events into something that we really want! After all, it’s YOUR VMUG! To help drive home my point I showed the graphic to the left in which I simply mentioned my presentation idea to Angelo and Eric, and had a response from a great community member Jonathon Frappier (Blog / Twitter) within minutes (OK, 120 minutes) stating he had already done some work on the topic and offered it up for grabs! This to me is the power of Twitter!
Eric Wright (Blog / Twitter) closed the day with a talk about OpenStack and the Industry Shift with Open Cloud. Honestly, this was a “roof-daddy” of a presentation as well! If you ever get the chance to hear Eric speak I would jump on it – He’s very engaging, very entertaining, and has sessions full of memes and honestly, he could be talking about the stock market up there and I’d be interested! That said, he was talking about OpenStack, Open source, Open cloud and enterprise adoption of all these things. Big ups to Eric for taking this subject to the Toronto VMUG and thanks for the “Cheeseburger Cheese” financial tip!
As always, Angelo Luciani (Blog / Twitter) gave us a great update on ways to stay engaged within our local VMUG community, VMUG news and all that jazz! This guy runs a very tight ship when it comes to VMUG meetings and dedicates a lot of his time to help us – so thank you for that Angelo!
So, another quarterly goes by but this time leaves me pondering “Was that the best quarterly VMUG meeting I’ve ever been to?” – That’s an easy ponder because the answer is definitely YES – I had a great time as always and thanks to everyone who took time out of their day to attend, to Pernix for the sponsorship and great presentation, and to Eric, Angelo and Josh for the great presentations! Let’s keep this ball rolling into our October meeting!
