Ahh Spring – Most people describe this as a time where the rain falls and cleans everything up around us – flowers blooming, grass growing – a sign of warmth to come! In Canada though, it’s a sign of giant muddy snow piles full of gravel, salt and sand from all of the plowing and shoveling performed all Winter long – for me, it’s a muddy white dog and two little munchkins tracking muck all over the house – All that said, there is some hope for Spring this year! March 23rd marks the date for our next Toronto VMUG UserCon – so, if you want to escape the mud and the muck come on down to the Metro Toronto Convention Centre this Thursday and join 600+ of your peers for some great learning, technical sessions and some awesome keynotes! We’ve got a great one planned this year and I just wanted to highlight some of the keynotes and sponsors we have lined up for Thursday!
First up – Mr. Frank Denneman
Over the years we have been lucky enough to have some awesome keynote speakers for our UserCon – this year is no exception! I’m super excited to hear from Frank Denneman! If you don’t know who Frank is let me try and enlighten you a little – this man literally wrote the book on DRS – three times! The “HA and DRS/Clustering Deepdive” books – written by Frank and his co-author Duncan Epping are honestly one of the greatest tech books ever. It’s written in a text that is easy to read, and has literally taught me so much about HA and DRS I can’t even begin to explain it all! Certainly a must read for any VMware admin. Frank moved on from VMware for a little while to work with PernixData as the CTO and has just recently returned to VMware taking on the role of Senior Staff Architect within their SDDCaaS Cloud Platform Business Unit. Frank will be giving a talk titled “A Closer Look at VMware Cloud on AWS”. With VMware and Amazon announcing a partnership recently allowing us to consume bare-metal ESXi from within the wide range of Amazon’s data centers this will most certainly be an interesting keynote explaining just how it works – and what we can expect from it in terms of unified management between our on-premises and AWS infrastructure.
The Breakouts and Panels!
After Frank the morning breakout sessions will then kick off – here we will have sessions from a variety of partners and vendors whom provide everything from hardware to storage to back up to monitoring. You will see all of the familiar names here with 30 minute breakout sessions covering off their technologies. Take a look at our sponsors below – without these companies these events wouldn’t be possible! A round of sessions from VMware follows a couple of rounds of sessions from third-party vendors, then, lunch, and an aspiring/VCDX panel talk where you can be sure to get some in-depth answers to any questions you may have about design, architecture, or every day management of your VMware infrastructure.
Drinks, Food, and DiscoPosse’s
After lunch we have another couple of rounds of breakout sessions by VMware and our sponsors – with a reception following immediately thereafter. vSphere with Operations Management will sponsor our networking reception, complete with drinks and appetizers – a perfect way to end what I’m sure will be a jam-packed day! That said, what’s a beer without entertainment right? We are super happy to have our own VMUG co-leader Eric Wright (@discoposse) giving our closing keynote for the day! Think of this a little like the technology version of CBC’s Hometown Heroes segment that they offer on Hockey Night in Canada! Eric, our own hometown hero will deliver a jam packed hour of all things VMware and Terraform, showing us just how easy it is to start automating our infrastructure with the open source software! I got a sneak peek of this at our last local VMUG meeting and this is something you won’t want to miss!
Free Stuff!
Then, yes, of course, Giveaways! We have some pretty cool prizes this year including cold hard cash (VISA gift cards), GoPro’s, and the ever popular grand prize of a complete vSphere Homelab! This is on top of all the great giveaway’s we see from our sponsors!
So if you aren’t busy this Thursday, register now & drop in – we’d love to see you there! Even if you are busy, cancel everything and come on down! Can’t make it? Follow along via Twitter with the hashtag #tovmug and hey, we have more meetings coming up as well to help you all get the Toronto VMUG experience. Our Q2 meeting is May 31st sponsored by Veeam and Mid-Range and our Q3 meeting is tentative for September 19th with sponsors Zerto and Tanium (still in development) – come and check us out. As always, stay connected. You can follow us on Twitter, connect on LinkedIn, watch our website, or become a member of the Toronto VMUG Community in order to stay up to date on all things tovmug! See you Thursday!
Don’t delay! Register now for the March 23rd Toronto VMUG UserCon!
