Background Once I had discovered London VMUG but before I became a VMUG Leader, I used to attend the UK VMUG UserCon (UKVMUG) as a delegate, because it was way easier to sell my boss on me attending a day and a half at UKVMUG at the Motorcycle Museum in Birmingham than it was to ask to attend VMworld in Barcelona for a week. It helps that attending a UserCon is free!

The first London VMUG meeting of 2020 was held at our usual location, TechUK, on Thursday 30th January and I’d been looking forward to it for quite a while. Sadly, I didn’t make it all the way through the day, as I came down with some form of plague, which took a few days to fully shake off! I don’t think I looked very welcoming and I’m also sure that the rest of the leaders didn’t really want me hanging around, so I was ‘encouraged’ to go home early.

Well, I’m back. Just when you thought it was safe… Has it really been that long? Wow! Leave a few draft blog posts hanging around to be published ‘as soon as I tidy this up’ and sometimes you just never get back to finishing them off. It’s easily done. A lot has happened since the previous post, which advertised the 2017 UK VMUG UserCon. A lot of it has been VMUG related too, one way or another.

What is it? 2017’s UK VMUG UserCon takes place on Thursday 16th November at the National Conference Centre (a.k.a the National Motorcycle Museum) which is between Birmingham and Coventry. For those of you that don’t know, this is an all day, multi-track, mini VMworld kind of event - but with a higher ratio of great community content. Win, win huh? Oh, and it’s free! Where is it? For you SatNav users, the address is Coventry Road, Bickenhill, Solihull, West Midlands, B92 0EJ

We’re now a mere week away from the VMUG UK UserCon on 17th November, but there is still time toregister ahead the day itself. You should also remember that you can simply turn up on the day, as always. We’ll be happy to see you either way. If you want to come to the vCurry the night before (7PM - 9PM, in the Premier Suite at the Motorcycle Museum) then it’s best to pre-register for that so we know how many people want feeding.

It’s a triple point Tuesday (well, it was when I wrote this and it’s OK, they are all triple point Tuesdays) so what better day to take a look at CloudCred and see what it’s all about? This is another post as part of the vDM30in30 series that I am trying to keep up with. CloudCred was launched by VMware early in 2013 as a learning site, with a pretty solid gamification angle to it, which is what a lot of people were doing at the time.

In just a couple of weeks, I’ll be attending my fourth UK VMUG UserCon, which is set to be the biggest VMUG event in the UK this year. As usual, the UserCon is being held at the National Motorcycle Museum, close to the NEC and Birmingham Airport. This years date for the diary is Thursday 17th November. With the demise of the physical vForum event, this should be the biggest VMware related gathering in the UK this year.

The last day of the show is always the quietest day. Some people are travelling home early, there’s less sessions around, certainly no parties after hours to plan for, the solutions exchange gets torn down and basically, everyone’s knackered. My Thursday was relatively gentle, as a reflection of all of the above. I did have a few sessions booked, but in the end, I ducked most of them, other than the mandatory TAM session, as everything is available online afterwards and there were still some vendors to see, some conversations to have, some people to catch up with, generally some time to be sociable.

AKA TAM day 2 for me, I’d got so many TAM sessions planned that it was going to prove difficult to keep the step average up! TAM 3842 – VMware Cloud on AWS Wednesday morning saw me wake up to discover a session which I did not have on my calendar when I planned my sessions, although I was rather pleased to see it there, given that it was about #VMConAWS.

This post will focus on the better part of the VMworld Tuesday, from both a time and an enjoyment perspective. Things didn’t start too well, I’d not gone to bed too late, but it seemed that I was party to Barcelona’s loudest ever relationship breakup which took place outside my window at about 4.30 AM, which meant that I failed to get to the vBreakfast for 7AM (sorry Fred, I definitely will make it one year!