I was fortunate enough to attend the 2020 VMUG Leader Summit at the VMware HQ in Palo Alto last week. It’s not the first one that I’ve been to and as a member of the VMUG Board of Directors (BoD), my attendance is positively encouraged, which is great. The Leader Summit is an opportunity for leaders from many different local VMUG chapters to get together for a couple of days of as much networking, event planning, tip swapping and absorbing VMware information as we can collectively handle.

As I flew back from the VMUG Leader Summit in December 2017, I resolved to serve on the VMUG Board of Directors (BoD) before I was done with VMUG. I didn’t tell anyone, but somehow, word got out… History I’d been a VMUG Leader for a couple of years when VMUG came calling and asked me if I would join a newly founded Leader Advisory Council, which was designed to sit between the Board of Directors and the wider body of Leaders to help with the flow of ideas and opinions between both parties.

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

Ah, VMworld Wednesday, the show is in full swing. Get past the second morning keynote and the messaging will slowly change to focus on the VMworld Customer Appreciation Party with the Kaiser Chiefs playing. Keynote? The VMTN Community area was once again my first destination of the day, to get settled before the keynote started. However, a conversation with a bunch of the people who had also gathered there meant that during the keynote itself, I wrote 2 words, neither of them in this post.

So the day has come, the great and the good of the VMware community are all gathered in Barcelona for another VMworld Europe and as much as there’s been a whole bunch of chat, beers, sessions, training, exams and catching up going on (including PEX and TAM Day), the keynote marks the transition from all the “preliminaries” to the actual show proper. More on that soon, but first, the vBreakfast!

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.

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.