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.

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

Settling in for another stream from the VMworld.com site. The day 1 General Session came with a whole bunch of new announcements, plus some that didn’t even get a mention, so what will today’s bring? Here comes Pat Gelsinger to tell us. A brief intro and then the introduction to Michael Dell, who is, in case anyone didn’t know, Chairman of the Board of VMware, for some live Q&A.

It seems like everyone and his dog has written a post about this already, so here’s mine. The biggest buzz at VMworld Europe was actually about an announcement that came out the week before, which is quite something, considering that a lot of nice announcements were made over the duration of the show as a whole. If you’ve been living under a rock for a while, VMware and AWS are planning to co-operate so that by the middle of next year you can run your VMware VM’s natively on the AWS cloud.

I’m looking forward to the General session today, it appears for once that there is more being announced in Europe than we got from Vegas. Given the early release of some training courses, the forthcoming general session is known to contain the release of vSphere 6.5 (and hence VSAN 6.5 also). The recent announcement of the #VMWonAWS setup, using vSphere Foundation, has also garnered massive interest (there’s not enough sessions on this and VMware are scrambling to put more on to satisfy the clamouring from the masses).

Kicking off the conference in the best way possible is attendance at TAM day (or Partner day if that’s your thing). TAM day is a relatively structured day with a number of sessions and of course, that access to the other parts of VMworld which are open on the Monday. There’s a growing number of people arriving on the Monday who are neither TAM nor PEX attendees, but there’s other conference activities to keep them going too.

Not sure if this was day 0, day -1 or what, but this is where it all begins for a serious percentage of the VMworld attendees that I know. The normal approach for most people who are going to TAM or PEX things on Monday is to get in on Sunday and then head to the vRockstar party. This year I’d got an early flight out of Gatwick so was in BCN before the shuttle buses started running, but there’s lots of ways to get from the Airport to both the conference site (particularly via the new-for-this-year Fira metro station, which is on L9 Sud along with the airport terminals) and also in to town itself, usually by bus.