WI-VMUG User Conference follow-up

Last month on April 28th the Wisconsin VMware User Group held it’s 2nd annual User Conference.  Now that I have caught up on some things a bit after the conference and have things in place for the June 7th meeting in Kimberly I am finally getting around to putting together this follow-up post on the event.

Let me start with some thanks and appreciation for all of those involved without whom all this would not have been possible.

• First the many outstanding sponsors who participated
• All the WI-VMUG Members who attended the event, we hope this event was a day well spent for you.
• A special thanks to Sherry, Nathan and Mike from the WI-VMUG Steering Committee for the many long hours they put into helping pull this event off.
• Keynote Speaker Edward Haletky who traveled here and spent the day with us on his own dime.
• Frances Park, Amy McDonnell, Dave Burnell and other from VMUG HQ who did a lot of the background logistical work and helped on the day of the event.
• WI-VMUG members Chris Luter and Tim Curless from WI-DCF for their great presentation.
• The WI-VMUG members who volunteered part of their day to help us out: Ian Koenig, Rob Roob, Greg Hajec and Tammy Bassuener.
• Leanne Shaw, Paul Heuring and MLT/Instructing Technologies for putting together their PowerShell lab again this year.
• Ben Sier, our VMware Liaison for his help organizing as well as filling in last minute for the Virtualization 101 breakout.
• Andi Mann, VP of Virtualization Product Marketing at CA for the signed copies of his new book: Visible Ops Private Cloud: From Virtualization to Private Cloud in 4 Practical Steps.
• Last my employer (UFS) and most importantly my family for putting up with the time I spent working on the event.

From the perspective of organizing and putting on the event I think things went much better the second time around.  Last year was not only our first time putting one of these on but we were one of the first VMUGs to work with VMUG HQ in putting together one of these all day events so there were many things that were new to all of us.

Recap of Attendance: As you can see, our attendance numbers were pretty much the same as last year’s event.

Some other numbers: We increased the number of sponsors, breakouts and labs this year.

• Sponsors:  2010-18 / 2011-24 (sold out all our spots again this year!)
• Keynotes: 2010-3 / 2011-3
• Breakouts: 2010-12 / 2011-20
• Labs: 2010-1 / 2011-2

Congrats to Justin Gleicher from Epic who won the VMUG Advantage Membership we gave away at the conference.  The introductory discount on VMUG Advantage memberships ends May 31!

If you haven’t already, be sure to check out the photo collection from the day that Sherry and Nathan compiled.

While this year’s event was great, we will continue to work towards a better and hopefully larger (at least attendance wise) event for next year.  We welcome all of your feedback of what you liked, what you didn’t like and what else you would like to see.  If you haven’t already, please be sure to complete the post event survey that went out.  Not only will this help us put together a better event next year but we will be having a drawing for another VMUG Advantage and an additional signed copy of each of Edward Haletky’s books from those who complete the survey.

– VMware vSphere and Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing the Virtual Environment
– VMware ESX and ESXi in the Enterprise: Planning Deployment of Virtualization Servers (2nd Edition)

We hope to have copies of many of the presentations available for you in the near future.  Keep on eye on our website or follow us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or our VMware Communites page for details once they are available.

There are now copies of some of the slidedecks used for the presentations available for download.  They are hosted on the MyVMUG.org website.

Thanks again to all who participated and I hope to see many of you at our next meeting on June 7th in Kimberly.