Join us for our Wisconsin VMUG Virtual meeting taking place on Tuesday February 23, 2021!

This meeting is an excellent opportunity to meet with your peers to discuss virtualization trends, best practices, and the latest technology!

Meeting Agenda

• 3:00 pm Welcome: by Mike Nelson, WI-VMUG Co-Leader (@mikenelsonIO)
• 3:10 Presentation: What are these things called vVols? by David Stamen, Field Solutions Architect @ Pure Storage (@davidstamen)
  Virtual Volumes (vVols) have been around for some time now, but why are we just hearing about it more? Join this session to understand what vVols are, how they work, discuss some use cases and considerations when implementing them.
• 3:50 Break
• 3:55 VMware Presentation: Automate policy enforcement with vROPS Automated Actions by Scott Bowe, Senior Solution Engineer Specialist, Cloud Management @ VMware (@scottrbowe)
  Does your organization have a policy that says snapshots should be limited to short term usage?  Have you ever found a virtual machine with a snapshot older than a year?  Today we will walk through how you can use vROPS to enforce policies using automated actions while provided a scalable way to allow exceptions to occur occasionally.
• 4:35 Ask the Experts: Roundtable Q&A
  • David Stamen, Field Solutions Architect @ Pure Storage (@davidstamen)
  • Scott Bowe Senior Solution Engineer Specialist, Cloud Management @ VMware (@scottrbowe)
  • WI-VMUG Leadership Team
• 4:50 Wrap-up & Announcements
• 5:00 Virtual Happy Hour Conversation

Register Here

Join us for our Wisconsin VMUG Virtual meeting taking place on Wednesday January 20, 2021!

This is an excellent opportunity to meet with your peers to discuss virtualization trends, best practices, and the latest technology!

Meeting Agenda

• 3:00 pm Welcome: by Mike Nelson, WI-VMUG Co-Leader (@mikenelsonIO)
• 3:10 Presentation: License-free backup & high-availability storage with Synology by Cody Hall, Product Manager at Synology
  Any downtime in your business (or homelab) can spell disaster. In this presentation, we will take a deep dive into Synology’s different hardware and software solutions for backing up and storing your virtual machine data. You will learn how to integrate Synology’s high-available storage with VMware, setup Synology license-free backup software, and implement a complete 3-2-1 disaster recovery strategy. Join the presentation and enter the raffle to win a DS220+ NAS ($300 value) home
• 3:50 Break
• 3:55 VMware Presentation: Autoscaling your application with the vRealize Suite by Scott Bowe Senior Solution Engineer Specialist, Cloud Management @ VMware (@scottrbowe)

It’s easy to think of vRealize Operations and vRealize Automation as two separate products, however if you think of them as two pieces of a single product, vRealize Suite, you will find that the sum of the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.  We will walk through the vROPS and vRA integrations and the code needed to make it work.  As a bonus – links will be provided to the content needed to create this in your environment.

• 4:35 Ask the Experts: Roundtable Q&A
  • Cody Hall, Product Manager at Synology
  • Scott Bowe Senior Solution Engineer Specialist, Cloud Management @ VMware (@scottrbowe)
  • WI-VMUG Leadership Team
• 4:50 Wrap-up & Announcements
• 5:00 Virtual Happy Hour Conversation

Register Here

Join us for our Wisconsin VMUG Virtual meeting taking place on Tuesday November 17, 2020!

This is an excellent opportunity to meet with your peers to discuss virtualization trends, best practices, and the latest technology!

Meeting Agenda

• 3:00 pm Welcome: by Mike Nelson, WI-VMUG Co-Leader (@mikenelsonIO)
• 3:10 Community Presentation: Terraform – From Zero to IaC Hero by Eric Wright, Director Technical Marketing, Technical Evangelist at Turbonomic (@discoposse)
  Get a ground-up view as we walk through how simple automation with Terraform can cut out wasted time and ensure consistency for ops tasks as we set up a live lab on VMware and AWS
• 3:50 Break
• 3:55 VMware Presentation: Securing Cloud Workloads with VMware Carbon Black by Arjun Narang Senior Product Manager at VMware (@arjunintech)
  Infrastructure and security teams looking to protect their workloads have been forced to rely on outdated tools designed for a different purpose. Learn how VMware Carbon Black is taking a modern approach to workload protection through preventive measures that more effectively identify risk and reduce your attack surface.
• 4:35 Ask the Experts: Roundtable Q&A
  • Eric Wright, Director Technical Marketing, Technical Evangelist at Turbonomic (@discoposse)
  • Arjun Narang Senior Product Manager at VMware (@arjunintech)
  • WI-VMUG Leadership Team
• 4:50 Wrap-up & Announcements
• 5:00 Virtual Happy Hour Conversation

Register Here

Join us for our Wisconsin VMUG Virtual meeting taking place on Tuesday Sept 1, 2020!

This is an excellent opportunity to meet with your peers to discuss virtualization trends, best practices, and the latest technology!

Meeting Agenda

• 3:00 pm Welcome: by Mike Nelson, WI-VMUG Co-Leader (@mikenelsonIO)
• 3:10 VMware Presentation: Introduction to VMware Cloud Foundation by Heath Johnson, Sr. Technical Marketing Manager at VMware (@heathbarj)
  Welcome to VMware Cloud Foundation, a next-generation private cloud infrastructure platform that enables customers to succeed in their data center modernization and hybrid cloud journey. You will hear firsthand about this solution, and view product demonstrations of its latest features and capabilities.
• 3:50 Break
• 3:55 Presentation: Managing your vSphere environment with DSC, Finally by Kyle Ruddy Senior Technical Product Marketing Manager at Hashicorp (@kmruddy)
  Configuration management is one of those key DevOps principles. Being able to declare a state and do it all in code, where we can take advantage of those developer processes we know and love like source control, unit testing, etc. This ability is not something that’s new to PowerShell though, DSC has been around since Windows Server 2012 R2. However, this ability is something new to VMware environments. This session is going to take a look at the brand new DSC resources available for vCenter servers and ESXi hosts. We’ll take a walk through the nuances on how to get started using them, then applying some configuration settings. Finally, because these resources are open source, we will end by making a contribution back to the repository!
• 4:35 Ask the Experts: Roundtable Q&A
  • Heath Johnson, Sr. Technical Marketing Manager at VMware (@heathbarj)
  • Kyle Ruddy Senior Technical Product Marketing Manager at Hashicorp (@kmruddy)
  • WI-VMUG Leadership Team
• 4:50 Wrap-up & Announcements
• 5:00 Virtual Happy Hour Conversation

Register Here

Join us for our Wisconsin VMUG Virtual meeting taking place on Tuesday August 11^th , 2020!

This is an excellent opportunity to meet with your peers to discuss virtualization trends, best practices, and the latest technology!

Meeting Agenda

• 3:00 pm Welcome: by Nathan Scheunemann, WI-VMUG Co-Leader (@chickendilla)
• 3:10 VMware Presentation: Top 10 Tips for VMware vSAN Operations and Management by Miguel Medina, Senior Solutions Engineer at VMware (@DudeHci)
  The majority of vSAN deployments are used to run business critical applications. It is imperative that a proper operations cadence is put into place and best practices are followed to help ensure the highest levels of availability and performance. This session provides guidance for handling operations and management tasks such as monitoring health and performance, adding capacity, cluster maintenance, managing storage policies, and implementing data protection solutions. It is assumed that attendees are already familiar with vSAN.

• 3:50 Break
• 3:55 Presentation: Automation using RestAPIs – from simple scripting to using automation tools Ansible and vRealize Automation by Brandon Hartman Associate Pre-Sales Client Solutions Architect at Ahead and Gerry Thome Senior Client Solutions Architect at Ahead (@GerryThome)
  As IT solutions architects we are regularly asked how IT organizations become more cloud-like.  Cloud-like environments are many things, automation is one key feature of cloud-like environments.  This presentation showing how the less experienced can call RestAPIs from scripts to begin to learn to automate, and move onto how to use automation and orchestration tools such as Ansible and vRealize Automation to begin building useful automation workflows

• 4:35 Ask the Experts: Roundtable Q&A\
  • Miguel Medina, Senior Solutions Engineer at VMware (@DudeHci)
  • Brandon Hartman Associate Pre-Sales Client Solutions Architect at Ahead
  • Gerry Thome Senior Client Solutions Architect at Ahead (@GerryThome)
  • WI-VMUG Leadership Team
• 4:50 Wrap-up & Announcements
• 5:00 Virtual Happy Hour Conversation

Register Here

Join us for our Wisconsin VMUG Virtual meeting taking place on Monday, July 13th, 2020!

This is an excellent opportunity to meet with your peers to discuss virtualization trends, best practices, and the latest technology!

Meeting Agenda

• 3:00 pm Welcome: by Mike Nelson, WI-VMUG Co-Leader (@mikenelsonIO)
• 3:10 VMware Presentation: NSX Advanced Load Balancing byBrandon Hahn, Senior Technical Account Manager at VMware (@BrandonHahn)
  Today, more than ever, IT organizations are being asked to do more with less. VMware has led the digital transformation by delivering the Software Defined Data Center allowing the automation of Compute, Network, and Storage. NSX Advanced Load Balancer allows you to extend the Software Defined Data Center into the load balancing space. In this session you’ll learn how the NSX Advanced Load Balancer offers the strong feature set of legacy load balancers, while offering the automation and elasticity of cloud native load balancers
• 3:50 Break
• 3:55 Presentation: A No-BS Approach to CI/CD for Infrastructure as Code by Rebecca Fitzhugh Director Developer Relations at Rubrik (@RebeccaFitzhugh) and Chris Wahl Chief Technologist at Rubrik (@ChrisWahl)
  Join this talk to hear how a small team uses continuous integration and infrastructure as code to manage a multi-cloud environment. This session will cover the design principles used,  how the solution was prototyped, and how the design was ultimately deployed into production.
• 4:35 Ask the Experts: Roundtable Q&A
  • Brandon Hahn, Senior Technical Account Manager at VMware (@BrandonHahn)
  • Rebecca Fitzhugh Director Developer Relations at Rubrik (@RebeccaFitzhugh)
  • Chris Wahl Chief Technologist at Rubrik (@ChrisWahl
  • WI-VMUG Leadership Team
• 4:50 Wrap-up & Announcements
• 5:00 Virtual Happy Hour Conversation

Register Here

Join us for our Wisconsin VMUG Virtual meeting taking place on Tuesday, May 19th, 2020!

This is an excellent opportunity to meet with your peers to discuss virtualization trends, best practices, and the latest technology!

Meeting Agenda

• 3:00 pm Welcome: by Mike Nelson, WI-VMUG Co-Leader (@mikenelsonIO)
• 3:10 Community Presentation: Storage Essentials of vSphere Cloud Native Storage byCody Hosterman, Technical Director for VMware Solutions at Pure Storage (@codyhosterman)
  Kubernetes is all over the place now and there are many ways of deploying it in vSphere. Let’s set that aside in this session and focus on one piece they all share: VMware’s Container Storage Interface Driver called Cloud Native Storage (CNS). What is it? What does it use for storage in a K8s world? How does it map back to my existing VMware storage environment?
• 3:40 Break
• 3:45 Community Presentation: Understanding CPU Architecture Vulnerabilities and vSphere by Aaron Bolthouse, Senior Solutions Engineer at VMware (@Bhouse563)
  So you’ve heard about vulnerabilities like Spectre Meltdown and L1TF, but are you sure you’re protected?  We’ll dive in, understand the implication, options, and remediation efforts needed to protect you and your environment.

• 4:25 Ask the Experts: Roundtable Q&A

• • Cody Hosterman, Technical Director for VMware Solutions at Pure Storage (@codyhosterman)
  • Aaron Bolthouse, Senior Solutions Engineer at VMware (@Bhouse563)
  • WI-VMUG Leadership Team

• 4:40 Wrap-up & Announcements
• 4:45 Virtual Happy Hour Conversation

We will email the zoom link to all registered members the evening before

RSVP Here

Join us for our first ever Wisconsin VMUG Virtual meeting taking place on Monday, April 20th, 2020!

This is an excellent opportunity to meet with your peers to discuss virtualization trends, best practices, and the latest technology!

Meeting Agenda

• 3:00 pm Welcome: by Mike Nelson, WI-VMUG Co-Leader (@mikenelsonIO)
• 3:10 VMware Presentation: The Highlights of vSphere 7 byBob Plankers, Technical Marketing Architect, Cloud Platforms at VMware (@plankers)
  vSphere 7 is out and has a lot of new features and functionality. We’ll go through the highlights, talk about next steps, share some resources, and answer questions.
• 3:50 Break
• 3:55 Community Presentation: Simplifying vRealize Suite Management with vRealize Suite Lifecycle Manager 8.0 by Eric Stacey, Systems Administrator at Plexus (@vYooper)
  The vRealize Suite can be a complex set of software to deploy, manage and keep up to date. With vRSLCM 8.0, we can simplify most of those processes so you can focus on using the tools rather than keeping them going. We will look at what it takes to get this tool setup and Demo the management of a vRealize Log Insight install.
• 4:25 Ask the Experts: Roundtable Q&A
  • Bob Plankers, Technical Marketing Architect, Cloud Platforms at VMware (@plankers)
  • Eric Stacey, Systems Administrator at Plexus (@vYooper)
  • WI-VMUG Leadership Team
• 4:40 Wrap-up & Announcements 
• 4:45 Virtual Happy Hour Conversation

Register Here