Join us for our Wisconsin VMUG Virtual meeting taking place on Tuesday May 18, 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 VMware Presentation: VMware Skyline: Supercharging Your Support Experience by Brandon Hahn Staff Technical Account Manager at VMware
  The VMware Skyline proactive support capabilities you’ve come to know and love have expanded and now encompass a whole portfolio of offerings. We’ll discuss the benefits and differences between Skyline Health, Skyline Advisor, and Skyline Health Diagnostics before diving into a live demonstration so you can understand how to best utilize them in your environment.
• 3:50 Break
• 3:55 VMware Presentation: NSX-ALB in Native AWS by Pam Norris, Staff Staff Solutions Engineer (NSX-ALB) at VMware
  The VMware NSX-Advanced Load Balancer, formerly known as AVI, provides integrated multi cloud load balancing, WAF, application analytics, and container ingress services from the data center to the cloud. We will walk through an overview of the NSX-ALB, followed by a demonstration of deploying the solution in native AWS.
• 4:35 Ask the Experts: Roundtable Q&A
  • Brandon Hahn, Staff Technical Account Manager at VMware (@brandonhahn)
  • Pam Norris, Staff Staff Solutions Engineer (NSX-ALB) at VMware
  • 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, April 20, 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 VMware Presentation: Horizon – What’s New by Sean Massey, Staff Cloud Solutions Architect – Cloud Partner Solution Architecture at VMware (@seanpmassey)
  In this session, you will learn about the new features and enhancements in the latest version of Horizon, including what’s new with Instant Clones, the Horizon APIs, and the Horizon Client and Agents.
• 3:50 Break
• 3:55 VMware Presentation: SaltStack Overview by Cosmin Trif, Cloud Management Solutions Engineer at VMware
  In this session we will go over an overview of SaltStack and SaltStack SecOps, and how it can help you with configuration management and security compliance.
• 4:35 Ask the Experts: Roundtable Q&A
  • Sean Massey, Staff Cloud Solutions Architect – Cloud Partner Solution Architecture at VMware (@seanpmassey)
  • Cosmin Trif, Cloud Management Solutions Engineer at VMware
  • 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 March 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 VMware Presentation: What’s New in vSphere 7 Update 2
  Come join Brandon Hahn, Staff Technical Account Manager and Bob Plankers, Senior Technical Marketing Architect as they share the numerous improvements in vSphere 7 Update 2 that assist in delivering AI and developer-ready infrastructure, boost infrastructure and data security, and simplify operations.
• 3:50 Break
• 3:55 Presentation: The Crawl, Walk, Run Approach to vSphere Management with Terraform by Kyle Ruddy, Technical Marketing for Terraform at HashiCorp (@kmruddy)
  Infrastructure as code is a powerful process where you can describe the end result and the backend engine makes it all so. This means that instead of knowing the step-by-step method of creating an object, we just need to learn how to define it! In this demo-focused session, we’ll use Terraform, the world’s most widely used provisioning product that’s become synonymous with infrastructure as code, to start creating, managing, and importing resources in an already existing vSphere environment.
• 4:35 Ask the Experts: Roundtable Q&A
  • Brandon Hahn, Staff Technical Account Manager at VMware (@brandonhahn)
  • Bob Plankers, Senior Technical Marketing Architect at VMware (@plankers)
  • Kyle Ruddy, Technical Marketing for Terraform 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 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