Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

vmug

VMUG Advantage Homelab Group Buy Discount offer!

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Some of you may have seen the blog that William Lam posted last year titled the “VMUG Advantage Homelab Group Buy Discount”. Some of you may have not seen this. Basically, William worked with the VMUG on a discount for the VMUG Advantage Program. Why am I posting this? Well, I am pleased to announce that I have teamed up with William Lam and the VMUG to bring the VMUG Advantage Group Buy to the VMware Community. The great thing about this group buy is that the higher the number of people signing up, the higher the discount will be! But why should you sign up?

I get questions about career development a lot. How do I become an expert in vSAN or NSX for instance? How do I get to the next level? Well, there’s no shortcut, unfortunately. You have got to put in the work! What better way than building a lab, testing and playing with the products, taking training courses etc? That is where VMUG Advantage comes into play as it can provide access to all of those things, and/or at least lower the cost for these things. What is included?

  • 365-day Evaluation Licenses
    • Including vSphere, vCloud Foundation, vSAN, NSX, vRealize, Workstation, Horizon, and more!
  • VMworld Discounts
  • 20-35% discount on training
  • Access to “test drive“

The VMUG Advantage Program comes at a cost of 200 USD. Last year the discount was 15%, which means the price ended up being 170 USD for a full year. If you have just one training course planned per year, the VMUG Advantage Program will have already paid for itself (20% discount on a 3000+ USD training course). Yes, I have been talking about USD so far, but of course, this offer is available to all our community members globally (Europe, APJ, Africa, Middle East, etc). Now, again, the discount percentage you get, will depend on the number of people signing up for this years promotion. The ranges look as follows:

Quantity Discount Cost
1-199 12% $176
200-299 14% $172
300+ 15% $170

If more than 1000 people sign up, VMUG HQ will also do a raffle and give away some cool VMUG Advantage “swag”.Can’t wait? Sign up for the discount code here, join the program!

Now before I forget, personally I think that the VMUG Advantage Program is a great program, and I feel that it is a great investment in your career. However, I also do realize that not everyone may be in a position where they can afford to invest 170-176 USD. I would highly encourage people to have a conversation with their employer, in many cases, employers are happy for employees to join these programs, if only because it allows them to benefit from the discounts on training courses, exams, and of course VMworld. Sign up for the discount code here, join the program!

<UPDATE: We have reached 250, so right now we are at 15% discount!>

Event Season has lifted off! #VirtualRoadshow

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It seems that Event Season has lifted off, and the virtual roadshow has really started. I can’t remember a point in time where I had this many events scheduled in a few months. Actually, I think I have more events scheduled in the upcoming 3 months than I had in the previous 12. I guess the whole Corona situation has made people realize that we don’t necessarily need to be in a single room together to share knowledge and discuss interesting situations, architectures, and/or problems. Considering I have many different events planned, I figured I would share the links where you can register for these. If you are a VMUG leader and are interested in hosting a virtual event, feel free to drop me (or Frank Denneman / Cormac Hogan) a note, and we can see how we can fit it in our schedule.

  • June 4th – VMUG Romania – VMware Platform for a New Decade with Frank Denneman, Cormac Hogan and Duncan Epping
  • June 23rd – VMware vSAN 7.0 what’s new Webinar by Duncan Epping
  • June 25th – VMUG Scotland / Ireland – VMware Platform for a New Decade with Frank Denneman, Cormac Hogan and Duncan Epping
  • June 30th – VMUG Germany – VMware Platform for a New Decade with Frank Denneman, Cormac Hogan and Duncan Epping
  • July 2nd – VMUG England – VMware Platform for a New Decade with Frank Denneman, Cormac Hogan and Duncan Epping
  • July 7th – VMware vSAN File Services and Cloud Native Workloads with Cormac Hogan and Duncan Epping
  • September 9th – VMUG Southern Virginia – with Frank Denneman, Cormac Hogan and Duncan Epping
  • September 17th – VMUG Nordics (Denmark / Norway / Sweden) – VMware Platform for a New Decade with Frank Denneman, Cormac Hogan and Duncan Epping
  • October 6th – VMUG New York Keynote – Duncan Epping
  • December 10th – VMUG Portland Keynote – Duncan Epping

These are the “public” virtual events that are planned right now in a virtual format. There are a few more events that I will be presenting at, but these are mostly invite-only events for VMware TAM customers. Of course, we are also working with various other VMUGs that had events scheduled to see how we can turn it into a successful virtual event, so the above list will be updated in the near future probably.

If you are a member of any of the above VMUG chapters, make sure to register, and I hope to see you at one of those events.

Confessions of a VMUG Speaker – the prequel #SpeakerFail

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On twitter a question was asked by Casey West if people had “Speaker Fail” stories and I replied to it with my story. I have told this story to some folks but never shared it on my blog, so I figured I would share it. I already wrote an article about speaking at your local VMUG and what to do and not to do, but these are things I found out the hard way…

So what is the back story? Well, many many years ago I just started working for VMware. I was already doing some blogging and had posted a bunch of articles about vSphere HA. As a result I knew some of the developers and one of them asked me to work with him on the deck. I was terrified of public speaking, actually I rejected other public speaking, but I figured that helping him out develop the deck couldn’t hurt. So I worked with him on the deck and after a while he asked if I wanted to help presenting the deck.

I thought about it for a while and my brain said: SAY NO. I gave it some more thought, and although I was terrified I wanted to go outside of my comfort zone, I didn’t realize though when I said yes that I would go in to the panic zone straight away instead of in to the “learning zone”. I was nervous, extremely nervous. But luckily the developer told me that it would only be a session in front of 100 people.

A couple of weeks go by and I receive an email. The developer told me that due to various escalations/bugs had to fix for an upcoming release he could not fly to the event. I was by myself. You can imagine that my level or nervousness went up with about 10x. I would be on my own in front of 100 people, what now? The VMworld team transferred the session on to my name, and then I logged in to the backend to see the details of my session. This includes the registrations. Hold on, it was supposed to say 100 people, but it says 450. WHAT? 450 people in a single room? And then a day they changed rooms for the sessions, as it was overbooked, quickly after that the registrations filled up to 700 something. I was nervous just thinking about presenting in front of 100 people with a co-presenter, now I was going up on stage by myself in front of 700+.

I rehearsed, rehearsed, rehearsed, rehearsed and rehearsed. I wanted to make sure I knew every slide inside out before I went up on stage. And I did, I was nervous as hell but I knew my slides by the letter. Unfortunately I was so nervous that I went in to this “hyper sensitive state” and I could hear everything that was going on in the room. After 3 or 4 slides I was explaining a complex diagram and someone’s phone went off, he picked it up and walked out. I lost my train of thought and had to start over again with the slide. Which in its turn made me over more nervous. It took me roughly 5 minutes just to recover from that, but it felt like days. I finished my session and decided I would never ever present again. I am writing this while presenting at a VMUG, no need to tell you that I didn’t give up.

For those who have been in this situation, or are hesitant to present because of these reasons, please read the post Confessions of a VMUG speaker, which was written before this post. I hope it helps realizing people that many people face the same fears, but by practicing your session and doing it over and over again at various events you will become better and it will make it easier. Heck, you may even start to enjoy it after a while!

 

Coming to a VMUG in EMEA near you…

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I just came back from the VMUG in Denmark, which was a great event, and I figured I would share what I have planned right now for the upcoming months. I hope to be able to meet many of my readers at one of these events. If you are there, don’t be afraid to stop by and say hi! I am also more than happy to take back any feedback you have on storage/availability to our engineering and product management teams! (Oh and if you are a VMUG leader in EMEA and you would like to have my speak at one of your events, just drop me an email.)

Here we go:

  • 22 Feb – Newcastle, UK VMUG
  • 7 March – Lausanne, Switzerland VMUG
  • 8 March – Zurich, Switzerland VMUG
  • 20 March – Den Bosch, Netherlands VMUG
  • 10 April – Istanbul, Turkey VMUG

See you there!

 

VMware User Group

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I have the pleasure to present at three VMUGs in the upcoming months I have never presented at before, heck I never been to those countries even. First coming up is the VMUG in Dubai on the 16th of February followed by two VMUGs in Australia, with the Dutch VMUG in between. Lets see which other VMUGs we can add to that list in the upcoming months.

  • 16th of February – Dubai VMUG
  • 16th of March – NL VMUG, Den Bosch, Nederland
  • 21st of March – Sydney VMUG, Australia
  • 23rd of March – Melbourne VMUG, Australia

I will (most likely) be talking about vSAN (what else), if you are interested make sure to register through the VMUG website here: https://www.vmug.com/Attend/Calendar (no details for Dubai yet).

See you there, I will make sure to bring some goodies like stickers and probably shirts (if I can order them in time).