Today's UK VMware User Group

Today's UK VMware User Group was a great community content event. Of course there was a sponsor presentation (Veeam) without whom these type of events can't be put on, but there were also a lot of contributions from people in the group.

We had:

1) Veeam talking about their reporting and backup products.

2) Mike Laverick from RTFM education talking about Site Recovery Manager and not the VMware view of it, rather real world struggles - warts and all as he put it. Its great to see this kind of content because you get to find out how these products really function in reality. He also gave away a few copies of his book on Site Recovery Manager which I'm sure is a must read for this topic.

3) Get-Scripting's very own vExpert Alan Renouf gave us a debrief from VMworld Europe in Cannes. By the sounds of it a great event, but possibly could be extended to include an extra day and maybe needs a bigger venue given the issues some people had getting into sessions.

4) A presentation from another community member about technology futures, 'the cloud', advances in mobile devices, stuff like that, and how they may affect the corporate world. This is now the second event I have been to which has talked about employee owned IT, i.e. you turn up to a job with your own laptop and corporate IT supply you either with a VM to run corporate applications or all delivered through a browser. The demand coming from cool, young, hip people (like me :-) ) who won't stand for the constraints of a corporate environment.

"Why can't I run facebook / second life / quake / twitter on my macbook / ipod/ pink netbook and just run your apps on the same machine too?"

5) Steve Bruck and Alan Renouf (again) with an update about the recently released VI toolkit V1.5 . Some good examples, also lots of interest in Alan's getting started guide.

6) Finally finished off with more community content, this time about the upcoming vCenter Heartbeat product.


It was great to see slightly more audience participation than normal this time, which I think might have come from the slightly smaller room and more, but shorter sessions. I really enjoyed it anyway.

If you want to hear REAL people talking about how they really use VMware based products then this is the event for you.

Next one 14th May! More details can be found here.