Tag Archives: UKVMUG

The UK, now with more VMUGs

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imageI am a big fan of the VMUGs, especially in the UK, my first VMUG was the London VMUG, I started attending a long time ago and traveled from the south west of England to join in.  This is where I started presenting and learning more about VMware and vendor related products.

As a side note you should also make sure you volunteer to talk at the VMUGs, Duncan gave some great tips about talking in his recent post so make sure you check them out.

My first real presentation was at a the London VMUG, I stumbled my way all the way through it and never did I think that just a few years later I would present to over 1,000 people at VMworld, I guess it shows you what you can achieve and why you should get involved!

Anyway, the main reason for this post is to let everyone in the UK know that there are now multiple VMUGs that you can attend so you have no reason not to join in and talk to like minded people.

London VMUG

Next meeting is January 23rd 2014, sign up here to find out more info and learn about upcoming VMUGs.

South West VMUG

Next meeting is February 18th 2104, sign up here to find out more info and learn about upcoming VMUGs.

North East VMUG

Next meeting is March 13th 2014, sign up here to find out more info and learn about upcoming VMUGs.

North West VMUG

Next meeting is not currently scheduled, sign up here to find out more info and learn about upcoming VMUGs.

Yorkshire VMUG

It would seam Yorkshire is no longer in the North of England Winking smile Next meeting is January 30th 2014, sign up here to find out more info and learn about upcoming VMUGs.

Scotland VMUG

Next meeting is not currently scheduled, sign up here to find out more info and learn about upcoming VMUGs.

And don’t forget the Ireland VMUG

Next meeting is not currently scheduled, sign up here to find out more info and learn about upcoming VMUGs.

UKVMUG–Nov 3rd 2011

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For the first time ever there will be a UK wide VMUG and I have to say the organisers have certainly made sure it will be one that is not to be forgotten.  With VMware super stars like Duncan Epping, Lee Dilworth and Cormac Hogan being flown in to give some great sessions and the usual UK crowd it should be a great event.

Also available throughout the day will be a PowerCLI Hands on Lab, come to learn how to get started with PowerCLI, take PowerCLI to the next level or even just to say hi and chat with me and Jonathan Medd about PowerShell, PowerCLI or anything else on your mind.

Event Details

Thursday, November 3, 2011

8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.

National Motorcycle Museum
Coventry Road
Bickenhill, Solihull, West Mids, England B92 0EJ

Register

Make sure you register here
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North UK VMUG –11th Oct

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image“Ayup me duck” – Sorry, just practising for next week.  For those of you in the north of the UK, if you aren’t already aware there is a “Virtual Machine User Group” next week on Tuesday 11th October.

Sessions will not only include VMware but Citrix, Microsoft, EMC, Netapp, B2Net and many many more – it should be fun !

I will be presenting a session on “Image Builder, Auto Deploy and general PowerCLI”, my session will be from 15:15 – 16:05 in the “Mull Room”.

If you are not yet registered to attend I suggest you head over to http://www.vmug.org.uk/ right now before they run out of room.

For more information on the day please see the below details and schedule of events:

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July London VMUG

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Its time for another London VMware user group, unfortunately I will be unable to make it but I highly recommend attending this on Thursday, July 14, 2011 between 10:00 a.m. – 17:00 p.m. and afterwards for vBeers, Don’t worry PowerCLI will still be there and I would suggest attending Jonathan Medds session for a chance to win a copy of the “VMware VSphere PowerCLI Reference” and for some great PowerCLI tips which will save time for any VMware admin.

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London VMUG – 12 May 2011

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The next London VMUG has been arranged and will take place on Thursday, 12 May 2011.

There will be a change to the normal routine as it now looks like there will be multiple tracks, multiple sponsors and labs. There is also a theme for this VMUG… “Your Journey to the Cloud”. The start time has also changed to 10am. This event will be sponsored by COLT, EMC and Quest.

To book your place at the VMUG visit the VMUG site here, before registering for the event you will also need to sign up as a member of the myvmug site first.

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London VMUG – Thu 15 July – Lets get interactive !

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I have been given my normal resident slot at the London VMUG this Thursday, 15th July.

At the last VMUG I showed how vEcoShell could be used to add the graphical interface back onto our PowerCLI scripts and also gave an overview of the “VMware Community PowerPack”, when performing the demo I showed how easy it was to drill down into an object using the debugger in the script editor.

Someone asked me if next time I would give more tips and tricks like this, the kind of tips you pick up without realising it and are really helpful to people starting to learn PowerCLI.

So this time there will be a change in the way my session is presented…. We are going to get interactive !

If you are attending my PowerCLI session at the VMUG this Thursday 11-12, please bring along the following equipment:

I will bring these on a USB stick also but it will help if you are already setup and raring to go !

My plan is to host a ESX host and a vCenter VM and a few other VMs which we can all hook into and mess with, we can all do the same things and learn at the same time, I will have some mini instructions to follow which will help you along the path – think of this as a free PowerCLI course !

We will start off slow and then I will ask you to do a few things on your own, just to keep you awake.

Hopefully it will go down without a hitch, if you are unable to bring your laptop don’t worry I will try and put you in a group with other people so we can all observe and work together.

See you on Thursday and please remember your laptop !

London VMUG – My Presentation

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Yesterday was a fantastic VMware user group, definitely my favourite one so far, lots of great content from some fantastic people and some real rockstars (I think that is the 2010 word for Guru’s) like Mike Laverick, Carter Shanklin (Carter USM), Stuart Radnidge and many many more.

I was privileged to open the show with a PowerCLI session, this is a pre-show session so wasn’t really part of the main VMUG, as such I was not expecting such a large crowd, if you came to the session then thanks very much, i thing there must have been around 40-45 people in there and I had a great time presenting this one.

We had a great mix of beginners to Pro’s and some great conversations about PowerCLI and what we could do to take the ESX install to the next level, one such example is in my script where we add an A host record to the DNS server as part of our deployment.

If you weren’t there or you would just like to re-live the presentation then please see below: Continue reading →

London VMware User Group – 25th Feb

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I have been asked to do a session at the London VMUG on 25th February 2010, after my previous session where I took the attendees through a beginners introduction to PowerCLI, I think I will throw them straight in this time and show them how we can configure ESXi using PowerCLI.

ESXi is obviously a hot topic at the moment and the configuration of ESXi without the service console access is proving to be difficult for many users.  This session will take you through the configuration of a host from start to end showing you how easy it is and highlighting some of the scripts and cmdlets explained in my previous post.

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As a bonus I will also be giving away a set of “VMware vSphere Pro Series Training Vol. 1: View, ThinApp, Nexus 1000V, and PowerCLI” videos during my session, with thanks to the great guys at TrainSignal, be sure to bring your questions along for a chance to win this great prize !

 

There will obviously be all the other great sessions which normally take place and there is even a rumour that an all powerful PowerCLI expert from the states will be descending from upon high to give us the latest and greatest automation information from VMware !

I am personally looking forward to a “Real life” session which my colleagues Jonathan Medd and Vic Milne will be delivering, this will be an interesting presentation on how they moved both datacenters and storage devices with (nearly) no downtime !

Also on my agenda will be the Enterprise Cloud presentation from vStu that is sure to be full of both useful information in a friendly and native Australian dialog and humour.

As always the details for the VMUG can be found on the forum here.

If you are looking to deploy ESXi and are having trouble performing or have had trouble performing a certain task then please do let me know via the comments of this post so I can be sure to include this. – It would also give you bonus points when in the running for the TrainSignal video 🙂

UK London VMware User Group

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The next UK London VMUG has been announced, if you have not been before I highly recommend it and this time there is an added treat, Jonathan Medd will be presenting a pre-event on PowerCLI, at this point in time I don’t think I will be able to attend as I am unable to get time off at work (I’m gutted) but if that changes I will also be catching Jonathans excellent session.

Firstly, the VMUG will be held on Tuesday 24th November, and is going to focus fairly heavily on vSphere.  If any of you would like to present on a vSphere-related topic with which you have good, recent experience, please get in touch with Alaric as soon as possible. This could be any of installation, upgrade (hosts, VC, VMs), networking, storage, design changes, operations changes, backup, DR, third party tools, and so on. There are some fantastic giveaways that are available to anyone who presents a session, so please do get in touch with him via the forum here: http://communities.vmware.com/thread/241557?tstart=0

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UKVMUG: PowerCLI Presentation/Class

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Last week at the UK London VMware User Group they tried something different, in the UKVMUG forums there had been a few threads from people interested in learning more about the VI toolkit or as it is now known PowerCLI.

I was contacted by one of the UKVMUG leaders and asked if I would be interested in giving a presentation/class for an hour before the normal UKVMUG for those who were interested in learning… I jumped at the chance as love to pass on my experiences and show people the easy way to learn both PowerShell and PowerCLI as there are a few shortcuts and things I have learnt over the past 6 months.

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