Its that time of year again, when we all look forward to the imminent arrival of our local VMUG. In my case it’s the Summer London VMUG being held next Thursday the 4th of July 2013 at 33 Queen Street, London, EC4R 1AP.
For those of you who haven’t previously attended, a VMUG is a great place to:
- Meet and swap ideas with other virtualisation professionals in the community. A great opportunity to put real faces to all those twitterati with whom you have had many conversations with over time, but aren’t quite sure what they actually look like (especially if they’re particularly selective about which photos they use)! 🙂
- See some great presentations from other community members. Some of my most memorable have been things like network virtualisation from Greg Ferro (one of the best tech presentations I’ve been fortunate enough to attend, anywhere!), converged networking from Julian Wood of wooditwork.com, and the standing room only presentation from the inimitable Mike Laverick, talking about his 42U “home” lab!
- Attend vendor presentations on new and existing technologies / products. These can be a real mixed bag IMHO. I’ve seen some truly awesome presentations on tech which I would definitely be interested to deploy, as well as some right shockers where half the audience was nearly asleep! Either way these events don’t pay for themselves, so spending 45 minutes at a presentation from a vendor which has the potential to turn out to be really useful, is worth it for the great event they help to fund.
Of course, after the VMUG it is tradition for us all to pop along to a local watering hole to set the virtualisation and tech worlds to rights, over a few vBeers. Once again, if you can spare the time these are great things to attend. The number of things I’ve learned, and great people I’ve met though these events have made it an event I look forward to each quarter. The fact that you might get a free pint on top is just an added bonus!!!
However you look at it, VMUGs are great FREE events organised in their spare time by some very generous people. If you can get the time out of the office, and make it to the venue you won’t be disappointed!
Register for London VMUG here, get the latest news by following @LonVMUG on Twitter and don’t forget to join in the conversation throughout the day using the hashtag #lonvmug
If you see me at the London VMUG or the subsequent vBeers, don’t hesitate to come and say hi; you cant miss me, I’m 6’7″!