Tuesday, February 21, 2017

Maryland VMUG Gets Real

A few years ago, I complained that VMUG meetings were too heavy on pres-sales and product-
pitches to suffer through in order to get any useful technical information, and that the technical information on current VMware offerings was increasingly irrelevant to a customer base that wasn't keeping up with vSphere releases. The VMUG formula was predictable and tiring: vendor sales presentation, vendors sales presentation, food, and a brief discussion on actual VMware products. Sometimes the sales presentations were only tangentially related to vSphere or vRealize.

VMUG images hosted on AWS? lolwut
But the worst part was that the users group wasn't really a users group. It was a small group of interested technologists listening to VMUG leaders and vendors. Few and far between were the interactive, informative, informal conversations between fellow vSphere or vRA (or View, if that's your thing). You had to wait until the meeting was over before you could really network with your fellow VMUG members. Sad!

In fact, I'd stopped attending the local meetings as a direct result. I still browse the agenda for the meetings, but they haven't caught my attention.

Until now.

Tomorrow afternoon at 4pm, the MDVMUG is trying something new: no vendor presentations, just HOL and NSX.


This is a much welcomed change from the typical format of these meetings, and I'm very glad to see the focus rightly returned to sharing knowledge and encouraging professional development and networking among VMware users.

Show your support for your local VMUG, especially when they're taking steps to address criticism. I'll be there tomorrow night!
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