This year is our 3rd Wisconsin VMUG User Conference. The first two have been very well attended and we have received a lot of great feedback. We continue to try and improve the event and think that this year’s event will be our best one yet. Here’s a couple of highlights for next week’s WI-VMUG User Conference.

We have a VMware NDA Session in the afternoon which is something that the Central Ohio VMUG has done the last couple of years. It has been very highly attended and very well received by the VMUG members there. This closed door session will require you to sign a NDA form when entering the room.

I’m looking forward to vExpert Cody Bunch’s keynote at the end of the day. If anyone outside of VMware knows vSphere automation and VMware Orchestrator it’s Cody. He’s written a great book on the topic and has done countless related blog posts at professionalvmware.com. Cody is also the creator of the vBrownbag podcasts which is a series of online webinars held using GotoMeeting and covering various Virtualization & VMware Certification topics.

The labs this year should be by far our best yet. MATC is putting on a subset of the actual labs from the VMware vSphere 5 Install, Configure and Manage class they teach. We will also be providing access to the Beta of VMware’s Online Hands-On-Labs. These are modeled after the labs VMware does at VMworld.

A couple of things to be aware of with the VMware Online Hands-On-Labs:

These labs are still in Beta so while they have been working pretty well so far please keep this in mind and set your expectations accordingly.
You MUST PREREGISTER for the User Conference in order to access these labs. This is due to the fact that each person will have an individual user account set up for them in advance.
The lab is designed as a Bring Your Own Device lab. While we expect to have a limited number of laptops setup in the room please bring your own laptop if you want to be assured access to the lab.

Here are some additional details on what will be available for these labs.

Watch for a blog post on Wednesday with some directions (best way to minimize road construction delays) and parking information for the event.

Here is the Schedule of Events for the day.