Last week I attended the Sydney and Melbourne VMUG UserCons and apart from sitting in on some great sessions I came away from both events with a renewed sense of community spirit and enjoyed catching up with industry peers and good friends that I don’t see often enough. While the VMUG is generally struggling a little around the world at this point in time, kudos goes to both Sydney and Melbourne chapter leaders and steering committee in being able to bring out a superstar bunch of presenters (see panel below)…there might not be a better VMUG lineup anywhere in the world this year!

There was a heavy automation focus this year…which in truth was the same as last years events however last years messaging was more around the theory of _change or die_ this year there was more around the practical. This was a welcome change because, while it’s all well and good to beat the change messaging into people…actually taking them through real world examples and demo’s tends to get people more excited and keen to dive into automation as they get a sense of how to apply it to their every day jobs.

In the VMware community, there are not better examples of automation excellence than Alan Renouf and William Lam and their closing keynote sessions where they went through and deployed a fully functional SDDC vSphere environment on a single ESXi host from a USB Key was brilliant and hopefully will be repeated at other VMUGs and VMworld. This project was born out of last years VMworld Hackerthon’s and ended up being a really fun and informative presentation that showed off the power of automation along with the benefits of what undertaking an automation project can deliver.

“Its not stealing, its sharing” 

During the presentation Alan Renouf shared this slide which got many laughs and resonated well with myself in that apart from my very early failed uni days, I don’t think I have ever created a bit of code or written a script from scratch. There is somewhat of a stigma attached with “borrowing” or “stealing” code used to modify or create scripts within the IT community. There might also be some shame associated in admitting that a bit of code wasn’t 100% created by someone from scratch…I’ve seen this before and I’ve personally been taken to task when presenting some of the scripts that I’ve modified for purpose during my last few roles.

What Alan is pointing out there is that it’s totally ok to stand on the shoulders of giants and borrow from what’s out there in the public domain…if code is published online via someones personal blog or put up on GitHub then it’s fair game. There is no shame in being efficient…no shame in not having to start from scratch and certainly no shame in claiming success after any mods have been done… Own it!

Conclusion and Event Wrap Up:

Overall the 2017 Sydney and Melbourne UserCons where an excellent event and on a personal note I enjoyed being able to attend with Veeam as the Platinum Sponsor and present session on our vSAN/VVOL/SPBM support and introduce our Windows and Linux Agents to the crowd. The Melbourne crowd was especially engaged and asked lots of great questions around our agent story and where looking forward to the release of Veeam Agent for Windows.

Again the networking with industry peers and customers is invaluable and there was a great sense of community once again. The UserCon events are of a high quality and my thanks goes out to the leaders of both Sydney and Melbourne for working hard to organise these events. And which one was better? …I won’t go there but those that listened to my comment during our Sponsor giveaways at the end of the event knows how I really feel.

Until next year UserCon!