A few years ago I claimed that the Melbourne VMUG Usercon was the “Best Virtualisation Event Outside of VMworld!” …that was a big statement if ever there was one however, over the past couple of years I still feel like that statement holds court even though there are much bigger UserCons around the world. In fairness, both Sydney and Melbourne UserCons are solid events and even with VMUG numbers generally struggling world wide, the events are still well attended and a must for anyone working around the VMware ecosystem.

Both events happen a couple of days apart from each other on the 19th and 21st of March and both are filled with quality content, quality presenters and a great community feel.

This will be my sixth straight Melbourne UserCon and my fourth Sydney UserCon…The last couple of years I have attended with Veeam and presented a couple of times. This year Veeam has UserCon Global Sponsorship which is exciting as the Global Product Strategy team will be presenting a lot of the UserCons around the world. Both the Sydney and Melbourne Agenda’s are jam packed with virtualisation and automation goodness and it’s actually hard to attend everything of interest with schedule conflicts happening throughout the day.

…the agenda’s are listed on the sites.

As mentioned, Veeam is sponsoring both events a the Global Elite level and I’ll be presenting a session on Automation and Orchestration of Veeam and VMware featuring VMware Cloud on AWS which is an updated followup to the VMworld Session I presented last year. The Veeam SDDC Deployment Toolkit has been evolving since then and i’ll talk about what it means to leverage APIs and PowerShell to achieve automation goodness with a live demo!

Other notable sessions include:

If you are in Sydney or Melbourne next week try and get down to Sydney ICC and The Crown Casino respectively to participate, learn and contribute and hopefully we can catch up for a drink.