My experience at the Boston VMUG USERCON June 18 2015

Many folks in the New England / New York City area have met me these past few years, as I enjoy learning new things at various user groups for IT Professionals. I missed last year's Boston VMUG, but 2015 was bigger than what I recall from 2013, with many home lab give-aways and some friendly competition.

The networking, meeting new people, that's my primary driver. I also enjoyed hearing stories from an IT guy that I had met once before, eager to share the process he's going through to get his workplace ready to deploy vSphere 6.0 into production. Can you guess what tempered his enthusiasm for VCSA? That was VCSA's lack of VMware vSphere Update Manager. I love hearing actual stories from the real world. Hopefully all the vendors appreciate hearing direct and constructive customer feedback.

There were many VMware employees presenting. Also had the good fortune to find myself seated next to a VMware guy I had never met before. We enjoying a late-day casual conversation about all kinds of stuff. Never would have met him otherwise, if not for an opportunity like this event.

A nice surprise for me this year was meeting and greeting many new (to me) companies that I came across in the exhibitor area at @BostonVMUG yesterday. Their engineers politely endured the torture, handling my many challenging questions with ease:

• Arcserve @Arcserve - Dedupe, backup, restore.
• DataCore Software @DataCore - Storage Virtualization.
• LogicMonitor @logicmonitor - SaaS Performance Monitoring.
• Kaminario @KaminarioFlash - All-Flash Array.
• Pivot3 @Pivot3Inc - Hyper-convergence.
• Vembu Technologies @vembutech - Universal Backup, physical and virtual.

I'd like to end with a brief shout-out to some of the many familiar faces I got to catch up with, even if those moments always seem to be way too short, including:

• Chris Colotti from VMware, talking VCDX.
• Michael Berthiaume from Nutanix, talking VCDX.
• Peter Keilty from VMware, talking EVO:RAIL.
• Steve Flanders from VMware, talking Log Insight.
• Brian Tobia from VMware, talking NSX, security, and about Mike Foley's memorable IT work shed.
• Jonathan Frappier from EMC, reminiscing.
• Sean Thulin from SimpliVity, talking about his new job, and cronuts.
• Winslow Technology Group's vBeers, and their fun Northeastern University Interns, talking about Boston, and my own positive experiences working with their undergraduate interns in the past. With PernixData's Rob Bergin there too, always keeping things interesting and fun.

And finally, enthusiastic powerhouse Boston VMUG Leader Steve Athanas, talking about, well, see for yourself, a mere 2 minutes long:

See also at TinkerTry

• TinkerTry will be at Connecticut VMUG USERCON doing a live virtualization lab demo
• Think of VMUG USERCON as a VMUG meeting on steroids
• TinkerTry.com will be at VMworld 2015, see you there?
• All User Group related articles