Have you ever dreamt about becoming a vExpert? When I became one in 2016 I had no idea what was needed and the vExpert Pro’s where not around yet. Several years ago the vExpert team setup this vExpert Pro program that is aimed at enabling hopefulls to be able to create the application they need to become a vExpert.
Starting the week after Explore 2023 in Barcelona I will be running a weekly vExpert office hour zoom call where people can come with questions or if they want to discuss their application we can also review it. Even if you’re not there yet content wise we can also give you directions on what you could do for the next round of applications. These sessions will be held between 20.00h and 21.00h ECT +1 on Monday evenings and I will try to get multiple vExpert Pro’s in there to help you out as much as possible. My good friend Martin Micheelsen will be running a similar session on Thursday evenings.
If you are interested in joining the vExpert Office Hours drop me an email at vexpertofficehours@gmail.com so I can add you to either or both of the calendar invitations.
or join us on the days via zoom using these details:
Last Friday it was time for my annual trip tot he Belgian vmug meeting. I consider this my home vmug away from home and have been visiting for years. This was the first time I could give back in Belgium since Hans & mine session was accepted in the call for papers.
Our session
Right after the keynote (from which we sadly had to miss a couple of minutes to get setup) we did our presentation in front of about 22-23 people in the attick of the building. Just like at the Dutch vmug we did it about flings & tools for Vmware Horizon. Luckily we could do some of our demo’s locally because the wifi & 4G weren’t delivering a good speed to connect to our labs.One thing is for sure we did the session in the brightest manner ever.
If you are interested in the slidedeck we partially used you can find it here.
Other sessions
Firts of all the keynote by Joe Baguley was great as always. His vision on how things works or should be done has been evolving over the years but always seems to around the same lines. The 2nd keynote bij Johan van Amersfoor about VDI by day,compute by night wasn’t the first time I have seen this session but it’s so good that I don’t mind watching it several times.
The session about Kubernetes by Eric de Witte contained some usefull information since I haven’t done a whole lot with kubernetes yet. The last two sessions for me where Luc Dekens talking PowerCLI (what else?) and Valentin Bondzio about the computational cost of security. Luc’s session was about his style of coding and steps he takes to write codes plus a bit about working with instant clones.
During the day Hans and I had great fun with the people from EG Innovations and 10Zig in the exhibition area. As usual at the BE vmug the day ended with a great BBQ, those belgians do know their food! While not as big as the Dutch vmug UserCon the Belgian vmug meets are always high quality so I will beep going if my schedule allows me too and yes if needed I will take a PTO day for it.
Currently I am sitting behind my desk still bouncing around after a great Dutch Vmug Usercon yesterday. This was my fourth time presenting at this awesome event and every time I get a little bit better at doing so. With 11 parallel tracks in the afternoon it becomes hard not to find interesting sessions. As always content went from deep technical to marketing or even personal improvement.
My (or more our) session
As said this was the fourth time I presented at the Dutch Vmug and the second time together with my great friend Hans Kraaijeveld. Just like two years ago we had a mix of various flings and tools that could help a Horizon admin in managing their environment. We decided on skipping a couple since we already covered those two years ago or last year in my own session. They did get an honorable mention:
VMware OS Optimization Tool (OSOT)
Logon Monitor
PowerCLi for Horizon.
The tools we did cover are:
VMware Horizon Helpdesk fling
VMware Performance Tracker
VMware log bundle scripts (we still visit too many customer who don’t know about these) & analyzing them with Agent Ransack
Procmon
While 20 minutes is really short I think we really did manage to get the message across. We where even able to challenge to audience to present next year and answer some questions. You can find the slides to our presentation over here. This version is in Dutch but you can expect an English one since we will be giving the same presentation with some extras and hopefully live demos at the next https://vcnrw.de/ event on april 4th.
Besides our own session the highlights of the day where (re-)connecting with friends. Getting informed about new tech but also the vExpert lunch with Amy Lewis and the afternoon keynote by Jad El-Zein. The vibe during the day was awesome during the entire event!
While The Fabrique is a great looking location it’s hard to find where you want to go. With a lot of smaller hallways, corners, stairs and stupid doors it sometimes became annoying. And was it just me but I would have liked to find some other softdrinks than this (delicious!) healthy stuff like a coke or something.
Update: the video for my session can be found HERE (it is in Dutch!) or watched down below 🙂
I know I used it before but Ooooooooooooh what a rush where the last two days. It’s the day after when I am writing this but like I said on twitter I am still bouncing around after the Dutch VMUG UserCon. My own session went great and hopefully I can put the link to the video here very soon. What I can do is give you the slide deck I used and you can find it at the bottom of this post. The only thing I changed was that I added a translated disclaimer since I had way too much fun creating that one. I did create it as a parody of all the VMworld and .Next disclaimers and because I was in the last timeslot of the day and wanted to give the audience something to laugh when they walked in so they would stay awake after a tiring day at our mini VMworld.
disclaimer
Day one
Now about those two days, at the first day I was one of the three judges in our first (hopefully annual) Hackathon. We had three teams, two from partners: ITQ & PQR and one, that got dragged in by their TAM, from the customer side. PQR build a combination of VRA, home automation and Lego Mindstorms. They gave a voice command to a homey and the Lego Mindstorms robot showed the status of the new vm request while Ikea Tradiri would also show the status with a colored bulb. When a vm was rejected the robot dumped the bit the used as example in the bin aka off the table :D. Team ITQ wanted to deploy a PKS cluster by using giving an Amazon Alexa a voice command that in its turn used a slack channel as messagebus to get things deployed. Not everything worked perfect but in the end they were able to ask Alexa for a Minecraft server and a Steve webinterface would give visual feedback if it worked. As an easteregg Steve could also do a barrel roll. Team Dictu had a different use case, they are busy implementing VRA and their TAM though it was a good idea to get some practice at the Hackathon, they did end up deploying things after some waiting on the slow wifi. For me they were the winners for trying to do something almost new to them and getting results as well. That is why I gave them my personal spot price: a six-pack of Achelse Kluis Trappist beer. Overall, we decided not to have a real winner but everyone won as it should be. The theme of Fun, beer and Gyros fitted perfectly and together with everyone who was there I am sure we had an awesome time. Just next year I might think about creating a non-company but vCommunity team of all sorts to do some EUC stuff.
The swag table had some interesting stickers at the hackathon
During the day at day one there were also several VMware R&D sessions (NDA I believe) and a VCDX workshop. The R&D Sessions could use some more audience but the vcdx workshop was very full I believe. For me day one was already a huge success while day two was still coming.
Day two
Day two or more actually UserCon day. I must admit that I didn’t attend a lot of sessions but the keynote by no-one else then Pat Gelsinger was great. He did not get a lot of questions during the q&a part but it filled the time and he had to use the I cannot confirm nor deny that several times. Some of the sessions I attended where a NSX jumpstart for VDI by Pascal van de Bor, a security awareness session (marketed as security for EUC admins & Consultants) and some others. At 15.50h it was time for my own session that was in fact an introduction to PowerCLI for Horizon View. I managed to spoon-feed the audience 61 slides in a bit over 20 minutes without them even noticing it. I had 16 slides with static content including vmug, title, introduction and overview pages. The rest where simply moving gifs (without loops!) that I recorded using ScreentoGif. This allowed me to demo the functions and usage of the results without boring the audience with 10 minutes of typing errors by doing it manually. And yes, some things I had to do over 10 times to get it rights so it was worth doing it that way. I managed to get myself in a relaxed state by listening to some music (Katie Melua this time) while going through the deck one last time. During the presentation I hardly felt the nerves and even managed to keep my cool and not speak too fast like I did before. While last year with Hans it was a success this time was even better and I was really satisfied with the results.
After having lots of fun in the vExpert Slack channel last evening with everyone waiting for the vExpert 2018 announcements I decided to had to bed not too late. This morning I woke up with this in my inbox:
So this is my third year in a row that I have been awarded VMware vExpert. Those three years have been a thrill ride. I started blogging mid 2016 after doing my first (and somewhat failed) vmug presentation at the Dutch VMUG. Things really picked up after I was awarded my 1st vExpert in the 2nd batch of 2016, my blog started to get more views, I created more content and I found my home in a community that simply rules: the vCommunity!
While sometimes harsh words are spoken my general feeling of the vCommunity is one of camaraderie. No question is too stupid, no solution is to weird, there are always people willing to help you with whatever is going on. This is not only true for the vExpert slack channels but also those of Nutanix, VMware Code, IOPros and last but not least the vExpertEUC channel. Most of the times things are very serious but every now and then the channels buzz with that Friday afternoon feeling where no-one is safe for jokes. When going to events meeting up with all of these people is always fun. If it is at a vmug, VMworld or EUCtechcon there’s almost almost immediate chemistry between people who just enjoy sharing and caring.
So I want to thank all of the vCommunity that have made this possible for me and I look forward to speaking to you whether it’s in person, twitter, slack or some webex. Without all of you this wouldn’t have been half as much fun!!
In two weeks time I will be presenting at the Dutch VMUG UserCon, the biggest VMUG in the world! For the 3rd consecutive time I will be taking the stage by storm. My first try, about problems I encountered in the field, was a disaster but I learned lots and got good feedback from lots of people including my very good friend Hans Kraaijeveld. The second year I decided to get Hans on stage as well because he already thought he knew it all so we presented about our favorite flings for Horizon View last year. I repeated that presentation on my own at the German VMUG later that year where I had a bit more time so I could actually show the tools instead of clicking trough a powerpoint like we had to do in in the 20 minutes we had in The Netherlands.
This year I will be on my own again on stage talking about PowerCLI & Horizon View. For the regulars on that will certainly not come as a surprise. Lots of it will be pre-recorded demo’s since I don’t want to bore the people with ten minutes of typing errors. Sadly I am placed at the end of the day so I hope the audience will not be too tired. I have competition from someone called Duncan Epping, you might have heard of him. Looking at the agenda it’s a star studded day anyhow so it’s hard getting a slot without very good competition.
So do I see you at the dutch vmug? Most of the presentations will be in dutch but we can still have fun though!
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