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Special VMUG Advantage Homelab Group Buy

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The VMware Community Homelabs Project is a crowdsourcing effort that I had started back in February that enables the VMware community to help share the various VMware homelab configurations, usage and costs into a single location that can benefit our larger community. With the success of that project and the "hardware" aspects out of the way, I wanted to see what else I could do to help our VMware community in terms of the "software" aspects, as that is just as important.

The most popular solution by far today is to sign up for a VMUG Advantage membership which gives you access to a number of benefits including training and VMworld discounts but also to EVALExperience, which provides you with 365-days access (non-production usage) to the latest VMware solutions such as vSphere, vSAN, NSX, vRealize Suite and VMware Cloud Foundation. The EVALExperience alone is worth the $200 USD membership and is certainly one of the cheapest and easiest way to get access to all the latest VMware offerings for homelab purposes. Throughout the year, there are usually promo codes that you can find that ranges anywhere from 5-10% discount, but I wanted to see if we could do better 🙂

Today, I am very excited to announce a partnership between virtuallyGhetto and the VMware User Group (VMUG) organization to share with the VMware Community a special VMUG Advantage Homelab Group Buy offering. The table below provides the respective discounts based on the quantity of VMUG Advantage membership purchases. The larger the interests group, the larger the discount.

UPDATE (04/25/20) - The survey has officially closed and I will send in the final list to the VMUG folks which you will be receiving an email with instructions on how to obtain your promotional code. In total, we had a total of 701 respondents!


UPDATE (04/20/20) - We now have over 600+ folks registered. Everyone signed up (please sign up as that is the only way to take part in the group buy) will receive the 15% discount. I have already spoken to the VMUG folks and they will be working on getting the promotion code ready so folks can start purchasing immediately, stay tuned for that update via email. We have also agreed to leave the survey up for another week (Fri 4/24 will be last day) to ensure that everyone has the opportunity to sign up.

Quantity Discount Cost
1-99 12% $176
100-199 14% $172
200-300 15% $170

With the GA of vSphere 7.0, vSAN 7.0 and NSX-T 3.0, there is no better time to consider VMUG Advantage to get access to the latest releases. If that was not enough, I should also mention that VMUG Advantage will also include the upcoming VMware Cloud Foundation 4.0 release, which will allow folks to also try out the new vSphere with Kubernetes capabilities, which is currently only available as part of the VMware Cloud Foundation SKU.

Note: Licenses from VMUG Advantage can NOT be used for Production purposes.

If you are interested in participating in the VMUG Advantage Homelab Group Buy, please fill out the following survey below to express your interests in purchasing a VMUG Advantage subscription(s). This survey is planned to be open for two weeks to gauge the level of interests and help determine the final promotion discount. Please share this with friends and colleagues and its never too early to start thinking about Christmas gifts for that special someone 😉

Once the survey period has closed, you will be contacted by the VMUG organization with the details of the promotion along with the promotion code to apply towards your VMUG Advantage membership. Depending on the amount of interests, we could potentially close the survey sooner if we reach 200+ folks.

Here's short URL for the survey in case you want to share with others: http://vmwa.re/vmug-adv-groupbuy

Hope to see you at the Nordic VMUG UserCon in Dec!

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In case you missed it, a couple of weeks back, Liselotte Foverskov one of the leaders for the Nordic VMUG had announced some of the speakers for the upcoming Nordic VMUG UserCon taking place on Dec 1st at the Scandic Hotel in Copenhagen.

I was very fortunate to have been invited out to speak at the event. As you can see from the tweet above, I will also be joined by several of my colleagues from VMware like Paul Strong, Duncan Epping, Cormac Hogan, Paudie O'Riordan and Joerg Lew who will be covering a variety of topics, so there should be something for everyone. This will be my first time visiting Denmark and I am looking forward to meeting everyone and I hope that you can make it out. I also hear Liselotte has an amazing keynote speaker lined up that you will not want to miss! For more details about the event, be sure to visit Nordic VMUG site here.

Below is the topic that I will be presenting on but feel free to find me at the event if you are interested in talking about other topics that you may have on your mind.

Session Title: 

Harnessing the power of the vSphere API for the everyday Admin 

Session Abstract: 

In this session, you will get a brief introduction to the vSphere API and learn how to use and navigate it without needing to become a developer. Building on this foundation, we will then explore some of the different methods and tools that are available to a variety of audiences (vSphere Administrators, Developers, etc) when Automating against the vSphere API. Finally, we will take a look at some practical examples that demonstrates the vSphere API in action which you can then take back with you when you leave the session. 

Charlotte VMUG vOpenData Presentation Posted + New Stats

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Last week I had the privilege to attend the Carolina Users Summit and from what I hear, it is one of the larger VMUGs in the US. I was asked to give a presentation on a recent community project that I collaborated with Ben Thomas on called vOpenData. The presentation goes into some background on the how the project got started, a deeper look at how it works and a live demo including some interesting stats that have not been shared before (CLTVMUG exclusive!).

I would like to thank everyone who attended the session and the great questions that were brought up. For those of you who missed it or could not attend, I have posted the presentation online and you can download it here. I hope everyone enjoyed it and hopefully you will contribute your data as well as help spread the word about vOpenData! Both Ben and I have been quite swamped with work and changes lately, so hopefully we will have some a nice update for everyone real soon!

Even if you know what vOpenData is, I think it is still worthwhile to check out the presentation as it contains a bunch more stats that have never been shared before. Here is a sneak peak of two that I am sure both Duncan Epping and Frank Denneman would be quite proud of:

Clusters w/vSphere HA Configured:

Clusters w/vSphere DRS Configured:

Lastly, I would like to give a big thanks Charlie Gautreaux for inviting me out to the Charlotte VMUG! I had a great time and met a lot of really cool people!