It’s the End of January, 2013 is finally here, so the first thing on your mind should obviously be… VMWORLD!!!
For those of you who attended last year, you might recall OMG I HAVE TO TAKE A TAXI, BART OR CAR FROM THE SFO AIRPORT?!?!
Yea, that’s right. Because you didn’t book your hotel soon enough. It’s not your fault that San Francisco effectively has like, 3 hotels which aren’t an arm and a leg expensive. But that doesn’t mean you need to suffer through this indignation again! Do what *most* of us truthfully did… We booked our hotels MONTHS and MONTHS in advance! Here are a few cute little facts:
Hotels unlike Airline tickets can be booked out a bazillion years in advance
Hotels unlike Airline tickets can be CANCELLED as close as up to 24hrs in advance without paying any fees
Hotels will often fill up the “Cheap” rooms as they’re sold on a tiered basis, so you can lock in a good room for a good rate EARLY.
So what does this all mean?
OMG VMWORLD IS AUG 26-29 2013 – BOOK YOUR HOTEL NOW!!!
I mean, you can pre-register if you want as well, but I know some of you won’t know what your training budget looks like, sometimes upwards of DAYS before you’re supposed to attend. So I encourage you… book your walking distance hotel now from the Moscone instead of booking it days before-hand with a 30-60 minute commute staying at the SFO Airport or somewhere else horribly ridiculous.
And worst case scenario, you don’t get your budget? Well, then just cancel your hotel room and it goes back into the pool, no harm no foul.
Pro-Tip: I’ve actually found that sometimes using the VMworld sanctioned hotel code/etc to actually make the room MORE Expensive, so don’t use that as an excuse. Get ahead of this before you regret it later :)
THIS HAS BEEN A PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT. HAD THIS BEEN A REAL EMERGENCY, THERE WOULD HAVE BEEN COOKIES.
I’ve been planning on posting this for quite some time. Seriously, like a LONG time. It’s not much. It’s not complicated. It’s actually VERY straight forward!
So the story goes… I somehow got my hands on this handy dandy little CARD, and I thought, “Hey, not everyone knows about these awesome quick reference resources! They probably should!” Well, here is the CARD itself… and a copy of the resources so you too can share in its wonder!
From 2001 until 2006 I would regularly do presentations on OMG THERE’S FREE TRAINING OUT THERE WHY AREN’T YOU USING IT. Which even culminated in the release of a Technical Offerings training deck as noted in this blog post I published in 2006 (Yes, Seriously, in 2006) Well, guess what. A lot of that data is STILL highly relevant even today! So… Let’s get started! :)
Training Videos
Microsoft
Kicking off the realm of training videos I’d like to highlight our good friends at Microsoft with their release of the Microsoft Virtual Academy!
The MVA has a LOAD and I mean a serious LOAD of information, from Training Videos, Courses, Tutorials, Walkthroughs, even Tests and points and contests to increase not only the ‘fun factor’ but provide additional context in your education. For those of you VMwarriors out there who will discard this and say BLAH, SHOW ME THE VMware STUFF. I even did a little search for VMware in the “Quick Search” button and lo and behold lookie at the results!
So whether you are a rockstar, a seasoned professional or someone looking to get started and want to know where to get some good and valuable information without spending hours and $$$ in a classroom, this is definitely an excellent way to get started, so jump on in!
BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE FROM MICROSOFT?!?!
I know some of you are fighting the constant battle of “Damnit, can I attend Microsoft TechEd or not…” And with TechEd 2013 going to be in New Orleans I cannot blame you in the LEAST! But for those of you who just truly cannot find the time, the ability and are able to get away… something you should know.
ALL MICROSOFT TECHED CONTENT IS AVAILABLE FREE WHETHER YOU ATTEND OR NOT.
Yea. Seriously. It is. It actually has been for like the last… Oh I don’t know… since 2004 I believe? And all of that past-content since they started posting and making it available online has been posted online. For some reason I’m only able to find the 2012 content and the 2011 Archive but who really needs access to material on product versions which may not even exist or are supported anymore, if you truly need that let me know and I’ll find the link!
TrainSignal
A lot of you are familiar with TrainSignal and the loads of great content they create, produce and respectively sell out there (You can get access to their paid training video series and content on their website, Trainsignal.com) But when I reached out to their President asking, “Hey, you have any freeeeeee stuff!?!?!?” He pointed me over by here! So here is a whole bunch of videos freeeeeeeeeeeee of charge! And of course, don’t hesitate to check out the amazing content produced by the likes of Scott Lowe and David Davis and others!
Ya know… as an example here! :)
That should get you going on quite a load of stuff from Microsoft, to VMware, to Citrix and Cisco and beyond! But let’s drill down a bit into VMware now…
VMware
When it comes to VMware there are loads and loads (and loads) of information in the world, and often we never really know where to start… Well, here is a place to start and it’s home is in YouTube!
Yea, that’s lame right? I mean on YouTube there’s like a dozen channels?!?! Well, there are. Just go and use them. BAM, and BOOYAH.
VMworld Presentations are FREE TOO LIKE TECHED?!?!?
Well, no. Not exactly. Sorry! Although this last year VMUG Advantage did have a brief offer for free access to the VMworld content if you signed up for that… I’m unable to find any data on it at the moment, so that may have expired, but it’s still worth checking out!
SHOW ME THE LABS BABY!
You asked for Labs and here they are! More labs than you can shake a stick at!
Err, okay, maybe that was a little too literal! Let’s get on with our labs though!
FREE Hands On Labs from Microsoft!
The thing about Microsoft is… for 8+ years they’ve had FREE access to all of their products in a Try-Before-You-Buy model where you can DOWNLOAD any Product and play with it (okay, seriously that’s been around for going on 20 years) but they also instituted the Hands On Labs where the lab environments would BUILD themselves, provide you with a Lab guide to follow (or ignore) and learn and play with it that way. Not to mention all of the content they’d have in the Hands on Labs at TechEd would be POSTED and made available for you to go in and learn, explore and beyond!
This isn’t something new, it’s been around FOREVER, Here are links to where you can access it (as it’s actually available in several places).
Disclaimer: When I wanted to test something out, I’d spin up a lab which was designed to ‘best practice’ and go in and do whatever I wanted, I mean it was a lab environment available in minutes. Why not?
Interesting Fact, some of the types of labs and solutions available out there which you can play and learn from:
How to setup a product from scratch, like Sharepoint, Microsoft Exchange, SQL
How to MIGRATE a product from one version to another (like those products mentioned above and more)
How to Develop in a language like C#, Visual Studio, Azure, PowerShell and more
How to do other advanced types of things
Alllllllllllll the labs that were available at TechEd, so you know what that means… and if not, check it out!
You can find TechEd Labs in the Additional Content section here with this flask icon next to it!
Here at the MSEvents site there are a number of Virtual Labs on the “Virtual Labs” tab to choose and play from!
At the TechNet Virtual Labs site you can dive a little deeper on more Microsoft Technologies…
Looking to dive even deeper, the MSDN Virtual Labs site will take you there.
So if for a minute you thought this was going to be easy, or a single click site with all the answers. HAH.
FREE HANDS ON LABS FROM VMware?!??!
Well, not exactly.. I mean, sort of, kind of… but, well, let me explain. VMware recently announced “Project Nee” my dear friend Simon Seagrave talks about about it here at his blog. But ultimately, what Project Nee is intended to be is… VMware Hands On Labs publicly available online. However it is still in Beta at the moment. You can follow details of the VMware Hands On Labs by going here to the VMware Hands On Labs community!
Some additional places not even mentioned but you should check out, and all of the cited links for easy access and consumption:
So hopefully those of you out there who are looking to stay relevant, continue educating yourselves, maybe even heading down the certification track and whatnot will find this of benefit. I won’t lie to you, I’ve used these resources countless times over the years and I encourage others to. If you have any other sites to suggest, toss em into the comment section… This is an epic resources to reference from here until well.. until I write another one ;)
We all know how these things go, content creators create content, votes happen whether strictly or arbitrarily and then BAM! You get placed on a list!
It’s kind of interesting, kind of flattering, and well, I’m sharing it here because it happened! Here is the snippet of me, and behind the more there are the 99 other blogs mentioned and referenced! I do wish you the best in finding good content here and without! :)
Well, the fateful day has arrived, and that day is good! Welcome one and all of the #EMCElect ! ! !
I guess we start off a bit in reference to the title of this blog post, oh my! You may be sitting here wondering what this MVP/vExpert-like program is about!
What exactly IS EMC Elect?
I find this can be readily answered by looking at the EMC Elect Charter – which I know all of you will immediately click and find out all about it! And… because you won’t, here is the straight scoop on it!
The team at EMC has designed a program to span the gap between brand loyalty and brand advocacy.
EMC Elect is a community-driven recognition designed to award investment and engagement of individual contributors with the EMC brand. The resulting status symbol will be held with high regard as an industry standard representing thought leadership in the fields of data center management, cloud computing and big data.
Members will be determined by peer nomination for their holistic social engagement for the previous calendar year.
Rewards for participating EMC Elect will receive unprecedented connection into product teams through dedicated liaisons.
EMC Business Units, by participating, receive a low-latency, trusted connection into the highest value influencers in our social ecosystem.
Alright, so that says a whole bunch of stuff, but what does it really mean? These are like the brand champions, the evangelists… Often times, honestly… the same people you often ASSOCIATE with EMC whether they work there or not. Take @mrdenny Denny Cherry, He is a rockstar in his own right and when I think of SQL and SQL books I think of him, but he also knows a boatload about EMC Products and isn’t shy about keeping it honest when it comes to the good, the bad and the respective ugly. And you think about @sixfootdad Damian Karlson, while he works for EMC Consulting he is holistically focused on the whole of the Virtualization and Cloud communities, yet he doesn’t have the wool over his eyes when it comes to knowing the value-add and the EMC Portfolio, and he exemplifies that in his writing, his community and otherwise involvement… So these are just a few examples of the many!
Who exactly ARE the EMC Elect?!?!
It was announced just last night, this handy link which takes you to the 75 members who are now the EMC Elect 2013!
For those of you active in Storage, Cloud, Virtualization, EMC Specific technologies, and the like… You’re bound to recognize quite a number of those names; Off the top of my head and just glancing at the list the likes of…
Matthew Yeager, Erin Banks, Jase McCarty, Mark Twomey, Matt Cowger, Jason Nash, Simon Seagrave, Preston De Guise, and Rob Markovic are a few which just happen to jump out. In all actuality I recognize most of the people on the list (yay me, right?) Yes I am also on the list, but I digresssssssss! :)
What matters by exactly who they are will really shine forth in this little diatribe I like to call…
Err, so this is the EMC Elect, huh? HUH?! So… Why should I CARE?!?
That’s right. Why should you care? Great question, great point indeed!
If you do happen to know and recognize one or more of those names and you’re involved in this industry something rather common will start to shine through for those individuals… They tend to be very active, vocal and share with the community. You’ve probably read a blog of theirs, seen a video, read a whitepaper they wrote, watched one of their presentations, been to one of their parties! ;) Thus whether you realize it or not, they’ve had some kind of impact on your life, directly or indirectly and this takes it up a notch. In this first year of kicking off the EMC Elect there were a total of 270 Nominations, 124 finalists and in the end… the directory shows 75 total members of this first year of EMC Elect. I did some rough math on comments that it looked like a lot of EMC People are on the list, and I show around 8% of the total list are EMC Employees (my math may be wrong, as it’s just on spec and names I recognize, but not too horrible, considering how many of these people go above and beyond in their personal lives as well as professional!)
So in the end… why you really should care is… you’re bound to start to hear even more, useful, fruitful and quite amazing material and content coming from some of these gems of industry, and not just from the standard internal only folks… If this program is everything we can hope and dream it to be… we might find out about things, oh.. I don’t know, maybe BEFORE Chris Mellor from the register announces it to us a week before it comes out or something :)
Good luck, Good blogging, and OMFG have an AWESOME 2013! I know I will! :)
flask icon next to it!