Giveaways details for the 2016 NJ/NYC VMUG UserCon

The biggest VMUG event all year for the New Jersey and New York City region takes place this June 23! Our User Convention (UserCon) is the highest attended event all year, and with good reason. It's in a beautiful venue overlooking the Manhattan skyline with excellent presentations, lots of updates from the many vendors that come into town anxious to get your attention, joined with good food and even greater company.

You can check this event's details here

https://www.vmug.com/nynjvmug

Please take a moment to register if you haven't done so. This way you can also get a calendar reminder into your work email, and very importantly, plan to take the day off work, since it's a full day event that starts early morning, has breakfast and lunch, and finishes late in the afternoon.

We're very excited to announce the prizes that all attendees will be able to participate for. It's always fun to figure out what our users could be interested in. This year we have given options for both new and seasoned VMware enthusiasts and general IT people. I'm listing them in order of price and quantity:

Every attendee 
Will get a small token of appreciation that we hope all of you will find useful.

The first 20 or so attendees 
Will get a highly anticipated print book - the official VCP6-DCV Study Guide which just recently came out! This is a very popular option so make sure you arrive by 8am to be one of the first to arrive, and take advantage of more time with fellow colleagues.

Three separate SSD winners
Will get one 500GB Samsung 850 EVO SATA SSD! Whether for your desktop, laptop or homelab, replacing a mechanical drive or smaller SSD for a bigger one is always good, and these are probably the best ones out on the market today. Anybody in IT can appreciate this gift. This gift will be mailed directly to the home of the winners.

Three separate VMUG Advantage winners
Will get one code for a free VMUG Advantage subscription. VMUG Advantage has many benefits, but the perennial favorites are the discounts for training/VMworld/certification exams and having year-long homelab licenses. If you are just beginning your VMware journey, this is the push you need. At a possible $2000+ of savings, these are normally a steal at $200, but you can get one for free at this event!

Now come the big three
Inspired by the awesome work @lamw and others have been doing with the Intel NUCs, and realizing that the typical homelab bill of materials is a bit pricey, we've chosen three configurations that will let homelab users of all levels to tinker and geek out. In case you don't win and are looking into building your own, we've left all the component details here as well. Hopefully this is the start of a VMware/NUC community in the area that meets and shares tips in the VMUG presentations!

The NUCs are great platforms to jumpstart your homelab and to learn VSAN, while having a high WAF (wife approval factor) since they feature low noise and electricity consumption. Many people hook them up to TVs and figure out how to make them dual boot systems so they can act as Media Center PCs when not running VMware labs.

All of these will be mailed directly to the winner, so don't worry about walking through public transportation with hundreds of dollars worth of hardware. You just worry about participating in the Usercon :)

One lucky winner gets a "One-node Hybrid VSAN"
An excellent option for running a nested lab or be expanded with similar nodes, perfect for VMware VSAN! It includes:

• 6th gen i3 NUC maxed out with 32GB RAM and an extra GB NIC through USB adapter!
• 256GB SSD (m.2) and 1TB SATA Hybrid HD (2.5”) - it may be hybrid VSAN, but these are top notch disks!
• VMUG Advantage subscription included so you can push it to the limit as soon as it boots!

The component details for this prize are here.

One lucky winner gets a "One-node All-Flash VSAN"
An excellent option for running a high performance nested lab or be expanded with similar nodes, perfect for VMware VSAN! It includes:

• 6th gen i5 NUC maxed out with 32GB RAM and an extra GB NIC through USB adapter
• 256GB NVMe SSD (m.2) and 1TB SATA SSD (2.5”) - top quality drives!
• VMUG Advantage subscription included so you can push it to the limit as soon as it boots!

The component details for this prize are here.

And finally,

One very lucky winner gets the big home lab, "Two NUCs and a Synology"
What nested? You want to run ESXi on bare metal, and that requires dedicated hardware and some solid shared storage. With this kit, you can run DRS and HA tonight, while enjoying excellent upgrade options if you want to play with VSAN in the future.

• Two 6th gen i3 NUCs, each maxed out with 32GB RAM, each with an extra NIC
• Synology DS1515+ with 4x3TB 5400rpm drives (one slot open for future SSD or extra drive!)
• VMUG Advantage subscription included so you can push it to the limit as soon as it boots!

The component details for this prize are here.


In total around 30 people will walk out of the Usercon with even more motivation to achieve more and be better in their VMware journey. We hope to see you there, and hope that you enjoy these giveaways!

As always, please leave a comment with anything we can improve. We definitely want all the input we can get!