April is shaping up to be a busy month.
On top of the ongoing Zero to VCAP grind — studying, labbing, writing — I just registered for VMUG Connect in Minneapolis, running April 4th through the 7th.
And I’ll be honest: I’ve been looking forward to this one for a while.
What Is VMUG Connect?
If you’ve only ever attended a local VMUG chapter meeting, VMUG Connect is a different experience entirely.
Local chapters are great for staying connected to your regional community — vendor updates, peer conversations, the occasional deep-dive session. But they’re bound by geography and time. An hour or two, a handful of attendees, and you’re back to your inbox.
VMUG Connect is the national event. Multi-day, multi-track, and built around bringing together thousands of VMware and VCF practitioners from across the country. It’s engineers, architects, admins, and infrastructure leaders — all in one place, all dealing with the same platform shifts you’re navigating in your own environment.
Sessions span VCF architecture, NSX, vSAN, security, automation, SDDC Manager, and beyond. There’s a vendor expo, community discussions, and more hallway conversations than you can fit into a schedule.
If you’ve never been, it’s worth understanding: this isn’t a sales event dressed up as a technical conference. The sessions are practitioner-focused and the conversations are real. People show up with actual problems and leave with actual answers.
Why I’m Going This Year
The timing is deliberate.
I’m currently working my way through the VCAP-VCF Administrator blueprint — documenting every step of the journey on this blog as part of the Zero to VCAP series. I’ve finished my VSP and VTSP accreditations, I’m deep into the Tier 1 technical training, and the HOL labs are next on the list.
But here’s what I’ve learned over the years: studying a platform in isolation only gets you so far.
You can read every white paper. You can complete every hands-on lab. You can build a VCF environment in your home lab and break it six ways to Sunday. All of that matters.
What’s harder to replicate on your own is the accumulated experience of people who’ve deployed this stuff in production — in messy, real-world environments with constraints that no training module covers.
That’s what VMUG Connect offers.
I’m planning to focus my time around sessions and conversations in a few areas that map directly to where I am in the blueprint: VCF architecture and deployment patterns, NSX implementation, and the operational side of SDDC Manager. If there are sessions on the vSphere-to-VCF migration story — a conversation I have regularly with customers — I’ll be in the front row.
But equally, I’m going to listen. The practitioner perspective you get in a room full of peers is different from what you get in a vendor-led training. Both matter. They serve different purposes.
The Part That Doesn’t Show Up on an Agenda
There’s something I always try to communicate about events like this, especially to engineers who are newer to the community or on the fence about attending.
The scheduled sessions are valuable. The hallway conversations are often more valuable.
Some of the most useful things I’ve learned over the years in this industry didn’t come from a slide deck. They came from a conversation over coffee where someone said, “We ran into the exact same thing — here’s what we tried and what actually worked.”
You can’t manufacture that. It only happens when you show up.
I’m also going to be honest about something: the Zero to VCAP journey has mostly been a solo effort so far. Studying alone. Labbing alone. Writing about it publicly helps — but there’s something to be said for being in a room with people who are actively working through the same platform and the same challenges.
Conferences like this reset your perspective. You realize you’re not the only one navigating complex migrations or rebuilding your mental model around VCF licensing. You meet people who are willing to share what they’ve learned, and you find opportunities to contribute what you know.
That exchange — no gatekeeping, no ego, just practitioners helping practitioners — is rare. It’s what VMUG has always represented, and it’s worth showing up for.
What I’m Bringing Back
I’m not going to VMUG Connect just to attend. I’m going with intention.
I’m bringing questions. Specific ones. The kind that don’t have clean answers in the documentation — the real-world “what does this actually look like at scale” questions that come from being in the middle of a cert journey while also deploying this stuff for customers.
I’m also going to spend time with people I haven’t seen since the last event, and meet people I’ve only connected with online. That part of the community matters more than it probably should. This industry is smaller than it looks, and the relationships you build at events like this tend to show up again — in Slack threads, GitHub repos, job referrals, and late-night troubleshooting chats.
Whatever I take away — session notes, new perspectives, lab ideas, better answers to customer questions — it’s going back into the blog, the lab, and the Zero to VCAP work.
Because learning isn’t really learning until you do something with it.
If you’re going to be at VMUG Connect in Minneapolis — find me. I’d genuinely like to connect.
And if you’ve been on the fence about attending an event like this, take this as a nudge. The community side of this industry is one of the things that makes it worth staying in.
See you in April.