The World According to Mitch

Even before joining Microsoft Canada’s DPE team as a Virtual Evangelist (the Virtual part means I am a contractor in case you were curious, but I also specialize in Virtualization so it works in my favour!) I have had the opportunity to crisscross our great nation talking to audiences of all sorts and sizes – communities and user groups, enterprise customers, internal and external audiences, and more.  I have the greatest position I could imagine!

It continues today… I am heading to Calgary Alberta – a city that I have now visited a half dozen times in as many months, and one that I consider to be an important city for many reasons.  In October I had the opportunity to host a Windows 8 Launch Party for Calgary at Bottlescrew Bill’s, and have been back since for Windows 8, Office 365, Windows Server 2012, System Center 2012, and of course Hyper-V.  Every time I am there I am greeted by some of the greatest and most engaged and enthusiastic audiences.  Ever since I first spoke to the Calgary IT Community (CIC) in January of 2007, I have always been glad to go back to them.

While the CIC is going strong even today, a number of other user groups have popped up in that time.  The Calgary Systems Management User Group was founded in 2009 by Microsoft MVP Kevin Kaminski, and focuses on System Center, Desktop Deployment, and other topics of interest. 

The latest group to come about in Calgary is the Calgary Virtualization User Group (CVUG).  Founded by Marcos Noguiera, the group is one of the new breed of user groups that is technology agnostic and instead focuses on all topics related to virtualization.  The CVUG held their first meeting in February of this year, and they are building and growing, and from what I can tell all in the right direction.

Tonight (Monday April 15th) I will be speaking at CVUG for the first time.  For the first part of the meeting I will be comparing and contrasting VMware’s vSphere and Microsoft’s Virtualization & Private Cloud, and for the second part I will be discussing how to manage a heterogeneous virtualization environment using Microsoft’s System Center 2012.  Needless to say it should be an interesting meeting, hopefully evoking a lot of great conversation and debate between the members.

The event is free for all; all you have to do is register on their website.  I hope to see you there tonight and remember… make sure you say hi! –MDG