This week is the culmination of months of work for me and the many others that have been working to get the next Omaha-Area VMUG event ready for an AMAZING time!  Everything is on track and the finishing touches are going on right now.  Last I heard we’ll have close to 200 people registered!  If you haven’t registered yet and would like to attend, please sign up here.  If you need more information, check out my previous post with all the details (almost all of the details are still accurate).

For those of you who will be in attendance, I’d like to thank a few people before the event so you have the opportunity to find them at the event and thank them yourselves for making this event possible for you.  Write these names down and hunt for them at the event.  Most of them should be there.  If you can’t find them, then hunt me down and I’ll point you in their direction.

Cisco and EMC get my first thanks for helping us secure the hardware necessary to host these labs.  Curtis Hayworth (EMC) and Dale Dewitt (Cisco) have been the frontmen to our requests, and our advocates, but I know they have several people behind them who have worked diligently to get us what we need in time to pull it all off.

A special thanks to Chris Simpson from VMware.  He has been instrumental in helping me align VMware resources.  He has also been willing to respond quickly to a lot of random questions I’ve had over the last few weeks.  Mike Bullerdick and Sheng Sheen have been my local support and I know they’ve promoted the living daylights out of this thing, which is no small part in its eventual success.

Thank you to CoSentry for providing the facility, rackspace for the lab infrastructure, cool giveaways, and a large portion of the food that will be there.  Specifically, I’d like to thank Jason Phipps who has been my right-hand man through most of this.

Last, and most importantly, I’d like to thank Jodi Shely, Warren Dugas and David Olig who run the User Group together.  Thank you for taking up the huge mantle of running this group, thank you for asking Vital to help set this up, and thank you for all the support you’ve given me while building these labs.

I’d also like to thank Vital for handing me such an important project to our company and trusting me to pull it off.  I sure hope I’ve lived up to their expectations, because I’ve enjoyed it and would love to do it again in the future.

With the Thank You’s out of the way, I’d like to apologize to my readers for my lack of posts on the VMUG Lab setup lately.  Building these labs has been a priority that has severely dug into my writing time.  I’m hoping to be able to keep a hold of the hardware for a few extra days so I can play a bit more (and of course blog about it).  Hang on, there’ll definitely be more to come.