I Went to VMUG Connect Minneapolis 2026

April 15, 2026

I recently attended VMUG Connect in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA, from April 7th to 9th. This is the second round of VMUG Connect conferences. After the success of the first VMUG Connect in St. Louis, VMUG ended their UserCons and replaced them with VMUG Connects.

Due to VMUG Connect replacing UserCons, there is more than one VMUG Connect conference. For 2026, VMUG Connect will be in the following cities.

Amsterdam, Netherlands (March 17th to 19th)
Minneapolis, Minnesota (April 7th to 9th)
Toronto, Ontario (May 12th to 14th)
Dallas, Texas (June 9th to 11th)
Orlando, Florida (October 20th to 22nd)

In this post, I will detail my experience at VMUG Connect 2026 in Minneapolis.

Travel Day

My adventure to VMUG Connect in Minneapolis was a shared one, as I was traveling with my friend Stephen Wagner. Our journey started with a direct flight from Calgary, Alberta, Canada, to Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.

This was my second time going to Minneapolis, as I had traveled to Minneapolis in August for EUC World Amplify last year. You can read about that experience in my blog post, I Went to EUC World Amplify 2025.

Once we arrived in Minneapolis, we got all checked into the hotel. While we waited for our friends to arrive, we decided to explore downtown a bit. To my surprise, downtown Minneapolis actually has its own version of the Plus 15s that we have in Calgary, in Minneapolis they are called Skywalks. Plus 15s or Skywalks are a way to get around the downtown core without going outside. It’s super useful when the weather is bad. Minneapolis also has a double-decker Skywalk.

We then met up with some of our friends and went out to lunch. We ended up going to a restaurant named Hell’s Kitchen (it has nothing to do with Gordon Ramsey). We asked them who came first, and they said they did, and they had a licensing deal with Gordon Ramsey’s Hell’s Kitchen, which allowed them to use the name.

After lunch, we met up with more friends and went to the Mall of America. I had never been to the Mall of America before. It is currently the largest mall in America.

In Canada, we have the West Edmonton Mall, which is currently the largest mall in Canada. What’s interesting is that both malls are owned by the Triple Five Group. The West Edmonton Mall is 5.3 million square feet, and the Mall of America is 5.6 million square feet. What’s interesting is that the West Edmonton Mall has over 800 stores, while the Mall of America has only over 500. Both malls have an indoor amusement park, but only the West Edmonton Mall has an indoor waterpark.

After visiting the Mall of America, we all went back to the hotel and hung out at the hotel bar.

Day 1

The first day of VMUG Connect is registration day, and includes a few sessions. VMUG calls this day PreConnect.

I started by registering and collecting my badge.

I then attended Jon Towles’ session, 7 Conditional Access Policies Every Company Needs, which was very informative for anyone getting started with Conditional Access policies. I also learned that if you need to use device code flow for Teams phones, you can allow it by filtering the device type in a conditional access policy.

I also attended the VCF Certification in 2026 – Tips, Tricks and Guidance from the Global Community, which was hosted by Evert Amssoms, Dave Bradley, Matthew Heldstab, Dave Simpson, and Maarten Van Driessen. This session covered all the tips and tricks you need to pass a VCF certification. The session inspired me to consider taking a VCF exam at VMUG Connect. If you are a VMUG Advantage member, you can take a VMware exam for free at VMUG Connect.

I then attended a workshop hosted by Intel about running Generative AI in a home lab using Intel AMX (Advanced Matrix Extensions). This session was super interesting, as Intel demonstrated how you can run Gen AI models on your CPU and leverage AMX to speed them up. AMX is an Intel instruction set available on 4th-generation (Sapphire Rapids) or newer Xeon CPUs.

Intel also spoke about Intel Gaudi, which is super cool because it’s a PCIe AI accelerator card you can use to speed up your AI workloads. The current downside of Intel Gaudi is that it uses PCI passthrough. However, Intel has hinted that they are working on a solution to this, which might make it work like Nvidia vGPU and may even work with Intel data center graphics cards in the future.

To end the day, I went to the hotel bar and hung out with my friends.

Day 2

The second day of VMUG Connect was a complete day full of sessions. The first session of the day was the keynote, The Next Era of VCF: Accelerating Your Cloud Journey with VMware Cloud Foundation, hosted by Peter Near. Peter spoke about the future of VCF. Including possible new features coming to VCF, such as S3 storage.

After Peter came Chris McCain’s session, Shrink the Blast Radius: Private Cloud Segmentation Made Easy, which covered the ways you could implement vDefend to reduce your attack surface against attacks such as Brickstorm.

I’m looking forward to experimenting with vDefend in my home lab.

The next session I attended was So You Just Got Told It’s Time to Move to a New Datacenter. What Now?, which was hosted by Dave Bradley. In the session, Dave went over how, after months of planning, he moved an entire data center between two physical locations. A lot of the coordination was done using VMware Live Recovery (formerly VMware Site Recovery Manager). This was Dave’s first ever presentation, and he did a great job. If he hadn’t told me it was his first presentation, I wouldn’t have known.

After that, I attended the session Getting Started with VCF 9: Upgrade Paths, Architecture, and What to Expect, hosted by Kevin Brady. It was also supposed to be hosted by Tim Toohey, but Tim was sick, so Brock Peterson and Bill Oyler helped Kevin with the presentation. The presentation covered the various ways to upgrade from VVF or VCF 5.2 to VCF 9, including the gotchas, along with some best practices.

The next session I attended was VMware Cloud Foundation Troubleshooting: Real-World Scenarios and Solutions, hosted by Eric Sloof. In Eric’s presentation, he went over some of the tools he uses for troubleshooting. I ended up learning that if you setup VCF Operations for Logs and ship all your logs to it, you can compare Windows event logs to VMware logs, and even if you don’t setup full log shipping, you can also just export your Windows event logs and import them into VCF Operations for Logs and compare them that way. I think this will be very useful for troubleshooting strange VM issues.

Day 3

The third day of VMUG Connect was the last day and a travel day. The first session I attended was Security Hardening and Compliance in VCF 9, hosted by Bob Plankers. In the session, Bob spoke about the importance of securing the IdPs (identity providers) you use with VCF. This session was very useful. I learned about the vSphere Privilege Recorder, which can be used to determine exactly which permissions a service account needs. Another way to go about it is to not grant the account any permissions and just review the vSphere logs to see what was denied.

We even got some sneak peeks of things that may be coming soon to VCF, such as a security guide that actively shows your security posture and how you can improve it. I am very excited to play with this.

Bob’s session reinforced the idea that you should have a second IdP for your VCF infrastructure to reduce your attack surface. If you want to read more about securing VCF, Bob helps maintain the VMware security and compliance guidelines, which are hosted on VMware’s GitHub https://github.com/vmware/vcf-security-and-compliance-guidelines

After Bob’s session, I decided to take the VCF 9 Architect exam.

I passed the VCP-VCF 9 Architect exam with a score of 370. I needed 300 to pass. I am now a VMware Certified Professional – VMware Cloud Foundation Architect.

After the exam, the VMUG Connect conference ended.

Summary

VMUG Connect 2026 in Minneapolis was a lot of fun. I learned lots and even passed an exam. It was really great that a lot of my friends were at the conference, as in most of the sessions I went to, I ended up seeing someone I knew. I even made some new friends.

I recommend that if you work with VMware products, you check out one of the upcoming VMUG Connects. Here are all the details about the 2026 VMUG Connects.

You should also check out your local VMUG chapter, as there may be one near you. If you want to find your local VMUG chapter, here are all the upcoming VMUG community events.

Daniel Goes Outside Vlog

While at VMUG Connect Minneapolis, I recorded a new episode of Daniel Goes Outside. Check out my YouTube Vlog below.