MVMUA is the oldest organized VM users group in the country. In January 2014 we celebrate our 40th Anniversary at Information Builders in NYC.
Our purpose is to promote the use of z/VM, help educate those programmers who run or use z/VM in their work and to promote communication between these people. VM or 'Virtual Machine' in most cases is a HOST operating system for multiple Guest Operating systems (virtual machines) like z/VSE, z/OS, z/TPF as well as LINUX on system z. We offer education and companionship for users of these operating systems as well.
We cover roughly the metropolitan areas of New York, New Jersey and Philadelphia. However, there is no restriction to who can join. We have members from Boston, California and Virginia. The only requirement is that your installation runs z/VM of some kind or that you are a vendor that writes products for z/VM. We have about 60 member companies right now. The dues are only $250 a year.
What do you get for your membership? There are several traditional services that MVMUA has provided for years. In addition, there are new things that we are trying out and hope to continue. The traditional services consist mainly of 4 meetings a year (one each quarter). These presently take place in New York City, at Information Builders Corporate Offices. In Jersey City at the Brown Brothers Office, and Marist College in Poughkeepsie New York. These meetings are one day, normally on a Tuesday or Wednesday. During the meeting there are presentations from a variety of speakers. While the topics are varied, they all deal with some aspect of z/VM. Now more and more of our sessions are dealing with LINUX on system z as well as running z/VSE and z/OS as a guest of z/VM. These meetings have been described as "mini-SHARE"s. In many cases, this is the truth. We manage to get many speakers who do the same presentations at SHARE, GUIDE and the IBM VM/Linux Technical Expo/Conference. MVMUA gives you the opportunity to see quality presentations in a more intimate setting and without having to travel too far. We also get regular visits from the z/VM developers from Endicott. It is an excellent chance for you to give them "one-on-one" feedback and hear about future directions of z/VM, z/VSE, TCP/IP, and Linux.
NEW for 2006: MVMUA has joined SHARE; Any of our members can attend a SHARE conference on a members discount. This will allow those people to attend SHARE that otherwise might not be able to.
Some of our more popular speakers include some of our members, such as Arty Ecock of CUNY, Barton Robinson of Velocity Software, Dave Kreuter of VM Resources LTD, Brian Jagos of Computer Associates, David Boyes of SineNomine, Phil Smith iii of Voltage Software and Martha McConaghy of Marist College as well as the Marist/IBM joint study students at Marist.
Member installations can send as many people as they wish to our meetings.
Approximately 1 month to about 2 weeks before the meeting a final agenda and registration information is posted on our WEB site. Each installation has a primary representative and that is who receives the mailings. They agree to pass on the material to whoever is going to attend the meeting. Meeting agendas are also sent via e-mail to the MVMUA-L discussion list (MVMUA-L@VM.MARIST.EDU) and the IBMVM discussion list (IBMVM@LISTSERV.UARK.EDU)
The meetings include complimentary coffee and danish in the morning. Lunch is sometimes provided.
Perspective members can attend one complimentary meeting to see if they like us and wish to join. To do this, contact our president, Eric Schuler-Dalverny at Eric_Schuler-Dalverny@ibi.com or contact our secretary, Bill Munson. His e-mail is william.munson@bbh.com .
Some non-traditional benefits include the VM Workshop Tools tape and useful books. There are usually free give aways at the meetings from our good friends at IBM Endicott; Magazines, CDs, DVDs, stuffed bears, stuffed penguins, and other cool stuff. We have given away such things as VM manuals, and books like "The VM/ESA Systems Handbook" by Gabe Goldberg and Phil Smith and "VM and CMS Performance Tuning" by Jeff Savit. We are always on the lookout for new things to try.
There is now a MVMUA "home page" available on the World Wide Web. Its address or URL is: http://www.marist.edu/~mvmua/ Meeting agendas, directions to meeting locations and other information are on this page. The full list of Companions of the Order of Knights of VM are listed on our web site. Also, there are pointers to other WWW pages with information related to z/VM and its products, IBM, other vendors, and z/VM, z/VSE, z/OS, and LINUX education, and other User Groups.