CAREER

I was honoured to be asked to be part of VMware’s CrowdChat for the general sessions this year, the idea being to live-tweet the General Session as it progressed. I’ve tried to embed the session from CrowdChat itself below, but it might be blocked by your browser for running unsafe scripts. You can also see the commentary on the Day One General Session here. [http://www.via-cc.at/057s1]

VMware vSAN 2017 Specialist Exam I always like to take a discounted exam at VMworld, this year I opted for the VMware vSAN 2017 Specialist exam, which was released a few weeks ago. Having delivered quite a few vSAN based solutions over the last few years, I was fairly confident in the blueprint. I am pleased to say that I passed the exam with a score of 422, way higher than I expected!

**a non-VMware employee! I am very much looking forward to meeting friends old and new during the week, so if you see me come say hi! Where can you find me? During the day I’m likely to be found in the bloggers area, or hanging around the vBrownbag stage, when I’m not in a session. Monday evening I’ll be leading a fearless team of hackers for the VMware {Code} Hackathon, hoping to create something cool!

Just under two months ago I left my role at Xtravirt and started life as a contractor. At that point I was content to live the contractor life for a year or so and see what opportunities came along. I didn’t expect opportunity to come along so quickly! TLDR; I’m joining VMware as part of the PSO NSX practice! I’ve seen VMware as the place that I would end up working for a while now, having worked as a customer and a partner it seemed like a logical progression.

I’ve been working for Xtravirt for over 3 and a half years now, first as a Senior Consultant, and more recently as a Lead Consultant. During that time I’ve had the opportunity to work with some excellent people, some fantastic customers and some huge projects. I’ve developed and grown as a consultant and architect, achieved multiple VCP and VCAP qualifications, and VMware’s elite VCDX certification. For all of this, and for the opportunities and support they have provided, I am thankful to Xtravirt and to all of my colleagues who helped along the way.

I have been musing this a little while and decided to write this post/rant/opinion post, feel free to post your thoughts and opinions in the comments. OK so here it is, one thing I have observed for a good while now is how much noise there is about how -you- should be in the cloud (Public) and if you are not you’re already dead. I call Bull****! Public, Hybrid and Private clouds are solutions not final destinations, regardless of whether you are a customer, partner, or any other third thing you should be purely focused on what is best for you or (if you provide IT services) your customer.

I was having a chat with my Dad recently, about how those who work in IT keep their skills up to date. He is now retired but had spent 25+ years in the IT business so I always value his opinion. What occurred to me while we chewed the fat was the following. If there is one thing we can be sure of in IT, it is that change will happen and faster than we think.

vRealize Automation vExperts Workshop I attended a workshop with Jad El Zein in Barcelona last year and it was one of the best sessions I attended, especially as it was just on the news of vRA7’s release. This workshop was this year’s equivelant, but because the session included a lot of people just getting started with vRA a lot of the time was taken to explain what vRA does, so there was no real time for the more in depth details on the new features that are coming (some already announced and in Tech Preview).

Greetings from Day 1 of VMworld US 2016!  Every year I try and make use of the VMworld discount at the exam centre, and this year was no exception I sat the VCAP6-DCV Deploy exam, and results are still pending! Overall it’s a good exam, there was very little of the spelling and grammatical errors I’ve complained about in the past, performance was OK and the level of difficulty was good.

I landed in Las Vegas about 9:30PM local time on Saturday evening, having not executed my plan to sleep on the flight! I had planned to sleep on the Toronto to Vegas leg, which would have meant I could head over to the Sips and Stogies pre-event, however a very rowdy hen do a couple of rows away meant that I didn’t sleep at all, so I grabbed a taxi down to my hotel, the Excalibur, and got myself checked in.