VMTN Blog

Hosts
John Troyer

Guests
Keith Norbie
Tony Foster - @wonder_nerd
Stephen Foskett - @sfoskett

Link to Audio Recording
Live from VMware Partner Exchange!

Virtualization News
It Starts Here - VMware Partner Exchange (PEX) 2012
Atos, EMC and VMware to form an open cloud computing strategic alliance
VMware and Mitel Bring Desktop Virtualization to the Contact Center
Virtualization Field Day 2 – Silicon Valley
PEX 2012 Day 1 Recap
PEX 2012 Day 2 Recap

Show
General Discussion about PEX

Reflections on the tone at PEX - calm & competent - confident energy

4000 people attending PEX

People are moving toward automation and scaling it up

SQL/Exchange bootcamps - best practice takeaways were awesome

Virtualization of Teir1 apps have increased over the past year Going virtual gives you better tools to see

What is going on with your Teir1 apps

Success Key to get DBAs on side - its how you present it to them 

VCA Certification for a small bussiness would be great

VMware GO - great for SMBs - Try it now

Virtualization for Small and Midsize Business

vExpert 2012 applications now open

New Pathways for vExpert 2012 - Evangelist Path - Customer Path - VPN (VMware Partner Network) Path

Additonal Links

[ http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/YSLxF2t4e1o?rel=0 ]

It is this time of the year again, and the applications are now open for the vExpert 2012 selection.

In the years past, the program has attracted the most enthusiastic and active VMware users to become vExperts and help us spread knowledge and expertise about VMware technology. vExperts got access to software licenses, betas, and early access programs, as well as exclusive events at VMworld in Las Vegas and Copenhagen.

What’s next? Of course, more of the same. More licenses, more betas, and more VMworld. But starting in 2012, we will also have more vExperts, to include more VMware enthusiasts who may be doing their work of sharing the know-how away from the limelight of the Internet and public events.

Our vExperts in the past have for the most part fallen into two implicit groups: bloggers/writers/evangelists and VMUG leaders. This year, we are making explicit three different paths to becoming a vExpert.  As always, the common theme for the established and the new vExpert paths will be going above and beyond your day job to help others be successful with VMware solutions.

Evangelist Path
The Evangelist Path includes book authors, bloggers, tool builders, public speakers, and other IT professionals who share their knowledge and passion with others with the leverage of a personal public platform to reach many people. Employees of VMware can now also apply via the Evangelist path.

Customer Path
The Customer Path is for internal evangelists and community leaders from VMware customer organizations. They have contributed to success stories, customer references, or public interviews and talks, or were active community contributors, such as VMUG leaders.

VPN (VMware Partner Network) Path
The VPN Path is for employees of our partner companies who lead with passion and by example, who are committed to continuous learning and to making their technical knowledge and expertise available to many. This can take shape of event participation, video, IP generation, as well as public speaking engagements.

Although we’re making the three pathways explicit this year, as always, there will remain a single vExpert designation; we aren’t splitting the program into sections. The only change is that now you will be able to select which application path to take, depending on where your main contributions lie.

You will find more details and a link to the application form at vmware.com/go/vexpert2012

The vExpert 2012 page also has a link to an invitation form that you can use to encourage your friends and colleagues who did not previously qualify for a vExpert designation as an Evangelist to apply in the other paths.

VMware vExpert Benefits:

Applications are now open for the vExpert 2012 title. Use the vExpert 2012 form to submit your application, and the invitation form to encourage your peers to apply.

Name: Lars Troen
Twitter Handle: @larstr
Current employer: Atea
Blog URL:   http://core-four.info/ http://vmfaq.com/ http://watchingpaintdryminutebyminute.com/ 

How did you get into IT in the first place?

I've been a computer enthusiast since I was 13 years old when I first started coding simple games on my 8 bit Acorn Electron micro computer. I wanted to play games like my classmates did with their C64's, so I bought a book about game programming on the BBC B (I later also had a BBC B).

During army service (EW) I had my first contact with Unix. HP UX. A new world revealed itself and I tried to learn as much as I could

After college I started working as a consultant and since I had *ux experience I was given a lot of security related tasks, since the best supported operating systems for hosting firewalls were HPUX and SunOS (mainly CheckPoint & Eagle/Axent/Symantec Raptor). During (or maybe near the end of) the dot com era I joined a company as a programmer and did low and high level programming on different projects before I started working with ESX in 2003 as a consultant and sysadmin. I later started as a consultant with a VAR.

How did you get into working with VMware and becoming a 2011 vExpert?

As mentioned above, I started out with ESX 2.0 in 2003 and was quickly familiar with the VMware newsgroups where I met other people who had discovered VMware's products.

I wrote some graphical performance tool and later I was active in the new web based forums and also other forums on the internet. After the horrible VMTN upgrade in the autumn of 2007 I moved much of my forum activity to Experts-Exchange, but I also used IRC quite a bit at the time. I started blogging on the VMTN Community blog

(http://communities.vmware.com/people/larstr/blog) and I've later moved to my own domain (http://core-four.info/). I'm also contributing to an unofficial knowledgebase at http://vmfaq.com/ and I have a site for my web app at http://vmktree.org/

What would you tell someone who wanted to get a job like yours to do?

1. It's better to know a lot about everything than a little bit about nothing. However: "Jack or all trades, Master of none" may not be optimal so learn to master at least _one_ technology well.

2. Keep your eyes & ears open to other's ideas and emerging technology.

3. if(possible_good_or_perhaps_crazy_idea=true){action(activate_now);}

else {forget(fade_away);}

Hosts
John Troyer
Alex Maier

Guests
Neal Mueller, VMware
Anthony Kolar, VMware

Link to Audio Recording
Business Critical Applications

Virtualization News (from the VMTN Blog)
NEW - VMware vCloud Integration Manager to Help Service Providers Accelerate the Delivery of vCloud Services
Increase - 90 service provider partners in our ecosystem, who now offer services called “VMware vCloud Poweredâ€
SlideRocket Challenges Nonprofits To 'Make An Impact' For A Chance To Win $30,000 in Donations
One on One: Paul Maritz, VMware Chief Executive - (The Bits blog of the New York Times)
Recently published a Desktop modernization toolkit - Grab your kit today. 

Show
Live Sessions - Broadcast live on livestream - Coming Soon!
Combine the best of live discussions, presenations and chat.

Share your ideas about what you want to hear on the Live Session - @jtroyer @vmwarecommunity

Business Critical Applications Blog

Virtualizing Business Critical Enterprise Applications - Resources and Insights

VMware Business Production Bundle - Maximize the benefits of virtualizing business critical applications by enabling fully automated disaster recovery, dynamic security & automated operations with one convenient bundle.

Download Exchange 2010 on VMware – Best Practices Guide

Microsoft Exchange Server Profile Analyzer (32 bit)

Microsoft Exchange Server Profile Analyzer (64 bit)

VMware Provides Virtualization Technology for SAP Global IT Infrastructure

vShield App, vCOps, Site Recovery Manager - important add-ons to Business Critical Apps 

Additional Links
Virtualization for Small and Midsize Business

VMware SMB Social Media Channels

Twitter - @VMwareSMB
Facebook - VMware SMB
VMware SMB Blog

My VMware: This is your chance to join the Beta, and have your say!

Upcoming VMUG Local Meetings

2012 VMUG User Conferences - Mark Your Calendar!

Green Mountain Power - Vermont-based utility company virtualizes Oracle applications, including databases.

[ http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/HnZqYuULoNM?rel=0 ]

Yesterday, we have introduced the VMware vCloud Integration Manager which will help service providers to accelerate delivery of cloud services. The Integration Manager will allow service providers to quickly create and deploy cloud service offerings, operate at maximum efficiency and scale to meet customer demand in a reliable, repeatable and cost-effective manner.

The vCloud Integration Manager will be tightly integrated with VMware vCloud Director, VMware vSphere®, VMware vShield™ Edge and VMware vCenter™ Chargeback Manager to automate and accelerate the provisioning and delivery of infrastructure and associated services. It will provide a REST-based API to integrate with a service provider’s back office systems (CRM, billing, etc.), and a Web-based administration portal.

It will also include Web-based portals to streamline and automate service plan, customer lifecycle and reseller management. With the click of a button, service providers will be able to standardize product configuration and delivery, manage customer lifecycles from sign-up to decommission, and reduce the time and overhead involved in transacting with resellers.

In the same news, we now have nearly 90 service provider partners in our ecosystem, who now offer services that meet the criteria to be called “VMware vCloud Powered,†which is almost three times as many as we had six months ago.

And today, SlideRocket announced the “Make an Impact†contest for non-profit organizations, in which prize money of $30,000 will be split up between the winners whose SlideRocket presentations will receive the most views, and are judged by the panel to have the best stories.

The Bits blog of the New York Times has published an interview with our CEO Paul Maritz last week, in which he talks about how cloud computing will transform the information technology industry. Paul goes into some detail explaining the meaning of the cloud era in computing, and how he sees our company’s role in moving IT from client-server to big data and cloud environments.

Recently, we have also published a Desktop modernization toolkit, containing analyst reports of VMware View, to learn how our customers have benefitted from virtualization. Grab your kit today.

You probably have heard about Google+, but most people haven't really checked out this new social network. Google+ has some of the good qualities of both Twitter and Facebook, and it could turn out to be quite a nice way for IT professionals interested in VMware, virtualization, cloud computing, and IT transformation to hang out.

Google+ has some of the nicer qualities of Twitter, in that you can follow your interest graph, not your social graph. If you're reading this blog, that means you can follow fellow IT professionals and talk about jumbo frames without Aunt Helga asking how you're going to attach them to the wall.

However, if you've ever played with Twitter, you probably quickly realized that with everybody's tweets zipping by 140 characters at a time, it's hard to actually have a conversation, say about enabling jumbo frames on your management network, especially with more than two people or over a few days. Google+ solves this, like Facebook, by having threaded comments that let you go back and forth about a topic.

Google+ also shares some of the downsides of both Facebook and Twitter. Like Facebook, you get a lot of funny pictures being shared in your stream. And like Twitter, you have to build your own network to actually see anything being shared.

To solve that last problem, we've started the VMware Google+ Community Circle. It's a circle of people interested in VMware, virtualization, cloud, and IT transformation. It's completely opt in: only the people who want to connect and talk with each other are in the circle.

To get started, once you have a Google+ account, go over to this Google+ post and click the "Add Circle" link inside the circle. You can make a new circle or add it to one of your existing circles. Boom! You now can start to see what these folks are posting and start sharing to them as well. 

To get added to the circle, first you have to "circle" the VMware page on Google+ -- add us to your circles. This is a Google+ rule to prevent us from spamming anybody. Then add a comment on the Community Circle Post to let us know you'd like to be added! It's as simple as that. Every week or two we'll re-share the Community Circle -- just add it again to your circles and it'll add all the new people. When we get up to the limit of 500 people, we'll just make a new circle!

We'll see you all over at Google+! We'll be sharing some exclusive content over there as well as having live video hangouts now and then.

--John & the VMware Social Media Crew

Hosts
John Troyer
Alex Maier

Guests
Hemant Gaidhani, VMware
Hassen Abdu, VMware
Shrikam Goplaswyami,VMware

Link to Audio Recording
vCenter Infrastructure Navigator & Chargeback

Virtualization News
VMTN Community Platform Layout - New Tabs (Google+, Linkedin, Groups, Podcasts)
The Cloud Vendor Landscape – The VMware Advantage According to the Taneja Group
Preserving Multi-Cloud Choice and Flexibility with Cloud Foundry “Open PaaSâ€
LonVMUG Best Community Presentation of 2011 Awards
John Troyer Google+ Virtualization Circle
Toronto VMUG User Conference - Feb 7, 2012 Join the conversation on twitter #tovmug

Show
VMware vCenter Infrastructure Navigator - Visualize Dependencies - enables application-aware management of infrastructure and operations to better understand the impact of change, provide more complete disaster recovery protection and minimize downtime.

Download your eval NOW - VMware vCenter Infrastructure Navigator

VMware vCenter Infrastructure Navigator Documentation

VMware Infrastructure Navigator discussion forum

VMware vCenter Infrastructure Navigator - Delivered as a virtual appliance, vCenter 5.0 is a requirement

VMware vCenter Chargeback Manager - Improve utilization of virtual infrastructure with accurate visibility into the true costs of virtualized workloads.

Download your eval NOW - VMware vCenter Chargeback Manager

VMware vCenter Chargeback discussion forum

VMware vCenter Chargeback Manager Connector For IT Business Management Suite

VMware IT Business Management Suite (ITBM) - gives you the right level of visibility into the costs, utilization and service levels of IT services, CIOs can plan, manage and optimize the cost, value, and alternatives in the emerging world of dynamic IT.

vCenter Orchestrator plugin for vCenter Chargeback Manager - coming soon!

Additional Links

VMware vCenter Infrastructure Navigator Videos

[ http://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/rkx9sEjnSLE?rel=0 ]

The deadline is fast approaching - Tuesday, February 7. The bloggers that talk about VMware, virtualization and cloud computing (see a subset over at Planet V12n) work hard and bring a lot of value to their readers. 

If you're a blog reader, head over to Eric Siebert's joint at vote.vsphere-land.com and put down some votes for your favorite read! 

Voting now open for the top VMware & virtualization blogs | vSphere-land

In a recent evaluation of ten of the leading cloud solution vendors (including Microsoft, Red Hat, Amazon, Rackspace and others), the Taneja Group determined that VMware stands out as the clear cloud leader due to its broad portfolio of virtualization and cloud management solutions, service provider ecosystem, and cross-cloud enabling tools and interfaces.

The Hopkinton, MA based Taneja Group are a boutique analyst firm that focuses on the storage industry, storage-related aspects of the server industry, and eDiscovery. Using the VMware-CSC service provider partnership as an example, the Taneja Group highlights what sets VMware’s hybrid cloud service provider program apart:

You can read a detailed blog post about this study on the vCoud blog at blogs.vmware.com/vcloud – that article also includes a link to the full study.

On the Console blog, our CTO Steve Herrod has posted about Cloud Foundry and how it helps you preserve multi-cloud choice and flexibility. He goes into some detail of why companies would want to have multi-cloud setups, such as the ability to grow your platform over time if and when you need it, avoiding vendor lock-in, and meeting different compliance and geographical needs.

Cloud Foundry can deliver this flexibility and the rapid growth of its ecosystem is proof. These days, we have several public cloud providers on board, such as enStratus, Virtacore, and Tier 3, as well as a number of private cloud distributors, including Dell, Canonical, and Scalr.

As many suggest, 2012 will be the year of PaaS, and avoiding vendor lock-in will be a big factor for many businesses. Read more about how Cloud Foundry can help you achieve just that on blogs.vmware.com/console

The London VMUG has announced the winners of the Best Community Presentation Awards for 2011. Our congratulations go out to Stuart Radnidge, Jonathan Medd, and Julian Wood who have all stepped way out of their daily jobs and family commitments to share their experience and know-how with the community. Way to go folks!

First off, today we released vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.0
This release delivers on the vision of a new approach to virtual and cloud infrastructure management announced at VMworld Copenhagen last October. The VMware  vCenter Operations Management Suite together with vFabric Application Management Suite, and IT Business Management Suite allows our customers to remove the complexity of managing IT across all layers. The three management suites deliver on our mission to simplify and automate IT management in the cloud era and achieve the vision of IT as a Service. Read more on Rethink IT blog.

Also, Last week, Macworld has chosen VMware Fusion for the best way to run Windows on your Mac. And just because they’re so awesome, the Fusion team has announced that they will make the promotional pricing of $49.99 permanent. That is a nice deal for an unlimited personal use license. You can read more on the Fusion Blog.

The VMware Solutions Exchange has opened today, which is a single destination for partners to share their compatible VMware applications and cloud infrastructure products. 

The VMware Solution Exchange (A.K.A. VSX) allows customers to discover, evaluate and expedite the buying process.  You can easily explore VMware partner solutions and developer-provided virtual appliances in a single location, get free trials, watch a demonstration, rate & review, and engage directly with the partner or developer.

For the partners, the VSX will allow to list VMware products or solutions, upload marketing information, and set up free trials through a self-service portal.

All in all, the VSX is awesome for everyone. Go check it out at solutionexchange.vmware.com 

Finally, in our previous podcast, we ran a poster giveaway, where our international listeners could win two awesome vSphere and PowerCLI posters. Here are the winners, who have commented on our thread on Google+

Congratulations, folks! To claim your posters, send me a message on Plus or DM me on Twitter with your shipping address, and the packages will be on the way!

The primary goal of the vCommunity Trust is to help students and community members around the world that are eager to gain experience with infrastructure technologies including virtualization, compute, networking and storage by providing access to hands-on labs and affordable training materials.

The vCommunity Trust Inc. (vTrust) was initially formed to fulfill these needs as a Minnesota nonprofit on Sept. 23, 2010.  The founders, Paul Valentino and Tim Oudin, formulated the initial plan to start the vTrust at The Chieftain Irish Pub in San Fransisco, CA on Sunday evening just prior to day one of the 2010 VMworld conference.  

By August 4, 2011 the vTrust rounded out the board of directors by recruiting Chris Cicotte - Secretary, Caroline Orloff - Treasurer, Matt Leib - Director of Communications, and Luigi Danakos - Director of Marketing; we also obtained public charity 501(c)(3) determination from the IRS, and achieved partner in trust status with GuideStar. Now we’re well on our way to a fully functional lab environment  thanks to contributions from the community, EMC, and ipHouse.  We’ve also received donations of software and exam vouchers from TrainSignal and VMware to help candidates obtain VMware VCP certification.

The vTrust has maintained 0% administrative costs and overhead which has been possible through Google Apps for Nonprofits and contributions from vCommunity Trust volunteers.

We currently use datacenter hosting from ipHouse, and the compute and virtualization server resources required for a lab which will support approximately 25 students concurrently; however, we still are lacking the storage and networking components required to complete the initial build.

The vTrust lab environment will be used to provide hands-on access for students and community members, and it will also provide the resources to develop essential training materials and valuable lab guides that can be found at http://www.vcommunitytrust.org/vprofessional-materials.

There are many ways individuals and businesses may contribute to this cause and we greatly appreciate your support. We honor gifts by including the donors name or logo within our training materials and on our website so that our students and visitors to the site will know who has made an investment in the global community.

We welcome cash donations by mail or through our site at http://www.vcommunitytrust.org/donations, and you can mail your equipment donations to 30883 Montclair Dr, Lindstrom, MN 55045. You can also transfer the rights of technical training materials created by you or your company to vCommunity Trust Inc.

To show your support of the vTrust, you can put a web banner on your blog or web site. You can download the banners from our vTrust Facebook page or we can email it to you if you send your request to info@vcommunitytrust.org.

No matter how much you contribute, all gifts will have a significant impact for increasing interest, awareness and knowledge of new technologies and enabling individuals from all walks of life to embark on a successful career in technology. The ability to have hands-on experience with advanced technologies we feel is the best way to prepare individuals for the workplace.

We thank you for partnering with us and our students to make this a reality.

About the author
Current vCommunity Trust Chairman of the Board and ECMC Enterprise Infrastructure Architect, Paul Valentino has more that fifteen years of experience in the IT industry.  Paul was considered one of the greatest security risks at Xerographics Inc. while working in the Accounts Receivable department because he was in the habit of automating processes using technology without requesting the assistance of IT; therefore, a change in career path was in order.

Over the next few years he transitioned into a systems engineering consulting role providing support, maintenance and system build services to local manufacturing and banking institutions throughout Connecticut. In the late 90s he became the IT Manager of a New York start-up venture specializing in distributed systems.  Eventually he started SYSXPERTS, LLC, a technical solutions consultancy, which serviced many small to mid sized businesses in the New England region in the early 2000s before moving to Minnesota in 2006. Paul's primary professional goal is to attain and share as much technical information as he possibly can with hopes that others will discover they are equally passionate about technology.

On the vCloud blog today, there’s a post about How the Software Industry Has Benefitted from the Public Cloud. This is the fourth installment in the “Public Cloud Diaries†series in which the vCloud team is sharing the stories of five companies in the software industry and their journey to the public cloud.

The stories cover an IT Management Software Provider for Small to Medium-Sized Companies, a Spinoff Company from Large Corporation Intended to Provide SaaS for the Construction Industry, a Firm that Develops and Deploys Custom Enterprise Software for Multinational Organizations, a Well-Known Consumer and Enterprise Software Company, and a Young Gaming Company that Creates Social and Gambling Games.

Each story includes an analysis of the customer’s needs and the solution, as well as return on investment, in some cases, as high as 50 percent. Go check it out at blogs.vmware.com/vcloud

ZDnet has published an article about LG promising to offer VMware virtualization on smartphones in the coming months. The author, Andrew Nusca, sees this as the first offensive move in the “bring-your-own-device wars.†According to the article, this will happen in Europe, on the Telefonica mobile network.

VMware’s Horizon Mobile solution will allow you to have two separate identities on your Android smartphone, allowing your corporate IT to control and provision services to your work identity, while your personal profile will remain your own.

As you can imagine, this is a very attractive proposition not just to corporate IT, but also to the end users, and I am personally excited about it. To tell you the truth, I can’t wait to have Horizon Mobile on my phone.

Finally, on YouTube, the vCloud Director team has published a 45-minute presentation covering everything that’s new in vCloud Director 1.5. You will find this informative video at youtube.com/vmwaretv – just click on the vCloud Director playlist on the right.

Blog URL:  http://www.vinf.net
Twitter handle: @vinf_net
Current employer: Freelance Infrastructure Architect working in the EMEA consulting team of a major global service provider

How did you get into IT?

Being a Lego nerd as a child architecture and engineering was my main interest as I grew up and I wanted to be a civil engineer designing bridges. I had a passing interest in computers and took a computer science A-level at 16 along with physics and chemistry (oh, and art..!), I quickly picked up Pascal, C and C++ and Assembler and I loved it and spent many hours coding and disassembling other people's code. That, combined with the last economic downturn in the UK laying waste to the engineering and building sector sealed my fate in IT rather than civil engineering.

I achieved both ends of the spectrum in my A-level results (top marks for Computer Science, less said about Art the better ;)), and in 1995 I went to the University of Brighton to be near the beach, oh.. And study Computer Science 

University was my first exposure to the Internet, having only had limited access to bulletin board systems at home and I immediately got it, I recall being frustrated that I couldn't find reviews or details for my 1st car on-line.. Oh how things have changed! I lived in a shared house with some course mates and we immediately set about building the most ridiculous student home network ever, we had Netware, NT 10Base-2 cabling all over the place and shared dial-up Internet to a local ISP (Mistral), they only realised in later years how much money they lost out on through our local cable co's free local call policy as it was set to auto-redial 24/7 :)

Whilst at university a friend and I went into business providing network services to a local SMB reseller, we did everything from cabling to servers, proxies and email systems for small shops to golf courses and schools, it was long hours but it worked well part-time around my studies, I learnt way more doing this than I ever learnt at university and my experiences in infrastructure and networking was far more fulfilling than coding :) although my formal education did give me a good appreciation of documentation and research.

I did a sandwich degree so spent a year working for a reseller/VAR in Brighton, just before I started they were purchased by GE and merged into it's IT services division so I spent a year working on Novell and OS/2 to NT4 migrations for large insurance and retail companies and providing internal 1st/2nd line support for their enterprise network, as part of the prerequisites for the placement they paid for a CBT course and for us to pass at least 3 MCP exams, which I did and continued on to get my MCSE.

When I graduated from university, I went to work for a swiss watch maker in London, providing IT support and doing some IT refresh projects, after a year I was approached about a job with a small managed services company working with EMI music, I was interviewed in the basement of EMI's offices by the founder of Infocom (latterly becoming ioko, and then part of Kit-Digital), the guys were great and offered me the job on the spot, which I accepted and I spent the next 10 years working for what became ioko, initially working on Active Directory and Exchange migration projects for EMI and Diageo.  As the business grew so did my role and I was an early member of our professional services team, doing pre-sales and project delivery mainly in the Microsoft space and latterly virtualization, the company grew into the media/broadcast space and I worked on some great large scale video-on-demand projects as well as traditional IT infrastructure.

Ioko was a great company and I made some excellent friends but after 10 years I was looking for a new challenge, I originally planned to set out on my own as a freelancer but I was offered a job within the cloud practice at VMware,  it sounded like a great role, doing working with early-access customers using vCloud Director and building delivery materials for the field, I met some fantastic people at VMware but eventually came to realise that working for a software vendor in what was evolving back into a project delivery role wasn't for me, I had a number of personal and business projects that I could not carry out whilst working for VMware so I reverted to my original freelance plan, which is what I am still doing today, I enjoy the freedom to work on my own projects and being able to manage my career and personal development more closely.

How did you get into working with VMware and becoming a 2011 vExpert?

I first read about VMware Workstation in a magazine article in 2000, I was instantly hooked and used it to build various complex network and server labs for my studies, I built my own home-brew version of GSX server using Workstation on a Windows 2000 machine using a whole bunch of batch files to copy about VMDK files and start/stop VM, because I was doing so much AD/Exchange migration work it made the most sense as I could build out complex multi-domain environments and test and roll-back infinitely without waiting weeks for people to build out labs, I could turn up with a couple of laptops and have it done by lunchtime.

I got to build my first ESX server around version 2.5 as it was very hard for a non-large reseller to get evaluation versions in the early days. I built a lot of complex test and development environments for customers, ioko had grown into a sizeable managed services provider and I saw an opportunity to build a multi-tenant environment using ESX 3 to deliver customer solutions faster, cheaper and more flexibly; so we ended up building a very early implementation of a cloud.

Since my university days I have always maintained a large and ever-evolving home lab environment, when I found you could virtualise ESX itself I was blown-away, and I spent a lot of my own time and money on the various incarnations of my vTARDIS project (http://vinf.net/vTARDIS).

Whilst at BriForum in Amsterdam in 2007 I decided to start a blog to try and organise my notes a bit better, and it just grew from there. My blog is http://vinf.net which is supposed to stand for V(ritual) Infrastructure (.net) and I am sure someone told me 4-letter domain names were the most memorable so rather than deliberate over names I tried the JFDI approach and here I am, as unpronounceable as it is ;)

About this time I started attending the London VMware User Group On the advice of a colleague and I was impressed at the technical content and approachability of all the attendees, I had expected it all to be a bit stand-offish and awkward, but it was the polar opposite, I think I hold the (dubious) record for presenting at every London VMUG meeting for 2 years straight, if nothing else it encouraged a whole raft of other people to present so they didn't have to listen to me again :)

In 2011 I joined the steering committee for the London VMUG to assist with finding content and helped organise (and presented at) our 1st ever national UK event, which attracted over 300 attendees. I was awarded the vExpert title in 2009 and 2010 and 2011 and I continue to blog and contribute to LonVMUG and the wider community.

What would you tell someone who wanted to get a job like yours to do?

The most useful people in any industry are those that just get it done, it's very easy to find a reason to complain and say "it can't be done" it's a lot harder, but infinitely more valuable to say "it's tricky, but here is how I would do it, and these are the implications"; the most appropriate solution isn't always the "best" solution.

Nobody can ever know everything about everything, but don't be afraid to say so; you can blag all you want, but it's going to burn you when you fail. The key to being successful if you want a varied and long career is to know a wide breadth of technology, but have the ability (and technical grounding) to learn specific areas quickly, learn from your mistakes and apply that knowledge. VMware have produced some of the most useful technologies to support this sort of activity, it's so easy to spin up some test VMs and just give something a go.

Initiative is the most important attribute, if you are sitting in your chair complaining "my boss won't pay for training on X, thus I can't do it" then you're in trouble. Formalised professional development is all well and good, but people (employers) don't just give you things unless they have to (or there is a compelling tangible/commercial benefit to them doing so) and they're unlikely to do it on your timescales and say-so. The reality of the world is that if you want to be successful you're going to have to spend some of your own time and money if you want to better your career and knowledge beyond your day-job – you should view it as investment in  yourself, I've used this attitude throughout my career by investing in my own lab gear and study time for industry certifications and it's stood me well.

Interest – if you're not interested in what you do, then this isn't for you – I'd hate to just have a day-job, I need something I'm interested and passionate about or I can't do it well.

On Monday, vSphere won the prestigious Infoworld Technology of the Year award, and we are all very excited about that. Infoworld publishes the awards in a series of 25 slides which you can download from their page. Congratulations to the vSphere team!

Last week, VMware has also won in ten out of fourteen categories of the 2012 Virtualization Review Reader’s Choice Awards. We are quite elated over that here in Palo Alto. The categories we won include: Application virtualization, Business continuity, Cloud computing, Desktop virtualization, Mobile, virtualization, and nine others. You can check out the full list and also download the Buyer’s Guide on virtualizationreview.com.

Oh YouTube, our partner team has published a funny little animated film about bringing out datacenter and VM management out of the stone age with VMware cloud management tools. It has cute little cave men running around beating on the servers with clubs and stones, and then happily abandoning all that for our solutions.

The It Support Support Guy is still on a roll with the newest installment called “It’s a wonderful job.â€

And just yesterday, we have published a new series of videos about the real-world challenges in IT. There are currently two witty videos with cool South-Eastern soundtracks published on the vmwarerealworld.com page, and I expect there will be more. A little bit of insider info: both videos were shot on location here at our main office in Palo Alto.

Lastly, John has been quite active on the Google+ front. That’s doubly exciting since yesterday’s switch to personalized search on Google. If you haven’t heard, the personalized search (which you can toggle on and off as you please) will present the search results favouring content from your circles on Plus. This means that if you circle a bunch of VMware people, you will see more of our blogs and social posts in the personalized view. From where I stand, that means that you can see more content from the people you already know and trust, which can be a good thing.

So since yesterday, John has created a new VMware and Virtualization public shared circle. If you would like to be listed in it, you have to go and comment on the post on the VMware Google+ page in which John has announced the new shared circle.

VMware Community: a.p.
Twitter handle: @ap_unleashed
Current employer: Netzwerk GmbH (Germany) 

How did you get into IT?

During my apprenticeship as an electronics technician I got myself a Sharp PC-1500 with 2KB memory (for the younger audience, yes it's 2 Kilobytes, not 2 Gigabytes) on which I learned programming. About3 years later - after working as a technician in the US and Germany - I got a job at as a programmer in small company. While working as a programmer I had the opportunity to have projects in a lot of programming languages like BASIC, COBOL, TCL, STEP5, Pascal, C, Assembly language, Perl, ... This is something I still benefit from, when it comes toe.g. scripting. In the late 90s I started managing Client-Server infrastructures - mainly OS/2 LAN-Server and Windows environments - as well as Citrix MetaFrame farms (Application virtualization, as it is called nowadays). It then took another few years, before I was hired by my current company, where I work as a Sr. Consultant and - besides other things - started with VMware ESX 3.0.

How did you get into working with VMware and becoming a 2011 vExpert?

As mentioned before,vSphere is one part of my duties in the company I work for. One of the resources I used to get into virtualization and find help was - and still is - the VMware Communities, which IMO is one of the most active and professional forum. First I only used the forums to find answers to issues I had to solve, later I started "paying" back by helping other users solve their issues. Then - last year in November - I was asked whether I wanted to volunteer as a Communities User Moderater, to which I agreed. In April this year I was nominated for the VMware vExpert 2011 and finally at July, 1st I received the Welcome mail from John Troyer.

What would you tell someone who wanted to get a job like yours to do?

Love your job and love to work with other people. It may be a long way with ups and downs. However, with dilligence and patience you will reach your goal.