There are many interesting and exciting vendors on the itinerary for Tech Field Day 13. One that really intrigues me is ZeroStack. I did a month long study trying to learn Openstack for my vBrownbag Tech talk at VMworld 2016. I love cloud technologies and their ease of consumption. There are a lot of issues associated with public cloud that Openstack addresses. You use on-premises hardware, have total control of your data, and don’t have the reoccurring costs.

I am extremely proud to say that I was selected as a delegate for Tech Field Day 13! You may be asking the question “what is Tech Field Day?” Well I’m glad you asked. Tech Field Day is an organization that takes independent IT professionals and IT vendors, puts them in the same room, and lets the good times roll. A delegate gets unprecedented access to a vendor’s executives and engineers.

It’s a very common sentiment that 2016 was a bad year. If you pay attention to the news and pop culture this seems accurate. Many of the celebrities I grew up watching and listening to passed away. The election cycle was filled with mud slinging and people on both sides seemed to lose their mind. There were many people in my extended social circle who experienced personal tragedies. I was one of the lucky ones.

The end of the calendar year brings family, travel, and performance evaluations. A big part of mine is training and tech development. It’s never too soon to start thinking about what is new and where your are interested in strengthening your skill. I asked some tech experts what skills are the stuff to learn for 2017. Keith Townsend @ctoadvisor responded with Scripting (ie Cloud Formation, Powershell, Python) Hybrid infrastructure networking (AWS VPC>VPN integration)

In 2008 I purchased a Dell T110 tower server for my home. I wanted something to run ESXi 4 on so I could run Windows 2003 servers to study for my MCSE. From that point on a home lab has been critical to my success as a technician. It is very common for a technical professional to have some sort of personal space to mess around with. There are many reasons someone may want to spend hard earned money on a home lab.

As vCenter has evolved many programs and plugins depend on it for functionality. With the recent GA to vSphere 6.5 a discussion came up on twitter. Veeam released version 9.5 around the same time but it’s not compatible with vSphere 6.5. I tried to install Veeam into my lab but couldn’t. Instead I was met with an error warning me to wait until Veeam 9.5 Update 1. The discussion about Compatibility reminded me of the spreadsheet I use to track plugins and configuration of all my servers.

The application for vExpert 2017 opened today and go through December 16th. The vExpert program is a VMware advocacy group that recognizes people who give back to the VMware community and promote VMware technology. You can become a vExpert by leading a VMUG, speaking, blogging, and/or tweeting your support of VMware technology. I can say one of the best things that has happened in my career was being selected as vExpert 2016.

In part 1 of my discussion about Merging SSO Domains I discussed why I was required to make that change. To recap: Enhanced Linked Mode is a business requirement in 6.0 and that requires all vCenters to belong to the same SSO Domain. You can’t merge SSO domains in 6.0 so we need to do it before the upgrade. While the concept sounds simple enough execution gets a bit complicated. There are a lot of services that need to be modified and some architectural decisions to make.

I have publicly committed to submitting a design to the VCDX committee. My design is due in March 2017. I’m very glad I signed up to submit because it has kick started my motivation. Today I wanted to talk about my progress. I am using an actual design for a project I worked on. It’s a fairly complex system with many moving pieces. It mostly meets AMPRS requirements (Availability, Manageability, Performance, Recoverability, Security) so I shouldn’t have to do much tweaking to make it pass muster.

I’m a huge fan of the Full Stack Journey podcast. In the show Scott Lowe investigates the question “Can someone truly be a full stack engineer?”. He and his guests work together to give actionable advice and talk about the benefits of being a full stack engineer vs working in a silo. The definition of a full stack engineer really hard to pin down. Many people have opinions on the matter and they revolve around some common themes.