Sometimes tasks that seem simple at first can become very complicated. When I was first tasked with upgrading a vCenter 5.5 environment to 6.0 I imagined mounting an ISO, clicking through the wizard, and voila, upgrade complete. This may work when you only have one vCenter server in a simple environment, however in an enterprise this is typically far from the optimal way to approach the upgrade. Over the next couple of entries I will talk about my progress toward a vSphere 6 upgrade.

I am a regular listener to The Geek Whisperers podcast. If you haven’t listened to them before please check them out here. Trust me, you won’t regret it. The podcast always has a very interesting guest and they talk soft skills and high level concepts with very technical people. A lot of their discussion revolves around career paths, decisions that lead their guest to their current position, and practical advice a listener can implement to change, improve, or develop similar skills.

As I’ve stated before, I highly value certification. I think they provide a good goal and can encourage someone to dig deep and learn features of a technology they may have never looked into otherwise. I recently had a discussion which started with the question “can certifications make a career?” The even split came down to “yes, they prove your knowledge” and “no, it’s too easy to cheat for them to be valuable”.

After a lot of going back and fourth, gnashing my teeth, etc I decided to participate in the #vDM30in30 challenge. I suppose that starting a VCDX design and working to improve my presentation skills wasn’t enough. Add on work responsibilities and family time and I have a challenge ahead of me. I refuse to let doubt or fear stop me so here I go. In the next month I hope to talk about the following topics (and more!

One of the biggest challenges in a new environment can be mapping out resources. In a large environment you may encounter ESXi hosts that were moved between clusters, datastores that were mapped to multiple unnecessary hosts, or any number of additional surprises or inconsistencies. I encountered such a challenge and needed to answer a seemingly simple question: Which hosts and which clusters would be impacted by a loss of a datastore?

My first VMworld is coming to an end and has been an amazing experience. I have learned a lot about VMware’s pipeline, dug deep with vendors to learn more about products we are evaluating, and sat in some breakout session with tips that will help me improve our environment today. Cross cloud services is the most interesting and important development as far as I am concerned. They are using NSX and their other SDDC services to provide a single dashboard with visualization and control of your AWS, Azure, and Google cloud resources.

In July I posted about my insane goal of giving a talk at VMworld on a technology I knew nothing about. I chose Openstack, which at that time was nothing more than a buzzword to me. I remember reading tweets saying VMware Administrators needed to pay attention to Openstack but couldn’t tell you what it was. VMworld has arrived and on Monday, August 29th, 2016 I presented my talk. I am not afraid of public speaking but got some jitters as the crew started counting me down.

I arrived at VMworld on Sunday August 28th in the mid morning. I was exhausted after a long and early flight but activities were already underway so I jumped right in. Registration was quick and I got a sweet backpack out of it. Day 0 is a great time to meet up with new pals and get the lay of the land. I did a couple laps of both floors and basically know where I’m going.

I’ve never been a person to shy away from a technology or educational challenge. When I was presented with AWS as a platform to move forward with in my consulting days I jumped on it. I went from “couch to AWS” within a couple weeks and did my first deployment six weeks after starting my journey. I wanted to replicate this journey. Jumping in the deep end and having a deadline to learn something well enough to really use it excites me.

I sat the VCAP6-DCV Beta last night. First off the test was extremely fun, much like the VCAP5-DCA. In a live lab your skills are really tested. The new interface provided some challenges but is overall better than the legacy interface. The console is faster and it’s a lot nicer to be able to open the manual over the interface. It is very cramped though. My center maybe had an 18 inch monitor so I was still minimizing my manual a lot.