Virtualization, Cloud, Infrastructure and all that stuff in-between

Apologies, my blog has been a bit quiet of late, some of this is due to a much overdue holiday but mainly because I have been nearing the end of my time with my current employer and have been very busy finishing up projects and documentation.

Ok, so here it is – I am going to work for VMware ! – yes, another blogger is going to a vendor! This wasn’t a simple decision for me but the chance was too good to pass on. I have been in my current role at ioko for 10 years (almost to the day) and it’s been great, I honestly have no serious complaints and have worked on some very interesting projects with great customers. We are parting company on excellent terms and I wish them well but it’s time for something different for me.

The next phase of my life will be working as a Senior Consultant within the VMware vCloud EMEA team on some very exciting technology. As my regular readers will know I’ve had a keen interest in all things cloud for some time and have been doing some practical work with the vCloud concept as a VMware customer for some time, now I’m making the wholesale transition to be closer to the technology by being part of VMware helping other people to implement it now, for real, in production.

It’s been interesting over the last year to watch the transition of so many people that I know within the virtualization community to work for VMware, EMC and other vendors, this is evidence of a real industry-wide demand for people that are motivated and able to learn technologies quickly but also those that have a good level of inter-personal and business skills.

In my experience those people are the ones who don’t just see it IT as a job, they are personally interested and thus motivated to learn through research, play and doing, many of those people keep blogs as a personal reference and a way of sharing their work with the community – I definitely fall into this category and it’s been great to see the explosion of people blogging about virtualization and associated technologies over the last 3 years.

There is a lot of consolidation going on within the industry and because things are moving so quickly the vendors are quickly becoming the place to be if you want to be working with the latest stuff or the most cutting-edge projects, significantly more so than it has been in the past.

Getting a position at VMware certainly isn’t an easy ride and as a side-result I actually feel better-prepared for my VCDX defence panel. I had a *lot* of interviews through the process and a mix of presentation, technical and hands-on scenario work, the fact that I have a blog didn’t get me the job, I had to work hard for it and I have a lot of real industry experience behind me which stood in my favour. There is no space for complacency if you want to work with the best 🙂

I won’t officially start at VMware until after VMworld SF, so I’ll still be in SF under my own steam and expense, I’ll be blogging as much as possible and will be at the usual events during my time there. You can even come and see the vTARDIS in action in the session I am sharing with Eric Siebert and Simon Seagrave V18328 "Building an Affordable vSphere Environment for a Lab or Small Business".

In closing, this certainly isn’t’ the end of vinf.net and I’d like to refer you to this post’s title if there is any doubt – I see this as vMotioning my career from one provider to another whilst maintaining a business as usual service – I hear VMware have a product that does that sort of thing 🙂

I’ll definitely keep blogging and I now have the advantage that I will be able to write about vCloud stuff once it’s GA’d, within the usual bounds of customer/project confidentiality – in exactly the same way I worked pre-VMware – this isn’t an official VMware blog/mouthpiece and it won’t become one – but it will definitely get more interesting! 🙂

Thanks for reading. and here’s to things to come 🙂