To the Mothership!

I know there have been a lot of these kinds of posts lately and I have been trying to think of ways to start off this post and not go into the detail of my career back story like a lot of folks have done. I am instead going to focus on how VMware has played a part in my career.

I have been in awe of VMware tech for over a decade. My journey started with VMware Server back in 2008. I was amazed at the ability to run multiple OS's on one physical piece of hardware. I worked with VMware Player as well early on and I had always been a windows guy prior to this, but wanted to start learning Linux. This was a great way for me to try it out and get more familiar with it without all the pain of finding the correct drivers and getting all the hardware to be recognized etc, so I could get a functional machine. I used it as a testbed and learning platform to get more familiar with it.


I attended my first VMUG meeting in 2009 and they were talking about ESX vs ESXi and I ended up playing with ESXi 3.5 on a spare machine and learning that. I had a coworker that had left where I was at and joined a new company. He knew I was starting to play with VMware so he gave me some insight on how it was running at his new job. I was fascinated as he told me about vMotion and how you can have a running VM highly available and can migrate from host to host. He told me how DPM could power up and power down hosts throughout the day as load increased and decreased in the cluster. I decided to dig deeper at this point and buy a real server and continue my education.

I learned by attending a VMUG Virtual event of Install Configure Manage courses that were available at a local tech college for a fraction of the normal cost. I enrolled in the course and took my first VCP exam in 2014. It was at this point I started working with VMware at the professional level for the first time. Managing clusters for 5 locations across the Midwest. I learned so much in this role and had a manager that was very open to supporting all of my efforts to learn more about VMware and get involved in the community. We deployed our first vSAN cluster in 2016, I dove right in and learned this fascinating new tech. I immediately saw the value of vSAN and thought about how they were doing the same thing for storage with vSAN as they had done for virtualization with vSphere. I started with the help of many mentors and encouragement from my local Wisconsin VMUG leadership to do public speaking based on my experience deploying and managing my vSAN cluster. Speaking kept leading to more opportunities to speak and get more involved in the community.

For those of you that haven't tapped into the power of the vCommunity yet and started getting in touch with and networking in this great group of people that are willing to mentor and help you learn. Go back and read this post I made last month, because the vCommunity is the reason I am able to say............

 I am pleased to announce that I have accepted a position at VMware. I will be a Sr Solutions Engineer vSAN/HCI. I will be working with customers to understand their needs and provide solutions. A huge thanks to all those that have helped me on my journey. You know who you are! I am very excited to get started working with all of my new VMware family! Here is to a great future! Cheers and thanks for reading! #GovSAN