blogging | CrashLoopBackoff

Another Kickoff and a New Year

November 2018 was my the finish of my 5th year at Pure. I really meant to write up a recap but let’s just say November and December were super busy.

I was in Barcelona for VMworld EMEA the beginning of November, then came home to visit more customers around the US and tell them about using PSO with Kubernetes and Docker. Then my amazing oldest daughter had a soccer tournament in Orlando, FL. It was a great time with the family and why I do what I do.

Post Tournament Team pic. Go AFU U13 Girls.

Then back out to AWS re:Invent. This was Pure’s first big presence since we launched our suite of cloud data services the week before. It was great to share what we have been working on in the background for the last year. Cloud Block Store, CloudSnap and StorReduce have definitely increased the interest in doing a hybrid cloud, many current and prospective customers are very excited. I came home to take a breather and then off to KubeCon Seattle where our team was overwhelmed with conversations about how Pure can make Cloud Native apps persistent with easy Storage as a Service with Pure Service Orchestrator. Being able to run the same API’s in the Public Cloud and on prem is very appealing to teams rolling out apps in all kinds of use cases. Dev in the cloud and prod on prem? yes. Dev on prem and prod in the cloud? yes. Dev and Prod in the cloud? you guessed it. yes.

January was about building out some content for our sales and company kickoff but also helping customers with their projects on K8s and Docker. That brings me to yet another Kickoff. What I call the Orangest show on Earth. A chance for me to see so many great friends and see how successful their last year was. It was very satisfying to see sales reps and SE’s that I worked with throughout the year get recognized for growth they brought to the company. It was very nice to be recognized by my leadership and peers with an award. When you work with such a wide range of regions and teams sometimes gets hard to see if you are making a difference, especially when you are remote like I am. At the beginning of 2018, almost no one at Pure knew what I was working on. Slowly but surely the excitement around K8s is growing, so I am looking forward to an even more exciting year here at Pure.

Kingsman jackets for the team. So much orange and such a great team.

Somethings I would like to do in 2019

Share more on the blog. The transition from VMware(I still do VMware stuff!) to Kubernetes has provided many learning opportunities for me to share.
Work on Clusters as Cattle with Persistent data. Data is important and the app/cluster can or should move around it. Seamlessly.
Finish some cloud/dev online classes I have started. Finding time with no distractions is key here.

In Seattle, Pizza and Star Wars / Ron Swanson art? YES!

This: I love Google Analytics

I have not really dug into the features of Google Analytics for a long time. I was curious today to see how people were following links through the site and how they got here. I found this report that totally made me geek out.

Highlighted is people coming from twitter. Now the top referral source for any new article on the blog. Very interesting to see the flow of people as the land on a page and move to other linked topics.

Anyways back to work.

First Three Months and the Cloud

This is the post where people start accusing me of working for EMC. Guess what? I do.

Now that Geek Week and onboarding are finished and I got my really cool shirt I wanted to spend a few minutes reflecting on the things I learned in the last few months. This post will introduce a few topics and be an overall summary of my first 3 months as a vSpecialist.

What is great is I didn’t have to be convinced to like or do something I didn’t already think or believe. I am definitely able to articulate my thoughts in a somewhat coherent manner.

I believe the way we DO technology will need to transform in order compete in the future. If you are doing well now and still spending most of your time and money keeping the lights on the margin for error is shrinking. Your IT needs to be empowered to focus on applications that will give you a competitive edge. I have seen that EMC is going all in to make this vision of the cloud reality.

Automate – Manage – Self-Service

We all have a vision of how the “cloud” will help us. For us technical guys our list may look like this:

I want my kids to recognize me.
I want tools that work.
I like sleep.
My Call of Duty Black Ops game needs some work.

Will we all be able to play golf every afternoon because of cloud? Most likely not. Let me know if it happens for you. It will enable us to provide more meaningful impact on the bottom line of our business. If that means I can spend less time pouring over logs to find errors and fixing them and more time improving the delivery and impact of our applications, I am sold. What I seek is less time fighting fires and more time creating value. I see that EMC is aiming (and currently delivers) to provide tools to make this happen. This will be done with tools to help automate, manage and supply self-service IT.

It has been a good few months learning. Soon I will have a few more posts about the last few months.

Coming Soon:

Everyone has a Shiny Thing

EMC Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) is really cool.

You Care about Business Impact

A Team Makes a Difference

Making Changes

It is not catchy or a creative title. It does however communicate exactly what I need to say. Things for me are going to change in a good way. It has been a very chaotic final three months of the year. Without going into every personal detail emotions have swung from really high and great to very low and difficult. It is awkward for me to kind of share the personal parts of my life.

The topics of this blog have always been driven by what I am working on and learning. I am certain in the next few months and years I will be learning lots of new topics. Soon I will be joining EMC as a Senior vSpecialist. I will still be based out of the Atlanta area and I am excited to see what will come in the future.

Additionally, I want to say something about VeriStor. The people at VeriStor became more than co-workers and bosses. They are like friends and family and it is very hard to leave them. Luckily they won’t be too far away. The work of implementing virtualization solutions is something I enjoy tremendously and I could be doing for many more years. My time at VeriStor opened up worlds of opportunity for my family and me. This opportunity at EMC though is a chance to move into a role that will challenge me in new and exciting ways.

Hopefully over the next few months I will share the journey of becoming a vSpecialist and all the new things it will bring.

Fast Don’t Lie – Tech Field Day

Apologies to the new Adidas Basketball youtube campaign. I am going to steal their title for this post.

Time has flown by and it is now time to get going to Gestalt IT’s Tech Field Day. Thursday and Friday will be full of some pretty exciting companies. I have some familiarity with three of them: Solarwinds, NetApp and Intel. I am excited to get some in depth information from them though.

Then Aprius, Avere Systems, Actifio, and Asigra are companies I have never really heard anything about so it will be interesting to see what they do and see how it fits in to my perspective as a Virtualization dude.

For now I have one question on my list (I will come up with others), Is it Fast? Watch the videos, because when we talk about the cloud, Fast dont’ lie.

I’m Fast

I’m Fast 2

Fast Don’t Lie

vExpert 2010 – a High Five from VMware

Last Friday night I received an email from John Troyer at VMware inviting me to the vExpert 2010 program. It is an honor to be included with such a great list of people. I never know how to respond to be complimented. That is why I like high fives. It is like saying good job, but the only expected response is to high five back. No awkward thank you, or speeches needed. Just don’t leave me hangin’ and everything is understood.

I am extremely excited to get the VMware vExpert 2010, but since this is the internets, no one is here to high five.

So I will just say, “Thank you.”

Yo Gabba Gabba High Five

Really needed a reason to put this song in a post…

Recap of 2009

Thank you to everyone out there that gave any attention to this little blog. I tried to supply new information where I could and also document my journey trying to improve at the esxcfg- commands. In 2009 the traffic increased from less than 100 visits in a week to approaching 500 in a week. That is a slow hour for some of the best vm bloggers (Yellow-Bricks, Scott Lowe) but I am not trying to replace them.

In March I was layed off. I spent 2 months full time looking for work. The VMware community really stepped up. Special thanks go out to a few people that tried to help out or checked in with how the search was going: @jasemccarty @maishk @jasonboche and many others. By the end of April I started a new position as a Virtualization Infrastructure Engineer at Veristor Systems. This job required moving the family from Memphis, Tennessee to Atlanta, Georgia. All the fun of a new job, house hunting and moving to a completely new city. We closed on our new house just a few days after VMworld 2009. My first trip to VMworld was amazing but I would suggest not buying a house while you are in and out of conferences, labs and seminars. Lots of details to fix, I will be happy if this is not the case ever again.

After such a busy year it was only the beginning of September. The rest of the year was filled with VMware Installation projects and VMware health checks. I was all over the Southeast US. Maybe I can come visit some of you in 2010?

Technical/VM/Blogging Goals for 2010:

Continually improve the quality of content going to this blog.
Schedule, take and pass the VCDX exams.
Improve my overall storage knowledge.
Renew my expired CCNA (bad move letting this lapse in 2009)

2009 was such a big year personally. I hope and pray for a little more stability in 2010 but I also love the excitement of new challenges, but the VCDX should be enough. 🙂

Also, I scheduled a Merry Christmas post, but for some reason I didn’t do what I thought I did. So a late Merry Christmas to all of you out there.

Write in Campaign! Vote Now! Top Five Blogs

Not that I think I am worthy of winning. There are so many better blogs relating to VMware out there. If though I can get someone besides my Mom, Dad, Wife and myself to vote for me I will be able to sleep tonight. 🙂

Vote for the best 5 VMware Blogs!

Who will be the elusive 5th 2Vcps and Truck vote? I am not beyond envoking sympathy, empathy and begging. So vote the common guy, a blog you can believe in! Write it in!

Woo woo!

These guys would vote for me.
Out.

vSphere-land’s Top 20 and Looking for Performance

(This post should have gone out last week. Ooops!)
Check out the top 20!

I would like to be on this list someday. I couldn’t find one of these blogs that I would slide out to let me in. I know these people put a ton of time into creating their content. So congratulations to the top 20.

From 2vcps:
More short VCDX notes coming with concern to command line tips for ESX 3.5. I am also working on some Exchange 2007 on VMware posts. Eventually some upgrading to vSphere 4 posts will be on the way.

What I have been looking for is VMFS vs RDM vs Guest iSCSI performance stats. I found some good information on VMFS and RDM. Since using iSCSI inside of the guest is not supported I am not finding any stats on the performance. To the naked eye running Exchange it seems to be working fine. I would like to see some numbers though.

Just wondering if I can find some statistics or opinions to help form a standard operating procedure for deployments.

I love Maps

When I was a kid I just looked at the map and the globe. It was fun for me to see where places are and what cities and roads go through those places.

So that is why I love google analytics so much. I get some sweet maps.
I don’t get near the number of hits of some (which is just fine with me.) Here is my World and US maps for March 2009.