VMWare Experts
What does it mean to be a VMWare expert? It’s about passion.
It’s about having a tech team that is busy, yet they still find time after work to watch another three hours of training videos about a new or latest version of a product.
Being a VMWare expert means going way beyond just setting up vSphere. It’s about understanding the pitfalls as well as the strengths of every design. Anyone can throw hardware at a problem, but a VMWare expert has a broad range of knowledge across many technologies like storage and networking. They are able to spot problems that nobody else can. A VMWare expert thoroughly comprehends scalability, every piece of the architecture, choke points, and how to root them out.
Furthermore, they are aware of all the “little gotchas” like storing all of your VMs on a single array can lead to serious scalability issues, and snapshots are not backups. They can create performance problems. The VMWare expert realizes that making sure your operating systems have the same level of patching is crucial to memory deduplication, and that mixing a whole bunch of VMs with different vCPUs can lead to scheduling problems. They are cognizant of the little things. The VMWare expert has dealt with vSphere when it wasn’t all glory, when it hung or corrupted a VM, when the iSCSI subsystem went MIA or when a junior tech accidentally rebooted a SAN. They’ve suffered through countless backup solutions that didn’t work, and have persevered to find the one that finally did.
For the expert, VMWare is an ecosystem of solutions. They implement way beyond vSphere by utilizing some of the new products like Config Manager. Config Manager can work wonders on your network when it comes to change management and fixing a thousand tiny problems from a single pane of glass. It’s about Operations Manager and discovering waste on your network by reclaiming resources that you just didn’t need to give to a VM. The VMWare expert knows how to protect your investment and squeeze every ounce of performance out of it.
What it’s not about is a stack of certifications. Sure, we have those. We have consultants who are certified all over the VMWare landscape. However, some of our best solutions could not have been learned inside a classroom. VMWare experts are warriors. They have learned under the gun, in real world environments.
It’s also not just about throwing hardware at everything. Some problems can’t be solved by throwing another NetApp at them. Understanding is what makes an expert. Where is the real bottleneck and can you find it?
In the end, being a true expert is about critical thinking. Can you look at the whole problem from a hundred angles and see all of the opportunities and the pitfalls? Can you make a $150,000 solution function as beautifully as a $500,000 solution? Can you see the architecture from way up in the clouds and all the way down to a single packet flowing on the network?
Not only does a true expert have intelligence and tenacity, the true expert also maintains grace under pressure as well. When everyone else is losing their heads, you need a team that can maintain focus and keep working until the problem is solved.
Finally, it’s about growing and learning every day. Knowing your limitations is what constitutes an expert. A true expert recognizes when they should call in another gun, or dig deeper. However, it also means that when they find the answer, they are confident it’s the right answer. The answer is both provable and repeatable.
We bring our passion, critical thinking and tenacity to work every day. Let us bring that to work for you.
