Tag - Professional Development

I’ve just hit the six month mark in my new role at VMware: Senior Cloud Solutions Architect - Service Providers. This role sees me working closely with a paired Business Development Manager, aligned to our VMware Cloud Provider Partners to design and build cloud platforms that highlight and expand on their unique offerings. It’s my first foray into the pre-sales world, and I’m loving it. I’ve really enjoyed talking to our partners, learning more about their businesses, and helping them map VMware solutions to their business objectives.

Over the years I’ve had many people ask me how I manage networking on my single host lab environment. “How do you do VLANs and manage routing/firewalling without a physical device providing that upstream?” they would ask. Well, I use a PFSense VM. Which would usually be followed up by “Yea but how?” VLAN trunking on my dvSwitch and sub-interfaces within PFSense. Easy stuff! Let’s review requirements first: Be able to define multiple VLANs and subnets.

In February 2022, I reached an incredible milestone: 3 years as a VMware Technical Account Manager (TAM). I’m writing about my experiences from the first 3 months to the first 12 months and on. I hope my experiences can highlight what this role is about to any would-be TAMs reading. First Three Months The first three months of any job are difficult. You are (kind of) expected to: learn everyone’s names in your branch and team, your teams structure, how you fit within the overall business, get a grip on what your job actually is vs.

You might notice something a little different if you’ve visited the site today. That’s right, a new theme based off VMware’s ClarityUI that’s in use across almost all of our products. I was envious of Cody De Arkland’s The Humble Lab blog and his work to integrate Clarity to his blog. Once I saw it, I knew that I wanted to do something similar but with my own touch and give myself a chance to dig deeper into Hugo.

Thanks to all 5 of my avid readers, I’ve been awarded vExpert for 2019! What is vExpert? Taken from VMTN The VMware vExpert program is VMware's global evangelist and advocacy program. The program is designed to put VMware's marketing resources towards your advocacy efforts. Promotion of your articles, exposure at our global events, co-op advertising, traffic analysis, and early access to beta programs and VMware's roadmap. The awards are for individuals, not companies, and last for one year.

I’m back from VMware’s internal Worldwide Sales Kickoff in Las Vegas! My first Kickoff and it was everything everyone told me it would be. What is Kickoff? It’s VMware’s internal networking conference for VMware staff that are in some way involved in the sales process. It’s to equip them with the tools and knowledge to deliver real solutions to real world business problems (can you tell it’s working??). The biggest highlight for me was hearing our CEO Pat Gelsinger during his keynote.

After many years of working with VMware products and having been on the receiving side of VMware’s support and business development team, I can now hop the fence and make a difference directly with VMware! I was given the amazing opportunity to join the Brisbane office in Queensland, Australia as a Technical Account Manager and today was my first day! Without a doubt, there is plenty to learn and do over the next few weeks (maybe even months) and I expect this blog will take a temporary back seat until I’ve taken the reigns and settled into my new life.

Like many professionals in this industry, I have a homelab. Who would need a homelab anymore with the cloud as prevalent as it is? Well, someone who specialises in private on-premises clouds and the work required to make it a hybrid cloud. And to be honest, I love it. I get to build something that is truly mine with my own constraints and requirements and still try to reach maximum usefulness for the hardware.

Here are some of the resources that I worked through as study material for the VCAP6-Design exam. A lot of these links and the discovery of these links can be attributed to a lot of others, and I’ll try to credit them where I can. vBrownBag EMEA - VCAP6-DCV Design - vBrownBag YouTube channel Some great presenters here that highlight some of the key concepts and follow up with discussions vThing - VCAP Study Resources - Andres Herceg’s blog https://vthing.

After months of studying and a Design and Deploy course for good measure, I passed the incredible VCAP6-DCV Design exam! This certification in combination with my VCAP5-DCA from 18 months ago has awarded me the VCIX6 title which I’m incredibly proud of. Here’s the official link from VMware about the certification: https://mylearn.vmware.com/mgrReg/plan.cfm?plan=89125&ui=www_cert To give you an idea of what the Design exam is about, take a look at https://www.virtualtiers.net. That exam simulator is a great representation of how the exam is formatted and how you’re tested.