Today is my first day at VMware!

Dear TinkerTry Readers:

Today, January 9th of 2017, is my very first day at VMware. As a Commercial Systems Engineer, my role will include demonstrating the benefits of a Software Defined Storage strategy, specifically focusing on vSAN for eastern US commercial customers, with a mix of travel to customer sites, and work-from-home. Customer facing work is what I enjoy most.

I'm at 30,006 feet right now with my laptop is running low on power (broken AC outlet) and Gogo Wi-Fi barely hanging in there with lots of turbulence, 150 mph headwinds, 50 mph groundwinds, well, you get the picture. I'll need to be keeping this post rather short, as I try to capture a change in my career that has been rather long in the making.

My IT experience in supporting post-sales servers and storage has me ready to tackle a new challenge, finding it best to take a chance on something new every few years, which is what I did internally back at IBM. I cannot tell you how enthused/stoked/excited I am to have this opportunity, but I'm going to try! If you've followed this site for a while, this company choice may not exactly surprise you. But what is so cool about this is new role is that I get to channel my enthusiasm for the market leading hypervisor and the latest SSD tech right into my day job! See also:

• vSphere 6.5 Core Storage white paper - one home virtualization lab enthusiast's perspective

I've been using VMware products in a variety roles, first getting my VCP-101V way back in 2005, using VMware Server and GSX for years before that. Anybody remember adding NIC drivers to your ESX from a floppy? Flash forward to today's world of flash storage, and it's time to leap ahead into the software defined storage world. Such an honor to actually be working at this company that I've spent so much of my time deploying and using.

Does this affect TinkerTry?

Of course you may wonder, how will this affect TinkerTry? In short, it won't. I've already talked this all over with my manager pictured above, and nothing changes. This site is still independent, featuring only my voice and opinions, not those of my employer. There may occasionally be work related posts, but only when it makes sense to do so.

If anything, working for VMware could help a bit, as I'll finally be able to easily file Service Request #s for the various bugs and product feedback ideas I've had, particularly for trickier issues that really need a bit more than my typical VMware VMTN community (forum) posts. Gladly, things are looking up with the latest 6.5 release! Of course, my primary job responsibilities will have to come first, as they always have.

So I'll be returning from some intense training this week at VMware HQ in Palo Alto, right in the heart of Silicon Valley, and it appears I'll be meeting some of the many folks I've already known from previous projects, and from various VMUG/VTUG visits.

OK, that's a wrap for today, time to tweet this news out, should be a bit of fun, before the real work begins this afternoon. Well, right after getting my new badge and a new Dell laptop, of course...

Jan 10 2017 Update

Here's yesterday's tweet, literally sent as I flew over Kansas and had just posted the above article. It features a recent picture of my new manager Peter Keilty (livevirtually.net) and I meeting in my hometown of Wethersfield Connecticut at Lucky Lou's, shortly after I accepted VMware's offer:

Jan 28 2017 Update

I just had to compare and contrast this VMware-issued workstation, the Dell Precision 5510, featuring the with the same 4K/thin bezel design of the well regarded Dell XPS 15 that one of my son's has enjoyed for a year now. A 1TB Toshiba M.2 NVMe drive with fully encrypted Windows 10 Enterprise and 32GB of RAM ain't too shabby, but I still have some ideas for that 2.5" bay, along with some VMware Workstation 12.5 SSD pass-thru thoughts, of course ;)

Proud to be here at VMware, apparently rather highly rated. Got the fun part down, waiting on this USB-C dock part, and now heads-down working on the work part...

See also at TinkerTry

• Thank you IBM, for 21 amazing years!
  Dec 31 2016

• The Portable Software-Defined Datacenter by Zack Widing, VMware vSAN cluster features 4 Xeon D Supermicro SuperServers
  Dec 23 2016

See also

• Is it VSAN, vSAN, VVols, vVols or what?
  Dec 14 2016 by Eric Siebert at vSphere-land

• vSAN,… correction its VSAN,… OK, OK, its vSAN now, VSAN and Virtual SAN are wrong.
  Oct 25 2016 by Peter Keilty at Live Virtually