And this time its not because I’ve passed a certification , in fact I recently sat the beta for the new VMware Certified Associate , Desktop exam – covering much of the things a VMware View 4.5 Admin would do on a day to day basis. Not being a View admin I found it a little harder than that , but time will tell

The reason for new cards is a change of role – I might have let it slip on twitter / linked in during my notice period that I was moving on from my current position with Delloite to pastures new. I won’t be eating one of my former blogs , which may or may not be gently poking fun at the “bloggers in bowling shirts” from EMC either as I’m still not a vSpecialist! I’ve had a fantastic 4 and a bit years in my current role , taking my from “just another windows engineer” to really finding my niche in virtualisation and a bit of a segway into social media!

I shall be starting tomorrow with ONI , one of the UK’s fastest growing Cisco Partners as a project engineer within the Datacenter Team. I have some pretty big boots to fill as the rest of the team all hold the Cisco CCIE certification , so as the token non-networky guy, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little apprehensive about working with quite such a smart team ! With the two VCAP exams under my belt , I’d like to think that a VCDX will show that I’m capable of running at the same speed.

I will still be continuing to blog and record the podcast , hopefully with some new experiences as I get to grips with the UCS range of Kit and some equally shiny storage to hook it up to. While I’ve had a great time as an infrastructure architect , I am missing getting my hands dirty with systems so the change is very much welcome.

It seems that barely a week goes by without one of the better known bloggers in the Virtualisation world announces that they’ve been snapped up by a major vendor , be it VMware themselves or part of the major vendor coalitions.

I wont be making such an announcement ( for a few years at least ! ) but I am happy to say I will be changing roles with my current employer , moving a little further back from the operational coalface and working closely with other parts of the organisation, helping them progress their technology roadmap. My experience in operations ought to give me a helping hand in terms of interpersonal relations , but its a fantastic way for me to evolve from a purely operations mindset to that of a more design / advisory stance.

The best practices I’ll be guiding people down might not always be those passed down directly from a vendor as I personally feel they have a tendency to be a little bit “one size fits all” – our groups will benefit more form a more tailored approach to their estate. This does lead me down the route of thinking about best practice and who its best for–but that’s a post for another day

On a different note , it does leave a little bit of a hole in our technical team , so if you are interested in working with an Enterprise level infrastructure with a good selection of technologies , you don’t have to be a VMware Guru , just be happy to take a technology and make it your own. Living near Milton Keynes would be a bonus too. Still interested ? drop me a mail chris AT jfvi.co.uk