With summer coming to a close, there’s an unavoidable temptation to look book on what was. This year has been pretty busy, so I thought I’d take some time to look back on my accomplishments.

In February, I started this blog. I set out with a goal of one article per week on the blog. In the last seven months, I’ve met that average for the week even if I don’t write another article (52 articles in 29 weeks), but I also learned that it’s not feasible for me to actually write one article every week. I wrote three series, on PowerCLI, Auto Deploy, and Puppet for the vSphere Admin (ongoing) and managed over 14,000 page views in ~7 months. I have been lucky enough to convince Jason Crichton (@hawkbox) to contribute articles on Hyper-V while I took a summer break, and there’s really no point in trying to advertise new content during VMworld next week. I count the blog as a success and I learned some lessons along the way.

Speaking of which, I am unable to attend VMworld this year. Last year was my first VMworld and I sorely miss the opportunity to go back and to meet all my tweeps. I’ll be watching online, however!

In the area of personal growth, I acquired my VCP5-DCV certification in April and became a vExpert in July. Both were exciting, the certification because it validated my technical knowledge and the vExpert because it validated my community activities. The fact that both came with some free licenses didn’t hurt, either. I plan to put those to good use in the coming months to continue my education! I’m looking forward to being part of these two communities and learning from the other members.

In July, Season 2 of Virtual Design Master (VDM) began. I was one of 11 contestants. I survived round 1 and round 2, but I had to fold on round 3 of 4 due to time commitments. Congratulations to Timothy Patterson (@PcProfessionals) for winning Season 2! I learned a LOT during this competition – taking all the skills I use on a day to day basis as a vSphere admin, what I studied for my VCP, and a number of vSphere design books and applying it to design and engineering, which is not part of my day job in operations. I haven’t done any actual design work in years, and then it was always on a much smaller scale. VDM was challenging, exciting, and scarey. It was also very rewarding. In addition to the technical growth, there was a great sense of community and co-opetition between the contestants and the viewers of the competition. Check out #VirtualDesignMaster on Twitter for some great discussions. There’s some good content about IPv6 and Openstack in particular.

As I mentioned above, I was able to convince Jason to become a contributing editor on my blog. He is in the middle of his own Hyper-V series, which now has its own page. As a vSphere admin myself, I find the content very helpful – the world isn’t all VMware – and I hope that others find it useful as well. We would both love to hear any comments you have on the series and what direction it should go in.

In addition to all of the above, my wife changed jobs in August and we moved from Richmond, VA to Indianapolis, IN. We’re really excited about the new job and home, but we’re both very exhausted, too. If you’re in the Indianapolis area and I didn’t meet you at the IndyVMUG, drop me a line.

Have a great summer, and enjoy VMworld if you are attending!

With summer upon us, I’ve taken a break from the blog. You’ll still see a few of my small posts pop out every so often, but no lengthy technical posts from me for a while. That doesn’t mean the blog is taking the summer off, though!

I’m proud to introduce a colleague and fellow Arsian, Jason Crichton, as a contributing author on my blog! Jason is going to write some articles over the summer about Hyper-V. For those of us (myself included!) who are only familiar with vSphere, Jason will help us compare the analogous features from each product with articles most Wednesdays this summer. Here’s a little background those of you who have not met Jason before:

This week was another nail biter in the Virtual Design Master competition. Challenge 2 required us to save the moon while using someone else’s design plus a few constraints: must fit in 21U, have to use the same vendors (but can use different product lines) as the provided design used, and the big one, the moon base only has IPv6 networking. I understand IPv6 but certainly haven’t designed an IPv6-only network, so this was pretty scary and very time consuming for the research.

There were a lot of great designs presented by the VDM competitors. Three of us had to work off of Daemon Behr’s and six of us had to work off of my design from the previous challenge. It was fun to see how other people managed the same base project and morphed it into a project that had their fingerprints on it. Watch the results show and check out the designs (here’s mine). During the design and the judging, I learned a few things in no particular order:
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This week has been pretty exciting. It’s getting closer to the move and things are starting to seem real – which means more time is involved in it. Somehow, in the midst of all that, I managed to complete my design proposal for Virtual Design Master’s first challenge, a whopping 30 minutes before the due date. On Thursday night, all the contestants defended their design. To my surprise, I survived! I am thankful of some critical reviews from Jason Shiplett and some friends on IRC. We lost a few competitors, as is the nature of the challenge, but everyone’s designs are amazing. Check them out at http://www.virtualdesignmaster.com/.

This week’s challenge is about constraints. We have some physical constraints – have to use the same vendors, and needs to fit in 21U, oh and by the way, it’s on the moon – plus a unique requirement I haven’t seen anywhere else: IPv6 only. That’s going to be tough. But they weren’t done with the constraints yet. We have to use someone else’s design from challenge 1! Everyone on Team Beta has to work off the design by Daemon Behr (@VMUG_Vancouver). I’m very honored that my design (@rnelson0) was chosen as the design that Team Alpha has to work from.

If you are available next Thursday at 9PM Eastern, tune in at http://www.virtualdesignmaster.com/live/ to see the results of challenge 2!

My summer has been exciting. On Wednesday, I received notification that I was accepted as a vExpert for 2014! That’s pretty awesome, both as confirmation that hard work has payed off and encouragement to keep it up in the future. On Thursday night, the Virtual Design Master competition kicked off. This will hopefully keep me busy throughout the summer. I haven’t even gotten started on it, though, as I am on-call this week and things blew up right after the live start. Here’s hoping it settles down so I can work this weekend!

As if that wasn’t busy enough, my wife accepted a new job in June with a start date in August. We’ll be moving in support of that around the end of the month. With that in mind, I’m taking a summer break from the blog (but certainly not a vacation!). I have a few scheduled articles that will take me through the end of July and I’m hoping to have a guest author to cover August until VMworld. I plan to get back to blogging in early September.

Until then, here is a mix of the most popular articles and the ones I really enjoyed writing.

• Puppet – There are two more articles to complete the intro portion. Now that you’re familiar with Puppet, we’ll look at closer integration with vSphere in the Fall.
• Auto Deploy Deep Dive – I was hoping to present this at VMworld but it wasn’t meant to be! Check out the #vBrownBag presentation, too. They’re in the middle of a Cisco track and will be covering Docker on 7/23, good stuff.
• The Philosophy of Ender’s Game – Now that the movie’s out on DVD and cable, it’s a good time to watch it again and do some critical analysis. Preferably on your tablet while piloting a quadcopter drone, both ideas that can be traced back to this novel. This wasn’t very popular, but it was one of my favorite articles to write. It’s always fun to wax philosophical.
• Snapshots Management – Surprisingly, this recent article seems very popular. I shouldn’t be surprised, snapshots continue to be a wildly misunderstood tool that cause problems for even veteran vSphere admins.
• InfoSec and Social Media – This article was a result of attending CPX 2014 and comparing it to VMworld 2013. I had fun writing it, soliciting feedback, and working to do the things I said I would.
• Synology Multi-VLAN Setup – This remains a very popular article. I hope Synology makes VLAN configuration a little smoother in future DSM revisions, but until then, this will get you going.

Have a great summer!

I’ve seen a few topics recently where people seem to misunderstand what a systems administrator is. The cause for this is likely due to a combination of factors including HR job classifications, some misunderstandings, and also a simple lack of other terms to use. Here’s my definition:

Systems Administration requires that you administer a group of interconnected objects, i.e. a system. One the important components of a modern system is the network, something that actual systems administrators know about. This does not mean that they are experts on each system component, but they are familiar with the components and can perform basic and some intermediate troubleshooting without requiring assistance.

In many cases, it appears that what people are talking about is actually a server administrator, maybe even just a computer operator. If we had an IT union, the only thing I’d want from them is to prevent people (and HR!) from misrepresenting their actual responsibilities.

Is that a good definition of systems administration, and are there better terms we can use? What do you think?

Around Christmas, I picked up a book called Ender’s Game And Philosophy: Genocide Is Child’s Play. I wasn’t looking for it, but it found me when browsing the aisles of Barnes and Noble. Like many technologically-minded children of my generation, Ender’s Game remains one of my favorite novels and spawned one of my favorite series. At the time, the movie had just come out; I had just re-read the novel; and when you add 30 years from the novel’s release, the opinions of one Orson Scott Card, and another dozen plus novels and shorts, you have a wonderful world, so close to our own, yet so far away. This is a great universe in which to debate philosophy.

This book is part of a series called Popular Culture and Philosophy and weighs in at 238 pages. We all debate and philosophize, though we rarely acknowledge it. It’s what a lot of you will be doing this week around the water cooler when discussing the season finale of The Walking Dead and all the decisions the characters made. In fact, the series even has a book on The Walking Dead!

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