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?