What it Means to be a VMware Pro

This career development-focused presentation was given on April 7, 2015 at the Austin VMUG, and discusses ways in which VMware professionals need to grow, evolve, and change in order to continue to be leaders within their organizations and within the industry.

Transcript

1. What does it mean to be a VMware pro? A look at the evolution of the role of the VMware professional Scott Lowe http://blog.scottlowe.org
2. Before we begin ☞ Get involved! Audience participation is encouraged and requested. ☞ Feel free to take photos or videos of today's presentation and share them online ☞ If you use Twitter, feel free to tweet about this session (use @MyVMUG or #ATXVMUG) ☞ A PDF copy of this presentation will be available online after the event
3. ❝The only thing that is constant is change.❞ —Heraclitus
4. What would you say was VMware's major value proposition in the early years?
5. Consolidation
6. What would you say is VMware's major value proposition today?
7. It's about speed, flexibility, & agility
8. VMware's value proposition has evolved
9. VMware's technologies have also evolved ☞ It's not just about VMs anymore ☞ Multiple forms of virtualization: not just compute, but storage and network virtualization as well ☞ Products to help with management/operations, automation/ orchestration, and security ☞ It's about the software-defined data center
10. So what makes VMware pros think we don't have to change and evolve?
11. ❝If you dislike change, you're going to dislike irrelevance even more.❞ —Eric Shinseki
12. It's time for the rise of the data center architect
13. The data center architect is the next step ☞ Just as VMware's value and technologies are evolving, so too do VMware professionals need to evolve ☞ VMware professionals are well-suited to evolve into the data center architects ☞ VMware sits at the center of the software-defined data center and touches almost every other area
14. ❝The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.❞ —Socrates
15. We must constantly be learning ☞ Business drivers and business value ☞ Storage ☞ Networking ☞ Security ☞ Automation/orchestration
16. Practical steps to getting started ➀ Model some DevOps principles ➁ Expand your technical horizons ➂ Think systems, not components ➃ Talk to the business
17. DevOps? What does that have to do with this?
18. Model some DevOps principles ☞ Look beyond the hype (DevOps isn't just for Dev and Ops) ☞ A key tenet of DevOps is breaking down barriers between groups to improve the business value of IT ☞ DevOps principles are valuable to any IT pro ☞ CAMS (Culture, Automation, Measurement/Metrics, Sharing)
19. Expand your technical horizons ☞ Linux ☞ Automation/orchestration tools ☞ New storage architectures ☞ Network virtualization ☞ Don't get distracted by the new shiny!
20. Think systems, not components ☞ Think at a systems level: your data center is a system, not a bunch of individual technologies ☞ Compute affects storage which affects networking which impacts security which has an effect on operations... ☞ Everything is interrelated and connected
21. Talk to the business! ☞ Understand the business of your business ☞ Think about how the work of IT (your work) affects the business ☞ Talk in their language ☞ Focus on requirements, not solutions ☞ Say yes, not no
22. Q&A
23. ❝No man steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.❞ —Heraclitus
24. Thank you! Be sure to provide feedback to the VMUG leaders regarding this session. Blog: http://blog.scottlowe.org Twitter: @scott_lowe GitHub: https://github.com/lowescott Life: Colossians 3:17