Discounted VCP-NV – It’s Never Been Cheaper

Discounted VCP-NV Bottom Line Up Front

There’s a discounted VCP-NV promotional package right now; $2,200 gets you:

  • An exam prep course for the vSphere Foundations course
  • An exam voucher for vSphere Foundations
  • NSX Install, Configure, Manage On-Demand E-Learning course
  • A separate NSX exam prep course
  • An exam voucher for the VCP-NV 6.2
  • 6 CPUs of NSX Enterprise for non-production personal use (training)
  • A full year of VMUG Advantage, including eval licenses for almost all VMware products.

Continue reading Discounted VCP-NV – It’s Never Been Cheaper

Thoughts on VMware Certification and Education

Last week, I appeared as a guest-host on Episode 386 of the VMware Communities Podcast [TalkShoe | iTunes | PlayerFM]. It’s something I hope to do on a fairly regular basis, time permitting. We had a great discussion with Karl Childs, the Senior Manager – Certification Development on the topic of the VMware certification program. We talked for an hour about the state of VMware Certification landscape. I wanted to summarize my thoughts on the conversation and write about some follow-ups I did. Continue reading Thoughts on VMware Certification and Education

VMware Career Saturday 2017 Week 17

UPDATE 2017-05-13: I’ve added individual pages (wherever my navigation currently has menu structure, currently on the left) with a weekly refreshed, complete listing of all listed positions for SEs, Sales, TAMs, and Consultants in both USA/Canada and EMEA. Those tables will have filters and sortability. My weekly posts will have new listings without the complexity of sorts and filters.

After receiving a lot of interest last week from my previous post on open jobs at VMware, I wanted to put up an update on Field Sales and Systems Engineering positions. I shouldn’t be surprised that there were 6 new requisitions posted, more than one per work-day. VMware is increasing the size and reach of it’s sales and systems engineering force on a pretty consistent basis. I don’t know if I can keep up a weekly cadence, but I’ll try as long as there’s interest in starting a VMware career.

In addition, I got asked about asked about implementation and other post-sales positions at the company, so I’ve included those. There are two kinds of positions I’ve listed here, Consultants and Technical Account Managers. If you want to see everything that was open for Field Sales and SEs as of last week, check out last week’s post. This is only the new SE and Field Sales jobs. As always, you can head to VMware’s recruiting site at Rolepoint and conduct your own searches. I’m watching the “United States” as a location and four types of positions: “Sales-Field Sales“, “Sales-Systems Engineering“, “Services and Consulting-Consulting“, and “Services and Consulting-Technical Account Management“.

Continue reading VMware Career Saturday 2017 Week 17

Jobs at VMware Sales/SE Saturday

UPDATE 2017-05-13: I’ve added individual pages (wherever my navigation currently has menu structure, currently on the left) with a weekly refreshed, complete listing of all listed positions for SEs, Sales, TAMs, and Consultants in both USA/Canada and EMEA. Those tables will have filters and sortability. My weekly posts will have new listings without the complexity of sorts and filters.

UPDATE 2017-04-29: I’ve got a new post with the newly posted jobs as of April 29th, 2017 (2017, week 17) here. In that post, I’ve included new SE and Field Sales jobs as well as post-sales jobs in the Consulting and Technical Account Management categories.

I’ve been tracking open jobs at VMware in enough areas for enough people that I decided to put up my findings for other people to search. Of course, you can head to VMware’s recruiting site at Rolepoint and slice and dice searches on your own. I’m watching the “United States” as a location and two types of positions, 38 in “Sales-Field Sales” and 41 in “Sales-Systems Engineering“.

One area that I haven’t had good luck in organizing for content is on the software development side. There are currently 130 open software engineering jobs at VMware (in the US) which doesn’t seem like a large data set to organize, but the question is how. For the Network and Security Business Unit, previous experience with network stacks is a constant theme. However, some specialties don’t sort that way (UX design, for example). Sorting by languages and tools doesn’t seem like a good idea, though an anlysis of what’s being used by Business Unit might be a separate, interesting task. At any rate, if you’re looking for a software development position at VMware, head to the recruiting site and choose “Engineering and Technology-Software Engineering” from the department drop-down.

Regardless of the type of role you’re looking for, I’m happy to chat about my understanding of the job roles and team structures, eyeball a resume for format and impact, and chat about what it’s like to work at VMware. I’m including a contact form at the bottom if you’d like to get in touch with me. And of course, I’m on LinkedIn and Twitter.


Continue reading Jobs at VMware Sales/SE Saturday

VMware Cloud Foundation Basics – Why You Need VCF In Your Data Center

My past 18 months at VMware have been a whirlwind of training, customer relationships, and new product announcements. I’m starting to see a pattern of questions, especially about where new VMware products fit into the portfolio. This is the first of series of posts about the VMware portfolio in 2017, all my humble view of things, of course. First up, VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). In the future, I’ll take a look at VMware Cloud on AWS and vRealize Automation. Please let me know if you have a burning desire for my perspective on something else. *grin*

Continue reading VMware Cloud Foundation Basics – Why You Need VCF In Your Data Center

vRealize Log Insight at VMworld 2016

Detective using vRealize Log Insight to find clues
Photo by paurian

The continuing theme is “Technology I wish I’d paid more attention to before I came to VMware.” Of all those technologies at VMware, vRealize Log Insight might be the most overlooked by everyone. At the same time, it’s a great tool for the sneakers-on-the-ground IT personnel working hard to keep the lights on. At it’s core, Log Insight is a Continue reading vRealize Log Insight at VMworld 2016

VMware Oracle Licensing – Myths and Facts

facts photo

I’ve had a significant proportion of my clients (maybe a third?) ask for my advice and guidance on VMware Oracle licensing. They seem to be scared (either through first or second-hand experience) of a bill from Oracle for their entire virtualization infrastructure because the potential exists for vMotion-ing Oracle server workloads from machine to machine and now across vCenters (since that’s a feature now in vSphere 6!). As a result, I have clients not even connecting their virtualized Oracle hosts to vCenter at all. But what’s myth and what’s fact when it comes to Oracle licensing on VMware?

Note: Oh wow, while I’ve been sitting on this for the past month, Chad Sakac pulled the pin on his grenade.

Continue reading VMware Oracle Licensing – Myths and Facts

VMware Validated Design at VMworld 2016

One of the things I’ve been meaning to write about more is the cool technology that I didn’t realize existed inside the VMware portfolio. One of the main themes that’s emerged with my clients is having a true private cloud infrastructure. If this is on your mind, I’d encourage you to go check out the sessions on VMware Validated Design (VVD) at VMworld 2016.

Continue reading VMware Validated Design at VMworld 2016

Learning Python: My Coding Journey Pt. 1

Today I began learning Python and ended the day with a script that successfully automated a process for me. Nope, I’ve never written Python code before and don’t code for my day job. In fact, it’s been over 20 years since I first took an introductory computer science class. The most significant project I worked to completion was less than 500 lines of perl, an Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) translator for the odd purchase order format that our customer used. But I’ve laid out two goals for myself, work myself up to light scripting competence in Python and light analysis competence in R. OK, those two goals are over 10 years old, so what got me moving?

Continue reading Learning Python: My Coding Journey Pt. 1

VMware 2016 – Another Job Change

fireworks photoWell, it’s happened again. I wasn’t looking to make a job change, but an opportunity I couldn’t turn down found me. In November 2015, I joined VMware’s San Francisco Bay Area Enterprise Systems Engineering team.

My previous role had me educating solution providers on the VMware software portfolio as well as teaching partner Systems Engineers about pre-sales systems engineering for their customers. I now find myself working for VMware directly as a Systems Engineer, assigned to cover a group of Enterprise level named accounts. My fiancée and I moved from Southern California to the Bay Area for me to take this job. An upheaval (and a risk!), but also an amazing opportunity to work directly for one of the most innovative and disruptive software companies around.

What does that mean for my writing? Well, I pretty much fell on my face when it came to maintaining a regular cadence during my time in the distribution channel. I’m going to try my best to do better now. There’s certainly a different emphasis within the portfolio for enterprise customers. Hopefully I can provide insight into the solutions engineering process from the inside.

Some things you probably won’t see from me:

  • Product speculation; Even with limited insider knowledge, this seems inappropriate.
  • Competitor bashing
  • Customer information; Maybe it goes without saying, but I’ll have to generalize my lessons learned.

Things I’ll try to add to the topic list:

  • Career advice that I’m finding helpful
  • Industry news that I’m finding relevant and impactful
  • Products I’m discovering within the portfolio

So thanks to anyone who’s found my writing useful so far. If there’s anything you’d like to see my thoughts on, please ask away!