The new year is well on its way but for a moment, I’d like to go back and reflect over the years of my career. I can remember being fresh out of college and landing my first real gig as a Network Systems Analyst for a local school district in Mississippi, the Hinds County School District. Really, the title was a glorified way of being called a PC tech. But it was a good learning experience for me to “cut my teeth” into the world of IT and learning some valuable troubleshooting skills. Also, in that role I learned a lot of core technologies that I would use in later roles that I would attain. (Active Directory, Exchange, GPOs, Cisco Networking).

Fast forward 4 year later to the year 2011. I began work as a Senior Network Specialist for the Mississippi Division of Medicaid. I must say, this job felt like going to college and getting paid to do it. I enjoyed every bit of it. I learned so much in a short period of time and was exposed to all types of technologies that were new to me at the time. It was at this job that I first discovered VMware. I came in at a time when there was a state mandate to migrate all physical servers to the VMware platform. So, I quickly became familiar with the P2V tool from VMware. Starting at ESX 4.0, we migrated 95% of our infrastructure into a virtualized platform. From there, I got a chance to help in a series of upgrades, to ESXi 4.1, 5.0, 5.1, and 5.5. By then, I was bitten by the virtualization bug and I knew that I had found the technology that I wanted to focus my career around. And that’s exactly what I set out for. Read Full Article