How to be successful with VMware vRealize Products in your environment

How to be successful with VMware vRealize Products in your environment

I often get asked to speak to different organizations about what I have accomplished with the VMware vRealize Suite of products. The one question that almost always gets asked is, how are you able to do everything that you have setup in your environment. After being asked this question a lot I thought I would give my thoughts in a Blog Post. Here is my “Recipe for Success”:

Ingredients:

• Enjoy what you do.
• Give Back. Be involved in the vCommunity
• Enjoy where you work.
• Enjoy who you work with.
• Work at a place where management supports you.
• Don’t be afraid of change.
• Always keep track of what the industry is doing.
• Use Social Media like Twitter.
• Setup a Home Lab
• Learn, Learn, Learn!
• Think outside of the box

Directions:

The most important ingredient is to enjoy what you do. I have worked in the IT industry for 25+ years and I still have a Passion for it. I feel that I get paid to do my hobby. I am fascinated every day when I see some of the new technology that get released. There are some very smart people in the IT industry. I can truly say that I love what do for a job! When I create Automation that makes processes consistent and faster for the Team that I work with, I get a feeling that I have accomplished something. “Feel Good”/’Proud” feeling inside.

Attend and Participate in user groups. VMUG, “Little Hacks”, SQL, HVC, PowerBlocks, Under The Hoods, etc… I started out by just attending and learning. I met a lot of people at the user groups. I now consider some of those people friends. After several years of being an attendee, I felt like I wanted to Give Back and start sharing some of the ideas that I have done. So, I started doing presentations myself. Everyone has something to share.

Work for a Team that isn’t afraid of change. I say tear down the “Silos” and have everyone work together more. I have heard people say that Automation will eliminate my job. If you are an engineer, Automation will get the mundane items off your list. Let you focus more on Engineering type of tasks. The Cool Stuff!

vRA: Start simple. Don’t try and have a 100 processes in your first Catalog item. Keep adding additional steps to the Catalog item until you cross off everything that needs to be done. Prove to management that the simple Automation is working and being used every day. My Automation is in a constant state of change. Always trying to make it better. Constantly including new processes.

vROPS: Start my making some simple Dashboards with Heat Maps that show the Health of Items. Show your Hosts, VMs, Clusters. Start simple just like I said with Automation. You can then keep adding widgets to the Dashboards to give more information and make them more useful. Look at the “Text Display” widget to let you show information not included within vROPS. Have a goal of using vROPS as your “Single Pane of Glass”.

Go to conferences. In 2020 since almost all conferences were online and free, I attended at least 6. Even if there was only one or two sessions that I wanted to attend, I took the time.

Twitter is an awesome place to keep up. Use Twitter Lists to keep the “Garbage” out of you feed. I follow a lot of Technology businesses and Bloggers. Find people that have similar interests. Tech Companies are always giving updates about their products on Twitter. They post information about webinars that I find very useful. My Twitter Lists are public if you want to get started.

Setup a Lab area of some type to be able to learn all the vRealize Products. One way to get a Home Lab started is to use VMware Fusion on Macs or VMware Workstation on PC’s. You can install nested ESXi on Fusion/Workstation.

I have a Packt subscription that gives me access to a lot of Technology Books on a lot of topics. Well worth the money.

Starting a Blog is a great way to start #GivingBack. Hugo is a great static site generator. You can use Github at no cost to store and host the web pages generated from Hugo.

“9 – 5 pays the Bills. 5 – 10 advances your career.”

#VMware | #vRealizeAuto | #saltstack | #vRealizeOPS | #vmloginsight

2022 Update:

I had to make some changes in 2022. I was starting to miss some of the ingredients that I listed in this Blog post when I originally wrote it so I made a change in my career to get all the ingredients back. When you have a passion for what you do, don’t let other people take that drive to keep being successful away. A word that is very important to me is Respect. In my Blog posts I will list people that have helped me in my career. I respect and look up to all those names listed. Life is to short to not have Respect for what you do and have accomplished…

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