Went through an awesome interview today!

Essendon

Dont you love it when you've been through an interview when the conversations are intelligent and engaging?! Well I had an amazing one today, it was quite unnerving to start with - I'll be honest about it. My interviewers were the following

- One current VCDX
- 2 aspiring VCDX's, both having been accepted to defend but unable to make it past the defence the first time.
- Their manager, a gun Windows guy

When I first saw them, I was like.. Damn, this is going to tough as.. I recognised them and so did they. They ensured I was comfortable, offered me a glass of water, which I accepted. They talked about the weather and sports for 5 or so minutes to ensure I was at ease. I was gradually eased into the interview, really. I was asked a "tell us about yourself" type question and from then on it became technical. They were impressed with my certs too, asked me about my lab. I took a detailed Visio diagram of my current and past lab setup and showed it to them, with a stroke of luck I had taken 5 copies of each diagram and was able to give them one each.

From there, it went on to open-ended questions. One was - what's VMware HA and how is it different from stateful things like MSCS. 2nd question was about resource pools and their use as folders. Then I was asked about how I would go about troubleshooting performance problems. Next up was a long discussion about how they would design a new environment they were looking for someone to build. I talked at length about cluster/host/storage/VM/security design, blew their socks off really - they appreciated the detailed and comprehensive response. Then came up questions about SRM design, how they wanted to go from SRM 3.something to 5.5. I was able to talk SRM too having done a DR test at my work - told them about separating applications into their own datastores, the need for replication and folders. Finally, we talked about NUMA nodes/boundaries and how vCPU's and pCPU's work and how over-allocation had a detrimental impact. Lastly, I was asked about Storage DRS and auto-tiering.

Loved the format of the interview. It was more discussion-oriented than them asking a set of questions. I reckon this is a great way to judge a candidate's depth and breadth of knowledge. You dont want to ask a candidate trivia questions, you know things like - what's the max number of VM's supported per 5.5 host. Chances are the candidate wont know. Such things are easily looked up, this is what the config maximum's documents are for, right?

I thanked them for their time and the opportunity to meet with a group of highly skilled people. I made sure I wasnt kissing a.. too, you never want to come across as doing that. Now the wait to hear the decision..!! And thanks for reading!

EDIT: I used the whiteboard too to further articulate my ideas and show I was not afraid to stand up and speak.

tprice5

Awesome. Sounds like you killed it. Can't wait to hear what the offer comes in at.