Virtualization Career Advice ( Desktop Support to Virtualization Admin)

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Hey everyone, I'm trying to figure out what steps should I take to get a Virtualization Admin/engineer job. I currently work for a small non profit ( about 80-110 users) as the sole IT for the department. They have my job listed as "IT Support" but I have my own budget, do tier 2 support, and manage file servers. My current job environment is one of those "what you put into it" places. That being said, I recently purchased a Dell Poweredge Server and installed Windows Server 2012 and Hyper V. I am in the process of migrating our old file servers ( mac computers) to Hyper V and looking to set up a domain for the organization.

I have my A+ cert, 3 yrs of desktop support exp and am working on obtaining Microsoft 74-409 Server Virtualization Hyper V System Center certification. If you are curious as to why I am not using VMWare or Citrix, it's because we are a non profit and I have an extremely small budget, so Hyper V is the most cost efficient. Who am I fooling, we can't afford VMware

My questions are:

1. What skillsets and certs would I need to get a job in virtualization and am I heading on the right path?
2. Is a Cisco CCNA cert required or some sort of Network certification?
3. How do I market myself to a larger corporation? When I look at virtualization jobs, I notice they will say things like " Must have experience managing 100s-1000s of servers or VMs." Unfortunately, because I work at a small environment, we only have about 6-8 servers.
Any feedback or advice would be greatly appreciated.

nachodba

I would recommend getting at least an MCSA in Windows 2012. That will be a requirement on pretty much any non-desktop support position, plus the knowledge you will gain from studying will be good. I would then recommend signing up at Stanly CC and going through their VMware class. I haven't been personally, but tons of people on this forum have been and used it to get their VCP, which will look great on your resume.

Deathmage

Welcome!

I can completely understand you're frustration with VMware pricing. But right now, you can install VMware on that Dell poweredge and use the free version after 90 days. It would be way more of a stable platform in the free mode than with Hyper-V.

As for certifications you have a few routes:

Networking: Network + and then your CCNA: R&S.

System Administration: MCSA 2008 or 2012, endgame being MCSE.

Virtualization: VMWARE VCP5-DCV. Take the ICM 5.5 class at Stanly for $185 compared to the $3000 5 day course (waiting list is 3 months but dunno but you 3k doesn't grow on trees)

If you have any questions, there is tons of us on here with advice.

Best of luck to you!

GreaterNinja

If you can't afford a vSphere server, then use Hyper-v or a linux virtualization distribution like Proxmox. With Proxmox I believe you can even utilize your old servers and desktops to add to the virtualization cluster if you want. I would imagine an organization of 80-120 users would not need too many servers. Good luck man.

Zartanasaurus

Virtualization touches on everything. You need networking, SAN, server and hypervisor knowledge. At a minimum you just need the hypervisor knowledge, but you're not going to be able to design anything complex by yourself because you don't understand the other pieces. You also might be doing your employer a disservice by throwing everything on a single box and virtualizing everything. What happens if the hypervisor goes down? A good lesson to learn early: Don't do something at work because you want to learn it and put it on your resume. Do it if you can do it properly and it fits with the business requirements. Your job is not a sandbox for you to play around in so you can move on to better things.

You can put together a lab pretty cheaply though.
Run Nexenta (SAN) on a server with lots of storage.
Get 2 servers and run hypervisors on them.
Cluster them using shared storage (Nexenta).
Run multiple vlans down to your hypervisors or VMs.

Nexenta will get you iSCSI, and I think SMB and NFS as well.

You can get quite a bit of knowledge with that setup.

Zartanasaurus

Deathmage wrote: »

It would be way more of a stable platform in the free mode than with Hyper-V.

This is ridiculous.