Network/VMware Engineer - Dataprise - Washington, DC

Deathmage

Hello,

So I was just offered a job in the DC area for a Network Engineer role and it seems appealing, in talk in the NYC area too. Plus they are offering relocation coverage.

What you guys think?

I'm sure Dave330i will be like "oo someone close by to pick brains with"

Position Requirements:

-Strong hands-on/practical experience with the following technologies: Windows Server 2003/2008,

Exchange Server 2003/2007 (2010 a plus), Active Directory, Citrix, Blackberry Server, Firewalls

(Sonicwall, Watchguard, etc.), DNS, DHCP, VMware preferred.

-3-7 years of related experience.

-Must possess hands-on experience working with heterogeneous LAN technologies.

-Ability to problem solve and to work well in a team or individually.

-Must have the capability to work in a highly visible, fast paced environment, with minimal supervision

and major responsibility.

-Exceptional organization skills and oral/written communications skills.

-MCSE 2003 or greater strongly preferred.

-Bachelor’s degree in a related field preferred.

Deathmage

Another job I'm in the 2nd interview with....

Qualifications:

• Extensive Experience in EMC products.
• Good understanding of Windows Servers, NTFS Permissions and File Sharing.

Computer Skills:

• Must be proficient in MS Office Suite.
• Working Knowledge of hypervisor technologies (VMWare or Hyper-V).

Certificates, Licenses, Registrations:

• At least one Industry Certificate with major technology brand (such as VMWare, Microsoft or Cisco) required. EMC Preferred.

Other Skills and Abilities:

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Demonstrates attention to detail.
• Responds promptly to client needs.
• Ability to multi-task, adjust priorities and work autonomously.
• Exhibits superior customer service skills.
• Must possess project management skills and be able to effectively communicate and provide training for users at all levels.
• Performs duties independently in a highly dynamic, fast-paced business environment.

shodown

A friend of mine worked at dataprise some years ago.

Pro's

Great sales team. They are able to go out and win some great contracts, and good customer business.
You are in DC, very pretty girls everywhere and you get to see them everyday
They are in Rockville right off the metro.


Cons

Not real skill in finding talent who are good at doing the job. I've worked for several VAR's in the DC area who won business from Dataprise in the cisco space. Due to them not investing in engineers they arent able to really do well on a lot of jobs they win. They would rather sub the work out than have strong engineers in house. This may have changed. But again they have to recruit outside the area so that may answer some questiosn when it comes to pay.

joelsfood

Sounds like I should apply to Dataprise in a datacenter/Cisco role and tell them to hier remote work to get the skills they need.

bpenn

shodown wrote: »

A friend of mine worked at dataprise some years ago.

Pro's


You are in DC, very pretty girls everywhere and you get to see them everyday.

Deathmage, I believe this would be a con for you...amirite?

Deathmage

Deathmage wrote: »

Another job I'm in the 2nd interview with....

Qualifications:

• Extensive Experience in EMC products.
• Good understanding of Windows Servers, NTFS Permissions and File Sharing.

Computer Skills:

• Must be proficient in MS Office Suite.
• Working Knowledge of hypervisor technologies (VMWare or Hyper-V).

Certificates, Licenses, Registrations:

• At least one Industry Certificate with major technology brand (such as VMWare, Microsoft or Cisco) required. EMC Preferred.

Other Skills and Abilities:

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Demonstrates attention to detail.
• Responds promptly to client needs.
• Ability to multi-task, adjust priorities and work autonomously.
• Exhibits superior customer service skills.
• Must possess project management skills and be able to effectively communicate and provide training for users at all levels.
• Performs duties independently in a highly dynamic, fast-paced business environment.

This one seems the most promising. They are offering me 90k a year, and it's just outside NYC.

Had a very promising interview today.

techfiend

Go get it! Looks like a good gig. The only thing I'd be curious about is the client interaction and customer service skills. Best of luck!

Deathmage

Right now I'll be coming onboard as a storage person. They have over 450 Dell hosts and a guy that only knows a little about VMware, they are looking for someone with more solid VMware expereince and Windows administration and knowledge of networking.

I could very well bloom into a larger role, they said for the 1st 8 months to a year it would be getting used to the environment.

Looks like CCNA exam in a week and pass it soon and then onward to VCP6 and VCAP shortly afterwards....

Interestingly enough, both interviews said it's not normal to find someone with skillsets in both networking, system administration, storage and VMware and being proficent at it. They both were very impressed by the fact I've managed the complete spectrum of the IT infrastructure solo for very large companies. lol Dataprise, told me that the pay in DC was 75k or maybe 77k and I was like um, I'd need at-least 85k, they I immediately said well I have 3 other interviews right now I'm still making a determination and they were like ooo well the highest we could do is 90k....BAM!



This however will be my largest employment ever, but I want CCIE and VCDX in 5 years. I can't keep staying small for me to reach this goal.

I honestly can't beleive the impact this forum has had on my life in 4 years, it ******* amamzing. Or maybe it's the fact my insanely overkill home-lab and countless hours of hardwork is finally paying off...

joelsfood

It is definitely rarer to find someone "multidisplinary" at a mid/senior level. It tends to take a larger business to get real exposure to senior/mid level technologies, and larger businesses tend to silo out the groups more, so you only get exposure to one aspect of IT. The downside is that you often then will have to work harder to keep the various aspe4cts up to date and relevant as you move into more senior positions, as they are more likely to then be siloed.

Dakinggamer87

Seems like a good opportunity buddy keep us posted!!

techfiend

Sounds more like an engineer than support that I had expected by the job listing. I'm sure it's really tough to find generalists that have solid server and network knowledge. Where I'm at the previous engineer had pretty solid server and vSphere knowledge but there's tons of network errors in his documentation like /64, still trying to figure out what that means. At least he was aware of VLANs. VCP and CCNA is basically what led to my hiring in an incredibly quick fashion.

8 months to a year to learn the environment? Wow, it might be real complex or they've had others in the position that weren't very quick learners. I'm sure you'd fully grasp it within 6.

Is 450 hosts a big step up from your current position? I'd say that's getting close to small enterprise level. 1000's of servers in enterprise is what I've heard and 450 hosts I'm guessing is well over 1000 servers. I've heard going from smaller environments to enterprise usually leads to a role demotion (admin to support or engineer to admin) and there's the silo factor. Stepping up in environment sizes I think is the best way for generalists at SMB's to climb the ladder as it shows progression where jumping to enterprise is likely a regression if you aren't already high up. My plan is to work on pro certs over the next year or two and see where my current gig takes me, I know where it took the previous guy, another nice step up.

I've seen some SMB's asking for expert certs with design experience and paying them handsomely. I don't think it demands enterprise experience although it might be more challenging (more stress). Having dozens of sites throughout the world isn't uncommon for SMB's and they have complex networks. If you are looking for on premise, there's many datacenters that are SMB's although becoming less and less because enterprises are buying them out. SMB's is where I want to stay, I've worked in enterprise in other fields and it's a lot of politics, so much so that I don't want to go back. SMB's are more like a family. I also don't want to spend my life doing the same things over and over, there's a lot more likelihood of this in a enterprise's silo.

I'd suggest to keep progressing on environment size as well as responsibility, but not too quickly, and it'll lead to bigger things.

LeBroke

If I had to guess, /64 is probably a /26 subnet (64 IPs).

techfiend

That's what I thought too at first but some expressions were for example 192.168.0.38/64 I wonder if they meant .38-63, 32-95, or 0-63. I haven't come across any VLSM yet so doubt it's 32-95. In the long run most of it doesn't matter as it was just thoughts. I'll spend some time trying to figure out the ones that are realized.

xnx

Sounds more like a Systems Engineer role than a Network one?

A /64 is 2^32 in IPv4 Space, so 4 Billion+ Addresses

Deathmage

I'm looking forward to the next interview, in which I tour the location and the datacenter. with the CompTIA Storage + still fresh in my mind and my recent implementations of Backups and OOB fabric, my brain is still on the topics of storage related issues, when we were talking they had no idea of the uses of Storage DRS and MPIO.

So right there I know that the Storage aspect of the VMware cluster will improve. They also have a very misunderstood view understanding on Resource Pools.

@Techfiend, got your Facebook message the other day, been busy with work and life. On my Facebook is my cell phone, just send me a text, best way to get a hold of me whenever.

Deathmage

3rd interview with company in Westchester next week.

jdancer

Grats on your opportunities. If you are looking for more on your cert plate, take a look at getting a RHCE.

Your phone will ring non-stop.

LeBroke

jdancer wrote: »

Grats on your opportunities. If you are looking for more on your cert plate, take a look at getting a RHCE.

Your phone will ring non-stop.

Don't get an RHCE. You'll be doing yourself a huge disfavour, and will eventually have to install a call blocker on your phone

Deathmage

VCP6 is my next goal, getting back onto the CCNA bandwagon, i ran into brain fog and needed a break.

TacoRocket

Deathmage wrote: »

VCP6 is my next goal, getting back onto the CCNA bandwagon, i ran into brain fog and needed a break.

We all get there but stay in the game and get that CCNA!

HailHogwash

LeBroke wrote: »

Don't get an RHCE. You'll be doing yourself a huge disfavour, and will eventually have to install a call blocker on your phone

Haha.. this cracked me up.lol

yellowpad

How did you managed to have found these cool opportunities?

Deathmage

Linkedin.

Gallager00

Good luck with your interviews dude. Been just following your blog/linkedin for a while.

Deathmage

pre-interview tonight and then interview on Friday.

Deathmage

off to 4th interview. they love me!!!!

gosh if I get this, career explosion once again.

6000 servers, 6000 PB's of storage, Largest VMware 5.5 cluster I've ever dealt with before....

techfiend

4 interviews? That sounds kind of stressful, best of luck!

What would a company do with 6 EB? Archive?

Deathmage

techfiend wrote: »

4 interviews? That sounds kind of stressful, best of luck!

What would a company do with 6 EB? Archive?

I have no idea, but it's pretty kool!!!!!!!!!


I just did a review of my VCP5-DCV book and I'm surprised how this time last year I was struggling with the content, now I'm like wow this is what I studied, I know, this, this, this, this, ooo and that.....nothing is like gray to me. I know more about VMware now than I did a year ago.... its amazing!!!!

techfiend

The mastering vSphere 6 book was really overwhelming for me and some things like storage I just didn't get. Luckily the test and even the online study guides didn't dive nearly as deep into topics as much as the book does. Looking back at it, it's a pretty general test that misses some things that are common in production like vDP. The next VMWare test, VCIX6 or VCAP6?, won't come nearly as easy and it looks like experience is most important for it. Luckily it's almost 2 years out for me, which gives me some time to engineer an environment.

Dakinggamer87

Deathmage wrote: »

off to 4th interview. they love me!!!!

gosh if I get this, career explosion once again.

6000 servers, 6000 PB's of storage, Largest VMware 5.5 cluster I've ever dealt with before....

Good luck!!

Deathmage

Dakinggamer87 wrote: »

Good luck!!

Thanks, doing some interview prep.