Thinking of becoming a virtulization specialist

Hello Forum,

I have being in I.T for little over two years and I think it is time that i specialize in something,

I have being a jack of all trades kind of person and I have decided that virtulization is where my most interest is at and where I have a lot of experience in as well.

Unfortunately all I have experience in is Hyper-V very little experience with VMware,

Anyone know how I could become more of a virtualization professional and get a role where its mostly visualization focused?

I know how to do the following,

Physical to virtual migration,
VM Migration,
Set up Hyper-V as a standalone (note I am trying to learn how to set this up in a cluster)
Create vms and do basic functions like adding stuff to it etc,
Know how to get my way around hyper v

What more do I need to do?

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Comments

Essendon

You need to find a job that lets you work on virtualization, a Microsoft partner would be such a place. While you have set a good goal for yourself, I reckon you need to age more in the industry before an employer hires you as the virtualization guy. See virtualization isnt just about P2V's, creating VM's and adding/removing devices from VM's, it's more about what happens (and how) in the background. Any virtualization solution, vSphere or Hyper-v has a lot to do with storage and networking too. You'll need a decent understanding of the concepts of storage, servers and networking . So your best bet would be to work on a cert (Hyper-v or VMware, with more ROI from a VCP), learn as much as possible at your current role and look for a role with a Microsoft/VMware partner. Just dont expect to land a virtualization role per se, but they'd definitely let you have some great experience on the product.

healthyboy

sorry also forgot to add that i have work experience experience with system center virtual machine manager
used it to create templates so vms can be auto deployed and done some work with scvmm it is used to manage hyper v virtual hosts.

also how much experience in the i.t industry do i need to be a virtualization specliast?

Yeah, you are correct about the networking and the storage part,

most enterprise level virtulization servers have their vms stored in a san and it is connected via iscsi or mopi and the I/O goes through a switch,

I am currnently shadowing the senior engineers and trying to learn these soon,

do you guys think I am well on my way with the experience I have and what I am about to do soon.

Essendon

You are on the correct path, but what are you about to do?

healthyboy

what do you mean by that?

jmritenour

If you want to be a "specialist" in virtualization, you need to have a very thorough understanding of storage. Sizing LUNs, getting IOPs right for based on the application needs, etc.

healthyboy

yeh will learn these soon at work but how did u guys learn these and get specialised

Essendon

healthyboy wrote: »

do you guys think I am well on my way with the experience I have and what I am about to do soon.

The bold part is why I asked what you were about to do.

The best way to learn is to be able to work on a product at work. Since you are able to get your hands on Hyper-v, find out what kind of storage you use, read up on the Internet about the storage solution, ask questions of your team members. See how Hyper-v is set up at your work, set one up at home and mimic your work network as much as possible. You can setup a SAN at home, OpenFiler, FreeNAS, Starwind (probably the easiest to setup and use) are all great products. Basically, learn as much as you can. A virtualization role is a fairly critical responsibility and I wouldnt hand someone the keys to my virtual infrastructure if they hadnt had substantial experience with a virtualization product.

healthyboy

this is exactly what i would be doing.

i know how it is set up,

but i need to go indept and do some work related to it,

looking forward to the next couple of months,

Essendon wrote: »

The bold part is why I asked what you were about to do.

The best way to learn is to be able to work on a product at work. Since you are able to get your hands on Hyper-v, find out what kind of storage you use, read up on the Internet about the storage solution, ask questions of your team members. See how Hyper-v is set up at your work, set one up at home and mimic your work network as much as possible. You can setup a SAN at home, OpenFiler, FreeNAS, Starwind (probably the easiest to setup and use) are all great products. Basically, learn as much as you can. A virtualization role is a fairly critical responsibility and I wouldnt hand someone the keys to my virtual infrastructure if they hadnt had substantial experience with a virtualization product.

jmritenour

For what it's worth, OpenFiler doesn't play too well with clustering in Windows 2008 since it doesn't support SCSI-3 persistent reservation. Not a big deal if you're just doing a standalone Hyper-V host and want to see how external storage works, but if you want to play with fail over clustering, Starwind or FreeNAS will be a better choice. I found that out the hard way last week when I was setting up a Hyper-V test environment for 70-643, and had to scrap OF for FreeNAS after I was unable to get any of my shared storage to be seen as cluster resources.