So, today marks the beginning of Week 2 of my new job. So far- compared to what I was told, the job is pretty accurate as described. With some other things thrown in. The biggest thing I was nervous about was that this is my first specialized job- I have always done jack of all trades type work, generic "System Admin" position for small businesses. Now, I am a Virtualization Engineer for a large enterprise Fortune 500 company. Big change!!
I spent the first two days sitting in my cube (first time in a cube- miss my office!) just analyzing their environment. I will say, I was slightly disappointed with the current state of affairs. Some ESX hosts in one datacenter were disconnected. Another was sitting in Maintenance Mode, not attached to the vDS. Then in another datacenter across the country I am responsible for, one of the hosts was erroring out on the DRS setting at the cluster level and the agent was erroring out. A couple others were just.. gone completely. They are currently running 4.0 (just upgraded from 3.5) so they are a little behind, but not too bad- thats what I am here for ha. Went to check the consoles of the blades and most of the iLO connections were errored out- I had to find someone on the enterprise messenger who could go reseat the blades for me while I shut those hosts down to get iLO working.
So, they wouldn't give me exact size of the environment before I started- but now that I have seen it, I am responsible for 50+ ESX hosts. Most are at 4.0, a few are at 3.5. There are a total of about 1100 VMs (about 30% of that is VDI stuff) that fall in my realm of responsibility. I am not disappointed here. I was definitely looking to move from the small business realm where I had 3 hosts and about 35VMs to something bigger. While this isn't the biggest environment ever, it is large enough for me to really cut my teeth on enterprise management of virtual infrastructure.
On Day 3, got to really see the group in action. Alerts started going off and a LUN became locked- and hosts started disconnecting. Not getting too much into it, apparently this is something that had happened a week before I started and sometime last year. Ended up trespassing over to the other SP and this freed the locked LUN. Rumor has it our storage team is non-existent- apparently it is in bad shape and they can't keep people here. So, we get on the horn with VMWare and EMC and as of right now- it seems to be a problem with the array according to EMC logs. So- this should be fun.
Fixed the DRS issue on one of the hosts in my local datacenter, working with a guy to clear all of the iLO errors, and have all of the disconnected/missing hosts sitting in the cluster, attached to the vDS, waiting to be thrown into production. Had to fill out a Change Request Order to be approved before I can turn them on.
That is probably the biggest change for me and one I am having to get used to- Change requests to be approved and separation of duties. My career has been spent in a "find it, fix it" mentality. I have always had access to everything, can fix things as need be, move on. Here- not the case. Lots of approvals, paper pushing, etc. For any infrastructure change to occur, you must fill out a detailed request about how you will perform the change, how you tested it, how to reverse it incase of adverse reaction or instability caused, authorizations etc and then a committee of senior managers meet twice a week to review all change orders and then either A) approve them or
deny them or C) more info requested. And as far as separation of duties- just an example- one of the hosts I added back to the cluster isn't part of the storage group. Historically, I'd just log into the SAN and add it. Now, I have to work with the storage team- submit a request, have them do it, and then rescan the HBAs on the hosts.
All in all, I am very pleased. It is different, but.. different is good. I feel this is a place I can learn a lot about and really grow into. After about a year (that is about how long it takes me to really absorb the position, gain the knowledge of the environment, etc), I should be in a good place to really make an impact. I seem some potential areas I could build and improve upon. It's all about getting outside of the comfort zone- and this is definitely outside of mine!
and.. just as an encouragement to the many posters I see "How do I get out of Help Desk, get started etc..", I just wanted to say hang in there. I have been in IT for about 4.5 years and started in the Help Desk. And then moved to System Admin and now to my current position. The biggest piece of advice I can really give is to "be aggressive". This applies to your daily duties and to the job hunt. This current job advertised 10 years experience- I still applied for it (well, technically I was contacted about it but still) and got it. Job descriptions are not "have this or dont apply" rules. They are the ideal 100% perfect candidate- which no one is. Upsell the things you are qualified on. Be aggressive and show your manager/interviewer/whomever that you belong in that position and you can improve upon it.
As Forsaken_GA likes to say around here- a technical gap can be overcome relatively quickly. You can't fix stupid. And I would like to add on- you can't fix lazy either. Be aggressive and try to set yourself apart.
