vCommunity – “What does ‘insert your employer’ gain from you participating?”

As you may be aware there is a multitude of vendor community advocacy programs, for example, VMware vExperts, Veeam Vanguards, Cisco Champions and Microsoft MVPs to name a few. Some of you reading this might be part of one or more these programs or interested to learn more about them. This post is not intended to detail what is required to join/participate in these programs. This post is intended to help answer the inevitable question from your employer :

“What does <insert your employer’s company> gain from you participating/attending/presenting at these programs?”.

To answer that question I need to explain the what being part of the vendor Community programs entails.

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VMware Fling – DRS Dump Insight H5 Plugin

This is a cross post from my own site: www.cragdoo.co.uk

I was recently reading through fellow vExpert Wouter Kurten‘s “The VMware Labs flings monthly for September 2018” post and one of the flings in the post piqued my curiosity.

If you’re not familiar with VMware Flings, then head over to labs.vmware.com and have a look around.

“Flings are apps and tools built by our engineers and community that are intended to be played with and explored.”

The fling in question is the “DRS Dump Insight H5 Plugin”  , so I decide to get it up and running in my Ravello Cloud Lab.

Installation

a.  Head over to https://labs.vmware.com/flings/drs-dump-insight-h5-plugin

b. check out the requirements. Note this is fling is only compatible with VCSA 6.5/6.7 and not the HTML5 Client Fling. Continue reading

Burnout in IT

This article has been cross posted from my own site www.cragdoo.co.uk.

At a recent Veeam User Group UK meeting I presented a session on burnout within IT. The title of my session was “And now for something completely different ….with Irn Bru“. I deliberately kept the title vague and non-descriptive, so the attendees/listeners could come into the session with pre-conceived ideas. The idea was to give every attendee a can of Irn Bru and open the session up to them to discuss a couple of slides about the subject. I have to say it felt like the session was well received, with some discussions and general nodding of heads all round.

Disclaimer

Let me start by putting a disclaimer in place. I am not a councillor, a psychologist or a qualified professional. The Content is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition

Intro

About 5-6 months ago I was driving into work, very close to tears and to be honest I was asking myself “what’s the point of going there, I’m really not enjoying my work anymore“, That’s when I realised that I might have a problem. I have been working for the same company for over 15 and 1/2 years, and honestly this was the lowest I felt in those 15 and 1/2 years. I decided to start looking for some kind of understanding or information about what could be the reason behind all this. Now you may be reading this and saying “well 15 years in the same job will do that to you” and you would be correct, if it wasn’t for the fact my role had changed over the years and every week brings something new. So it had to be something else.

During my searches I came across 2 excellent videos :- Continue reading

Coommunity Mythbusters

At the recent meeting the Scottish VMUG Leaders introduced everyone to the Coommunity. The leaders encouraged attendees to speak to themselves and other members of the Coommunity (Colin Westwater, Craig Dalrymple and Martin Campbell) about taking part. It was nice to hear that some attendees did take up the challenge and actively seek out the members to talk to.

Here is some info to help bust those myths,  for those looking to contribute.

I need to be a triple VCDX etc to be able to contribute. Continue reading

VMware {code}

As relative new comer to the world of coding and in an attempt to rectify this situation I started looking about for good, reliable sources for all things Powercli/API related to VMware. My 1st thoughts were to try the usual suspects like blog posts from Alan Renouf, William Lam and Chris Whal.

During my numerous searches I discovered that If you’re looking for an API, powercli example or guidance for design standards etc then https://code.vmware.com should definitely be your 1st place of call.

code.vmware.com

The VMware {code} website is a one stop shop for all things code related. From API information, to Powercli snippets and even guidelines on UX design standards , it really has something for everyone.

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