Posted on 01/07/2014 10:16:45 AM PST by SeekAndFind
I been automating just about anything with Perl, shell, Expect/TCL and others for a while now and I’m having trouble finding work. I’ve been trying to break into devops but think I’m seeing some major age discrimination now. I excel in phone interviews (personal/technical) but in-person interviews end after a few minutes if they even start. I hate that.
Where in the USA do you live? Some parts of the USA have more need of skills like yours than others.
I sent you freepmail.
It’s also good to be able to make tools.
Where I work, I built our VM Infrastructure literally from the ground up. As a part of another project, we had purchased an EMC SAN that had a ton of unused storage, even after factoring long term growth. I had been dabbling in VMware ‘on the side’ before then, and put all of that extra storage to good use. We had about 50 physical servers, in most cases each were existing just for handling a single application. I purchased 4 physical boxes, loaded to the max with processing power and RAM, building a ESX Cluster(three for production + one for fault tolerance).
Where I could, I ran a ‘P2V’ conversion on the existing servers, and was able to bring nearly all of them into the ESX Cluster. In nearly every case, the migrations went so well, there was NO downtime. We’re talking only a single dropped packet, while disabling the NIC on the physical server I was migrating from while connecting the NIC on the newly virtualized server. After I was done, my director walked into our datacenter, and it was nearly quiet. He saw all of the servers that had been shut down and panicked, thinking there was a power failure. I had to explain to him that our once sprawling datacenter was now contained in a single cabinet, only using 4Us. Not counting the SAN, which was in another cabinet.
The whole thing ran for about a year before he and my co-workers finally accepted and trusted it.
We’re a Windows shop, but have most of our stuff virtualized on ESX hosts right now. I’m still fighting a battle to wean people off the GUI, and use server core.
Good luck with that! LOL
I think that GUI keeps too many people warm at night!
If they’d only give it a chance and learn it, they’ll find that the GUI only gets in the way.
It doesn’t scale. IMHO, Powershell was the best thing MS has done in the last 10 years.
ping
But of course.....you one-uped me! ;)
That is something that is not too common these days, with the demise of our technical/trade schools.
Groovy, Grails, Java and Spring.
There was a time when making tools was an act of rebellion. We may be headed there again.
Good work! Didn’t they ever look at the electric savings?
You should do a report on the electrical and HVAC savings over the year to justify an increase in funding. A raise or more equipment is justifiable. Stats for a server’s electrical and cooling requirements are provided by most manufacturers websites. We have to include and tally up these figures before doing any install or upgrade as our server facilities’ space, power and HVAC are managed and budgeted resources.
If you have >50% available capacity in your SAN the first thing I’d do would be to put in a request for an additional chassis for VMware High Availabilty (HA). If the current chassis or even the interconnect switch fails the datacenter is SOL. HA is a parallel chassis and interconnect which VMware manages as an active-passive chassis array. Besides failover it’s also helpful for maintenance and upgrading of equipment without downtime.
It’s pretty good you had the freedom to do your own upgrade without briefing mgmt but it’s also sad they were ignorant of the advantages for a year. These advances save big $$ and you deserve credit for implementing them.
Thanks! I indeed built in HA with one of the boxes in the Cluster and network redundancy with two switches(an adapter running to each). I continued to lobby for additional storage for SAN redundancy and power redundancy for the data center itself, but they were too cheap to make the investment. The servers themselves have redundant power, but ‘the room’ doesn’t. I made it a point to make all such requests via email. :p
IT security experts will remain in high demand. Anyone who promises to fill in NSA security holes will be worth their weight in gold or Bitcoins.
Cloud computing will decline except for those organizations setting up private clouds.
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