In 1999, a friend of mine approached me asking me if I wanted to help him run some cables in an office building for $10/hr. I said sure. Being a techy-guy, I started asking questions about what cables were what, where they plugged in, and why they plugged in there...
It was all downhill from there.
Less than 2 years later, I was an MCSE-2000. For the past 10 years, I've worked in various systems administration positions, primarily focusing on Active Directory & Exchange domains. We did lots of Exchange migrations and AD 2000-to-2003 migrations earlier in the decade, because well, that's what admins did in those days.
But it wasn't until my current employer and I embraced the idea of virtualization that I truly came into my own. I finally found something I wanted to "specialize" in.
Since then, everything we have done has always had the "should we virtualize it?" tagline added to it, and more recently, it has been, "is there any reason why we can't virtualize it?"
My virtual career path started with ESX 3.0, and NetApp shared storage. Most of what I discuss here will be our trials and tribulations with migrating a company in the Healthcare sector (non-hospital) to the virtual world of consolidating servers and storage.
I welcome the feedback and any questions anyone and everyone might have, and hope that this not only serves as a track in my progress, but as a way for me to help fellow admins with situations I may have already encountered.
Nick Howell
Datacenter Engineer