I was driving home Friday night when my phone bleeped to tell me a colleague had DM’d me on Twitter. I made a mental note to check when I got home.

After a couple of hours spent building MetalBeard out of Lego I remembered and read it.

“Congratulations vExpert” it said. I checked the VMware blog and found this http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2014/10/vexpert-2014-q3-announcement.html#src=vmw_so_vex_cneal_850

I was very pleased that my efforts evangelising around virtualisation and in particular VMware had been recognised.

I have been using VMware since around 2005 when I started my current employer.  It was a brave new world, lots of resistance, people being concerned what consolidating their servers would mean, and vmotion!?!?! Voodoo!

“Which host are my VMs on?”

<Insert scream of frustration here>

Things have changed lots.  Virtualisation is the now, cloud is now-ish and Agile/OpenStack/Devops is the future.

I’ve started blogging on VMware not long ago and before that I had discovered that the VM communities are a great place to help people, build your own knowledge up and demonstrate your qualifications and experience.  It’s also a great source of revision for VCP/VCAP ;-)  So two birds one stone as they say.  My score on the communities is currently at the heady 212 mark.  This is puny compared to those moderators, VMware employees and other gurus who have helped so many for so long and hit crazy scores of 50,000 (Some have been on the forums since 2003 and amazingly active).

There are some benefits, which I truly honestly only found out since being given the appointment which is great but not why I did it nor why I’ll continue.  I enjoy helping people…even those who are pretty unashamedly trying to get you to design their whole vSphere environment for them via the forum :-)

In other news there is a slim chance I may be attending VMworld Europe on Monday which would be my fist VMworld ever!!!

Fingers and toes Crossed!

 

(Thanks go out to Darryl http://darrylcauldwell.com/ for nudging me to apply for vexpert and Corey Romero for the tips around blog tracking and his encouragement too!)