Work

Interview Time

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I had a job interview today. It was my first since I decided to start looking for work. It looks like it will be my last also. The place seemed awesome. The manager and VP that interviewed both seemed cool and had a direction they wanted to take the group over the next few years. I never can gauge how I do on interviews. I have thought some have gone great and they ended up not landing a job offer. Other times I think I tanked it and got offers, or call backs. Go figure. This go round I thought it went really well but lost some hope when they said they were interviewing for another week and would let me know next friday. I should have read through that since I have said similar things when interviewing people, and they also said they have been trying to fill the post for months.

The recruiter called a few hours later telling to expect an offer later or tomorrow. He then called back and said to expect a formal offer tomorrow but he gave me the numbers they were offering and asked if I could give notice tomorrow and start 2 weeks from monday. Of course I wanted the job but I told him I would think about it and call tomorrow.

Since my parents are out of the country on a cruise I spoke to my sister about the whole situation. She is in the tech field anyway so she is a good choice to talk to. She agreed that it was a fantastic opportunity for me. It was the first interview I went on but it was also a very exciting possibility for me. Technically I did turn down another job from a friend on Sunday, but I never interviewed for that. The more I thought about it, I wanted an established company like this offer gave me, vs a startup like what I turned down Sunday. I think I made the correct decision.

It was ironic I got the call from the recruiter when I did, since Jayson, Danny, & I were at a recruiter looking at candidates for replacing them, and Andrew. This recruiter was also going to talk to me about possible positions for me when we were done, but I didn’t have to do that!

We found three possible candidates for the positions we want to fill, but I don’t know if Bob or my CEO will go for the prices they are looking for. That is part of (but in no way the only reason) why 3 people are leaving in the first place.

Now all I have to do is wait for the written offer letter and tell work tomorrow. I wonder how that will go? 4 guys leaving out of a group of 6 with one other going on leave for 6 weeks is going to cripple operations and no one seems to realize it.

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Looking

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I am now in full job hunting mode. I got back my revised resume, and it looks awesome. I am uploading it on the job hunting sites I am using. I have gotten a few emails and calls about my resume already and I only posted it on Sunday night. I haven’t even began to contact the recruiters to expand my search. I am optimistic about the outcome but I just don’t want to be at work once Jayson, Danny, and Andrew leave. The stress will be bad, especially since we are launching more sites on the new code. Top on my general unhappiness at work and it is an almost intolerable situation right now. I feel so out of control, and helpless. I know it will resolve itself, but it takes time. I just don’t want to wait huge amounts of time.

Listening to Jayson and Danny talk about their new opportunities isn’t helping the situation. Danny has a great place to goto, and I am honestly jealous of the position that Jayson has landed. He deserves it and I wish him well, but I am wallowing in self pity right now since I feel stuck here right now. I know it will pass, but I am having a bad week.

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My First Interview

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On a brighter note I have lined up my first interview for Thursday. The place sounds interesting. I am going to do more research on the company and see what happens. I am hoping to set up other interviews ASAP. I have some other things in the works but no formal meetings yet.

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A VMware Gotcha

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A minor gotcha we ran into with our Virtual Center cluster last week and again possibly today. Virtual Center requires a SQL Server (Microsoft I know) to collect telemetry I think. Not really sure why, but it does. It is not critical to operations of any VM, but you do need it for VMotion, creating new VM’s and other admin work. Well when we built our ESX cluster we put our virtual center DB on the one sql server we had on the LAN in that office that had any amount of stability. Well we were wrong. It turns out that the machine we picked (a dev db) runs out of space because our DBA’s don’t pay attention to their backup schedules. I am making an assumption there but it has happened twice in a week and a half. Well when the server runs out of space, there goes virtual center. Jayson has all the details of the issue, but it boiled down to we couldn’t use our virtual center manager until it was fixed. It is our own fault for putting it on a dev box but it was our only option at the time. We are now just building our own SQL server that the operations group will own and all it will do is the virtual center db.

This ESX roll out is a learning experience, but I still believe that we are far better off with our current infrastructure over past non vmware setup.

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My Mistery Trip

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I am writing this on the return leg of my “semi” mystery trip. I say that because no one at work really was supposed to know what we were doing this week. Apparently others are not good at keeping things quiet. I told who needed to know in my group but they always are privy to corporate secrets. that is just the nature of the jobs we have, but the rumor mill is running rampant it seems. I wrote a post all about exactly what we are doing, but it is on my private work blog right now. There it will remain until I am long gone from my current employer. I feel that the smart way to write about stuff from work. I want to write about it but cant publish it.

I can say we were doing some research. It was a very busy 3 days, and then we took yesterday to relax a bit. On this trip we ate very well. Man the food was good. Traveling always lets you eat well and gain weight. I also got the chance to see some really cool technology in action.

We rented an Iridium phone for the week because we were concerned about mobile coverage and the price of service even if we had good signal. It turned out that the Iridium phones are huge, and only really work outside. On the flip side my Cingular GSM phone actually worked so we simply used that. I don’t want to look at my bill this month since the price per minute was very high, but when you need to make an important cal you need to make a call.

I went the almost the entire trip without needing my migraine medication. Right before I got on the plane I felt like I needed to take something. At least I had a good run without the extra medication.

The trip out was uneventful. our short mini trip was nice. I have to say even smaller foreign air carriers have better service than american carriers. In the US you would never see a hot breakfast on an hour long flight but we had one.

On the return trip I went from having an asle seat in the very back of the plane to a decent window seat in an exit row. And I actually did someone a favor with that change. Go figure. The leg room is nice, especially since the carrier we are on was cramped on the way down. Hopefully the remainder of the trip will be uneventful.

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Black Box Project

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As I write this I am on my way home from several days in Costa Rica, and El Salvador. 3 of us have been visiting several sites in both countries for what would be considered a black box project in my company. If this post is ever read it will be after I leave my current job, so I feel I can write about it.

We are researching outsourcing some of our call center operations. I went along to asses the technical operations of each call center site we visited. I also wanted to get an idea of how each company integrates their systems to ours. From what I saw we can send them calls via our providers voice cloud and do percentage based routing to their system. We would allow access to our applications via a citrix or terminal solution. As of now I am thinking a VDI solution that we have been toying around with for a while.

The trip was hectic, but very informative. We visited 3 sites from 2 companies in 2 countries in 3 days. I just hope that upper management listens to our recommendation to actually try and send some calls off shore. The venture would be profitable and still keep the same level of service. I was amazed that the majority of people in both countries that worked at the call centers spoke excellent english. I am in no way a fan of off shoring call centers to places like India because of constantly poor experiences I have had. Everyone we spoke to spoke very good english at each site. And it wasn’t like the discussions were staged. Just walking around and grabbing some food or hitting a bathroom and saying hi to someone they responded with excellent english. That and the technical feasibility of this project makes me want to try it out. Hopefully we will be given the chance.

Parallels & VMware Fusion Head to Head

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Late last week I finally received the email I was waiting for giving me instructions to download the VMware Fusion Friends & Family Beta. It is the same version I saw a demo of at VMworld. My first impression is that I wish it was faster. To VMware’s credit the issue is that by design the beta build has debugging on. It is a closed beta after-all.

My first use of the Fusion was a test for my own personal edification. I cannot get Parallels to sync my Treo 700P with an XP VM. The main reason to use a Windows VM on my Mac at home is to use the windows version of Quicken. I cannot stand the Mac version. This get complicated when I want to sync my Quicken with Pocket Quicken on my Treo. I sync everything else with the Mac, so I just need this one windows program to sync. Up until now I have a Windows XP desktop around with an XP VM on it for me to sync my Treo to. I took that VM with Quicken on it built and run on VMware Workstation 5.5.3 and simply copied it over to my Macbook. I told Fusion were to find the VM, and let it run. After a minute of updating the VM Tools the VM was working perfectly. Within 5 minutes I was able to sync my Treo with the Windows VM. The trick I found was that I disabled the USB sync in The Missing Sync, since I have that software start when the Mac starts. This trick didn’t work with Parallel’s but was exactly what Fusion needed to see the USB device.

My work requirements are a bit more intensive for what I need in a VM than my home needs. At work since I use a Macbook Pro, I still need to access some Windows only tools. From time to time I also need to simulate our users working environment, so I need a Windows XP VM with our corporate software build on it. Getting the software build working in Fusion was as simple as copying the XP VM we have ready with sysprep onto my laptop and turning it on. After joining it to our domain, and updating the VM Tools I was up and running. This template VM of Windows XP SP-2 was built to work with VMware workstation as well as Server, so I had no problem getting it running. The drag and drop copy between host and guest worked exactly as advertised. Rob wanted a copy after I showed him how I can move stuff around between my Mac and the VM. The auto resizing of the VM window was also very helpful for day to day work. I didn’t have any stability issues with the beta, but I did have a very noticeable performance loss in the VM. Debugging does give you a noticeable speed hit.

If I had to rate the Fusion Beta against the current final build of Parallels I would say Fusion has all the advantages except for the fact that it is beta, and Parallels has been out for months. Fusion beats out Parallels in basic features. Add on top of that the fact that I can use existing VM’s we build for Workstation & Server it puts Fusion over the top. Of course if I had to rate the Fusion Beta against the beta of the next update to Parallels that I just downloaded I am not so sure. The Parallels beta offers a conversion tool from VMware to their format. Helpful yes, but not as good as having full two way compatibility between Mac, Windows, & Linux versions of VMware. Then there is the Coherence feature. The few minutes I had to play with it tonight has me wanting to give it a full workout tomorrow at the office. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so take a look at this photo posted on Flickr by someone to explain what Coherence does. And yes my friends it works just like as it looks. The video is a bit choppy, but it is beta.

So the jury is out on what features VMware will add to Fusion as it gets closer to release. Parallels also seems to be adding more features as they roll out updates. For me, if VMware can compete with Parallels on features they have the advantage simply because of the interoperability between their other products. For now I look forward to the next versions of both Beta’s. More opinions as I get them.

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My New Career Path

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Currently (as of the writting of this post) I am involved in all aspects of Technology Operations. It is cool since I get my hand in all sorts of projects. However I think I found a technology to focus on that will be a huge growth area for the forseeable future. It is obvious that virtualization is growing by huge percentages. I am not an expert in it by any means, but as companies go we have deployed allot of virtualisation to solve many problems we have had. The more I manage larger and larger virtualization projects I can get into a better position in this piece of the Technology field. I am not planning on leaving my job tomorrow, but you always have to think about tomorrow. I think I am into this technology early enough (I deployed our first GSX box 2 years ago) that I can do allot with it.

P2V

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Since we had such good luck with a P2V (physical to virtual server conversion) a few months ago, we decided to try again with another critical server that we would all feel better if it was on different hardware. it is another of those box’s that would be a nightmare to rebuild so virtualizing makes sense. the only problem is that after two attempts we have yet to complete the conversion. The issue at first was the CD drive was busted, and we couldn’t fix it before our maintenance window ended.

The second try also was a bust since we ran out of time to let the conversion to run. We are regrouping again and will try a different tool instead of the P2V assistant from VMware. We are going to take a look at the Platespin tool. We have been using it to do V2V (virtual to another virtual server) on another project and we love the fact that it requires almost no downtime during the conversion. We are investigating the different tool this week. Hopefully news soon.

Yes, allot of writing about virtual stuff. It is on my mind recently and we are doing allot with it. it is some amazing stuff.

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VMworld

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My boss never ceases to surprise me. At the last minute Jayson suggested someone be allowed to goto VMworld, since the number of servers we operate are more and more virtual. He thought it was a good idea, and we got last minute approval. I leave on Monday, and I just got my travel arrangements done. Sean suggested I fly directly into LAX since it could be a bitch of a drive from Long beach where Jetblue flies into. Turns out I got a Delta ticket for the same amount as Jetblue would have been.

The problem with this conference is that there are too many things I want to do, and not enough time. It doesn’t help that I registered late and some of the good seminars are already booked. I ended up picking a mix of high availability and enterprise management of VM’s classes, as well as some on VDI (Vitrual Desktop Stuff). They are the two basic things we are currently working on. Hopefully I will learn a bunch of cool stuff that we can apply at work. I am also hoping to see the VMware Workstation for the Mac in action. Updates next week.

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