Loooong time

It’s been very quiet around here, I’ve been rather busy with my real life. During that busy time, a lot of things happened. I switched jobs starting on October 1st, I’m now working in Karlsruhe (as compared to the 870km northern Greifswald). It may sound far, but it’s actually quite pleasant. You know, I was born down here (well not exactly here — 70 kilometers afar) and I still had the feeling that this is my home.

My tasks haven’t changed that much, I’m still doing

  • VMware Virtual Infrastructure (as compared to vSphere)
  • IBM Storage / Brocade SAN (was IBM Storage / Cisco SAN)
  • Storage Virtualisation Controller (we were just buying that before I left)
  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10/11 – Deployment and Management (is pretty much the same as before)

What I don’t do any longer is Windows. That is, per se not completely right, since Virtual Center only runs on Windows boxen, but pretty much my whole work focuses on Linux and Storage. It’s as I argumented in the the interview a step ahead, since I’m specializing myself into a certain direction (whether or not that works out — I can’t tell yet. Time is gonna tell me that).

In my first week I spent some time getting to know the co-workers, working my head into the SVC (I already had a somewhat theroretical — and practical — insight, but not deep enough to actually make do with it). Next on my list is the AutoYaST environment for SLES-boxen / Kickstart for ESX(i), which (hopefully) enables us to standardize server installations using common schemas and partitions layout.

Also on the list is building a two-node test environment for the SVC so we don’t break the live environment with some tests we might be doing. Next on the list is some accouting to bring the settlements for the resource utilization based on vCPU/vMem upon a solid, up to date foundation.