Time to make it official!  I have moved to Clearpath Solutions Group where I’ll take on the role of Virtualization Practice Manager, focusing on delivering VMware solutions and services to our VMware, Cisco, and EMC customers.  I’m looking forward to joining a high energy company where I can focus on the VMware technologies that I am passionate about.  I’m going to hit the ground running with VMware View implementations, Site Recovery Manager (SRM) work, and vSphere upgrades on EMC storage and Cisco UCS servers.

A few perks that I am looking forward to in this new job:

• With the changing roles, I’ll be ramping up my writing on VMtoday, as well as on Clearpath’s blog.  A consistent focus on virtualization ought to help provide fodder for my blogging.
• My commute will shorten by about 33% (new commute will be a whopping 4 miles each way on side roads – unheard of in Northern Virginia / Washington, DC!).
• More active in social media – @ClearpathSG gets it (+Clearpath Solutions Group, http://www.facebook.com/ClearpathSolutions, http://www.linkedin.com/company/100452)
• VMware Partner Exchange (PEX) – I look forward to seeing all my virtualization friends at PEX next week!
• New colleagues – there’s some great folks at Clearpath, and we’re still hiring.  Check it out and join the team!

Leaving my role as IT Manager at Tiber Creek Consulting was not an easy decision, but it is time to move from being a constantly distracted, generalist IT Manager to something with a bit more focused. Tiber Creek has been amazingly flexible and encouraging over the past three years as Stephanie Townsend and I have worked though her health issues and the stress it imposes on our family (with Stephanie having improved over the past few months after a new procedure to patch her cerebral spinal fluid (CSF) leaks, I feel some freedom to go after great new things).   Tiber Creek is a great group of people doing great work for our armed forces, and I’ll miss the great team that I have been a part of for the past three years.  Thanks for everything, Tiber Creek!

Here’s to an awesome new role, at an awesome new company.  Thumbs up – let’s do this thing!

For those who read my sporadic posts here on VMtoday.com with any sort of regularity, you know I love crunching numbers – give me some perfmon, esxtop, or vscsistats and let me go to town.  There’s something cathartic about poking, prodding, and analyzing some performance numbers to find the root cause of a problem, the perfect sizing for a new environment, the right number of spindles for my workload….  It’s easy to get lost in those numbers, forgetting to step back and look at the bigger picture.  So rather than write the obligatory post on VMtoday’s 2nd anniversary/Christmas/New Years/Three Kings Day/whatever-the-kids-are-celebrating-these-days, I figured I might do a little analysis of , well, me, and give you all a peek behind the vCurtain I sometimes hide behind.

2010, simply put, was a very hard year for me.  Some of you know that my wife, Stephanie, has been dealing with a decade of a medical mystery leaving her in constant pain that affects our daily routines, relationships, faith, and family more than I ever could have imagined.  We’ve both been running on empty for some time, and I was ready to crack (Stephanie, being a much stronger, patient, loving, kind, gentle, self-controlled individual than I actually seemed to be faring better).  Stephanie and I decided to try one last ditch effort to get a diagnosis over the summer, starting with a detox of all of her medications.  Take a wife out of commission, throw in a couple of crazy kids, some increased work stress, and I’m done.  More pain, more frustration, more anxiety, no answers….  There’s no numbers to crunch, nothing to analyze… just the brutal realization that life is tough.  Tough being patient with my wife, friends, kids, and coworkers; tough finding time to blog; tough watching colleagues land some awesome new gigs as v-Something-or-others while feeling trapped by the realities of our situation…. But that’s me being a negative-nelly, working the glass-is-half-empty bit – something I’m too often prone to do.

You see, there is a bright side to all of this.   Over the past year, I have learned the depth of my love for Stephanie (and hers for me) as we have walked together through this trying time.  I have realized the goodness of so many people – family, friends, neighbors, co-workers, colleagues in the virtualization community – who have taken a moment to speak (or tweet) a word of encouragement, shown me patience and love, or have been there for a good laugh when I needed one.  An employer who has gone above and beyond to be sensitive to our situation, while rewarding my hard work with additional responsibility and unprecedented opportunity.  And we’ve received some good news – Stephanie got a diagnosis late in November that could explain, in large part, her various symptoms of the past 10 years (a chronic CSF leak leading to what is best described as an acquired Chiari malformation for those who want to know).  For the first time in a long time we felt hope, and many of you celebrated this bit of a victory with us.  There are some corrective procedures that we are currently investigating with Stephanie’s medical team.  An end is imaginable, if not yet in sight.  And we are better people for it on this side of the year than we were at the beginning.

So thanks to everyone who has helped, encouraged, and prayed for us.  I look forward to returning to a bit of normalcy, giving back to those who so freely have given to me over the past year, good health, faith and hope.   That’s the big change – I had given up on all of these.  But enough self pity is enough – I’m all in on embracing hope, on enjoying the little things, and being content with all the blessings I have (instead of worrying about what little I might have lost).  Oh yeah – and, for what it’s worth, I look forward to finding a bit more time to blog, give back to the virtualization community, and take on new challenges in the coming year.  Here’s to hope in 2011!

I’ve held off on posting this as I don’t like to toot my own vuvuzela too loudly, but in a fit of shameless self promotion and a desire to see the program grow, here goes nothin:

I am a VMware vExpert!

VMware notifed recipients of the designation last month.  The 300 or so awardees are recognized for their “advocacy of VMware solutions, your contributions to the community of VMware users, and your willingness to share your expertise with others.”  I find it an absolute honor to be included amongst the vExpert class of 2010 – a group full of folks who are on the cutting edge of virtualization and cloud computing, many of whom have helped me through their books, blogs, and contributions to the VMware Community.  Arnim van Lieshout has compiled a nice list of vExperts here: http://www.van-lieshout.com/vexpert-2010/.

It’s an exciting time to be a virtualization professional – in terms of the technology, people and seemingly endless opportunities.  I look forward to continuing my contributions to the community through this here blog, my leadership of the Washington, DC Metro Area VMware User Group, and through my work as a implementer of VMware solutions!  Special thanks to John Troyer for sponsoring the program and doing so much to organize the VMware community through the weekly VMware Community Roundtable, Social Media and the many other programs he touches.

Happy New Year to everyone!  2010 is shaping up to be quite a good year, both personally and professionally.  Between two little boys at home and a bunch of new projects at work I should stay busy.  I will also continue to co-lead the Washington, DC VMware User Group (VMUG).  In my spare time I will continue to write what I hope are technically sound, practical, and timely articles on VMtoday.com.

And speaking of VMtoday.com… Eric Siebert has opened up voting for the top 25 virtualization bloggers on his vSphere-Land.com site.  I am very honored to be included in the ballot list of 55 of our industry’s top bloggers.  Please take a few minutes to vote – a couple lucky voters will win a copy of TrainSignal’s VMware vSphere DVD training course.

Thanks for reading and best wishes for a blessed and productive 2010!

~Josh

Today marks the one year anniversary of my first post on VMtoday.com, and an exciting year it has been in many ways.  First, some stats:

• VMtoday.com has been visited more than 10,000 times in the past year.  While the number of site visits is far below some of my fellow virtualization bloggers, it is still exciting for me to see that I am making an impact on the community (despite my meager post count).  There are some of you who read my posts through Planet V12n and RSS, which is cool by me.
• Yesterday was the busiest day for the site.  No coincidence that it comes after adding some new content….  I’ll try to be more faithful in publishing regular, relevant content!
• My most popular post to date has been: IBM DS3300 iSCSI Write Performance Solved. I’m glad this has been useful for so many, but I hope that you don’t just apply the workarounds I wrote about. I would rather have you build a “bet the business” iSCSI environment by adding that second controller to your MD3000i or DS3300.
• My least popular post to date has been: VMworld Here I Come. I will try not to be so boring in the future.
• The first link back to my site was from Scott Lowe’s blog.  Thanks for the link, Scott.  Scott wrote a darn fine book: Mastering VMware vSphere 4.  Buy it.
• The site theme, like my Twitter page, is very blue.  I am working on a new theme in all of the spare time that a busy professional and father of two boys can muster.

Along with this site, I have made a concerted effort engage the virtualization community in several ways:

• Twitter keeps me plugged in to the latest news and discussions, and has been a source of help to me (and I would like to think that I have helped some of you as well).  Follow me at http://twitter.com/joshuatownsend.
• I have stepped up into a leadership role with the Washington DC VMware User Group (VMUG).  It has been awesome to meet with and learn from my local colleagues.  I will continue to work with the DC VMUG leadership team to deliver exciting and relevant content and activities (and also some more seating space).  I welcome your feedback and ideas for ways to improve the VMUG.
• VMworld 2009 was a great way to meet many of you while learning some of the hottest new technology on the planet.  My wife came along and enjoyed spending time with some of the other vSpouses (or vWidows?).
• I took a new job early in the year with a VMware Partner in the DC area.  This new job has been both challenging and rewarding, affording me opportunities to more effectively engage customers and spend more time working on virtualization-specific solutions.

I look forward to contributing to the virtualization community as a blogger, VMUG leader, and practitioner.  If you want to learn a bit more about me, check out the About page on this site.  I welcome your feedback and appreciate your reading my work!

- Josh