Have you ever had one of those days where you see on your dashboard one of your long lost boxen is no longer successfully reporting into your beloved puppet master? I’ve had a problem child as of late and I’m not sure if it was a security patch for openssl or if it was when the box moved from one virtual environment into a vCloud environment. But whatever the reason, I was suddenly seeing red when I would manually run my puppet agent command on the box.

Time flies when you’re having fun right? Back in 2006 when I joined LightEdge, I wasn’t sure what the future was going to hold for me. The company had employed my wife for a year already and they seemed to be moving in the right direction. Just over 7 years later, things are going strong and if anything, its hard to keep up with the customer demand. A great problem to have.

I’m very fortunate to have a nice lab at work where I have a UCS chassis, fabrics, a few blades and a VNX to play with. Recently I’ve been working on getting our Razor implementation hammered out so messing around with all the good automation bits. Now, because its a lab, it doesn’t tend to fall into the same patching cycles as our production servers do. My Razor server in particular is an example of this only getting updated when I have the chance to turn a wrench.

That VMworld went by way too darn quick. So fast that I didn’t get to put up a day 3 and day 4 follow up. There is a lot of cool stuff going on with VMware that many of us will be talking about for years to come. Mainly, NSX, vSAN and vCHS. But what are we here for, we’re here to see how dead wrong I was with my annual predictions.

Day 2 flew by for me and I have to say, I’m still reeling a bit. The day was kicked off with the general session keynote which is usually when we see Herrod take the stage, but since his departure, we got another C level (COO Carl Eschenbach). This one was probably my favorite of all of them that I’ve seen as we didn’t have to suffer through a VMware View / Horizon demo.