What does it mean to be a vExpert?

You might have heard about a community of geeks talking all day about infrastructure and virtualization. Maybe you wonder if it’s worth to belong to such a tribe. Let me tell you a short story…

Back in 2011, I was part of a team that was building Cloud regions around EMEA. While AWS was using their XEN based hypervisor, we were deploying VCE vBlocks, using ESXi as our hypervisor. Two years later both AWS and CSC were leading the IaaS Magic Quadrant with different architectures. Of course, you can’t compete against a large scale cloud provider, but we were able to bring what Enterprises was looking for. That’s where my virtualization journey really started. I was coming from the network space and suddenly I was reinventing myself.

Over the years I kept building infrastructure and traveling all around the world. I never had the chance to attend VMworld as my employers were not sponsoring neither paying for that. I didn’t’ even have time to jump into forums and communities, but one day while building a Datacenter in Romania I asked myself “what’s the value of doing what I do if I can’t share the lessons learned?“

That was my turning point. I decided to start investing more time in the community and sharing my experiences. In the beginning, you just look around, grab content, and follow the top Advocates. With the time you kick out your fears and start posting articles and being active in open discussions.

Suddenly you find yourself belonging to a group of people that shares the same interests as you. I’ve had the pleasure to meet some of the most outstanding guys out there but even better, I’ve got to work with many of them.

Today, I think back to the moment I took the decision and it was one of the best things I’ve done in my career. To be honest, I could never imagine delivering a session at vBrownBag, speaking in Virtually Speaking podcast, being part of the #vBeard community…neither writing a post like this sharing my experiences.

Don’t be shy, people are here to help. Feel free to ask questions even if you think they might look stupid. There are no dumb questions and there is always someone willing to help.

Last but not least, some of those top evangelists today are good friends. With people like Faisal Hasan, Prasenjit Sarkar, David Owen, and Val (aka Homelaber) you can spend days and days talking about techie things. Every day I learn something new, and that’s the greatness of the Community.

Now that you know my story, what about you? What are you waiting for?

There is an awesome Community looking for people like you!

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