Legacy of Teaching

When I was a young and inexperienced IT guy I had a mentor who had a way of teaching me important lessons about the industry so that those lessons stuck with me through the years. One of the most important ones he taught me was how to leave your legacy as an IT professional wherever you go.

In a nutshell teach those who do not understand how the systems you are responsible for work and they in turn can assist you in acquiring goals you may not otherwise be able to attain. I’ve taken this lesson to heart. When I work with someone who is junior level to me I take it upon myself to develop them and mentor them as I was mentored. Its very much like a “pay it forward” model for IT. Just as I was mentored when I was starting out, so do I mentor those who are still young and without the battle scars from years of being in the trenches of information technology.

How this relates to VMware is fairly straight forward. If you pass on your knowledge of VMware to those you work with, they in turn will be better able to support the environment and assist those who may need help. Also, they can begin to serve as “ambassadors” of VMware to management and non-management which can come in very useful when you are attempting to prove the concept of a new VMware implementation. We all know some companies are resistant to changes. Therefore, anything you can do to increase understanding of a new system will benefit you. By taking the time to teach those around you about the VMware you widen the knowledge and acceptability of the platform.

One of the biggest challenges I faced starting out at the organization I am with now was gaining the trust in VMware from upper management. I started out small in the beginning. I got them to invest in VMware as just a development platform on which to host various non-essential test and development servers. Then, through a constant teaching of the solution and by opening up the environment so other could look around and not hurt anything and understanding of the technology began to spread through the department. I began to answer questions about the capabilities of the system and how things worked “under the hood” of the platform from others who were technical. They then began to talk about how great VMware is and what the potential of the platform was in terms of cost savings, scalability, disaster recovery, and server density. By others in my department discussing VMware as a solution in meetings they were in, they in turn assisted me in influencing upper management into using it for several low end production servers.

After this proof of concept was done and VMware had proven its mettle, other production servers began to be built or migrated into the environment. Now, we run several critical application and database servers in the environment because “HA gives us a type of clustering and failover capacity that we could not get in a standard single server platform.” Funny how my own words I used six months ago are now echoed back at me by management! I always nod and smile when I hear this.

During this entire time I’ve mentored a junior level administrator in the ways of VMware. The young “Padawan” (always throw in a good Star Wars reference if you can!) has learned well the ways of VMware and now can administer almost all aspects of the daily dealing of VMware to the extent that my time is now free to work on other projects. I’m now encouraging him to pursue his VCP to validate his knowledge of the platform. From this we have both gained. He is now a better tech and I have given back to the IT community. This has created a win - win situation for us both.