Husband, Father, Typical Geek, Virtualization Enthusiast, Fort Wayne VMUG Leader, #vExpert, Radio Connoisseur, EMT, and CERT Support. Sorry for my rambles in advance!
How was it? The Conference was different from years past even if the design and marketing around the venue was reused. It was the same footprint, but the expo hall definitely seemed to lack a lot of familiar faces. Even in general attendance I definitliy missed a lot of faces that you have seen in many years passed. I went back and reviewed the general session on information regarding attendance and did not find anything in the re-watch.
What is the goal? This year for the hackathon at VMware Explore I was unsure I would be able to attend, so I ended up being a walk in and sometimes those are the best projects and networking opportunities. My team originally was just talking about life with everything from Firefighting to the spiders in Australia. PowerCLI man came over and was like hey why don’t you guys do something with ChatGPT.
What did I get into? I use Powershell day in and day out in my daily role. This conference made a lot of sense to attend but what I didn’t realize is I am more of a utility scripter and the conference had a big DevOps focus this year but that is how Powershell is heading as a whole. This mindset is a change for me and how I use my scripts by focusing more on reusable code such as functions and parameters vs hard coding information.
Back in the saddle On April 19th I gave a presentation to Fort Wayne VMUG around N8N and my current escapades down that rabbit hole of an automation framework. I have a DevOps mindset but wasn’t sure where I was going with this application other than some specific use cases which I will discuss later in this article. Let’s jump into the “What is it?”. What is it? n8n is an open-source workflow automation tool that allows users to connect different apps and services together to automate tasks and processes without any coding.
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Why? Our VMUG did not have a presenter lined up, so I figured it was time to pay my “dues” so to speak. I came up with the idea of covering #BackToTheBasics inside of VMWare pertaining to performance, Which included vNuma, ESXTOP, and snapshots. Which I have found have been heavy-hitting performance issues in my environments. This seemed like a great time to brush up on my first presentation since high school that wasn’t me blabbering and rambling through 5-10 mins of how-tos for a group of people.
The Professional Story Over 12 years in IT doing various jobs all the way from Helpdesk to IT Systems Administrator over a VMware Infrastructure. I have worked for small Mom & Pop shops all the way up to the big fruit company. Over the years I have developed an awesome set of skills and a great collection of random knowledge but the thing I took away from every job/Client site that I have been at is the ability to step back and do logical problem solving.
The long neglected homelab Roughly 3 years ago my life was very different. We lived in a metropolitan area with decent internet and a nice space for my homelab. Skip ahead 3 years we have moved to Convoy, Oh population 1,053~. We live on the outskirts of our village and where I can get 25/2 DSL Connection. Oh and I have a 2 year old toddler who takes up a majority of my time.