vExpert Spotlight: John Nicholson

John Nicholson

Today’s vExpert Spotlight interview is with John Nicholson. John is a fellow Spicehead like myself and that’s where we 1st met, virtually via the Spiceworks community, in person at Spiceworld. I’ve come to find out that John is very passionate VMware’s Horizon Suite as well as VSAN deployments. In between his VDI awesomeness you can usually find John being interviewed by none other than Mr. Yellow-Bricks himself over on that other great community blog. Nice work man!!

I am no Duncan, but I did my best to capture who John is in this Friday’s vExpert Spotlight.

The Interview

Star Wars or Star Trek?

Star Trek

What was your 1st IT gig?

I worked for a small answering service and call center. It was a blend of low budget and incredibly high up-time needs (they dispatched medical hot shots for organ transfers on occasion). Rolling out VMware and virtualizing everything helped a lot and reduced the number of 3AM pages.

What is your current job title and role?

Manager, Client Services @ Synchronet in Houston, TX.
I lead both the professional services and managed services teams who deliver VMware, Storage, VDI, Networking and Windows solutions. I wear a lot of hats, one day I’m designing a VSAN solution for a customer the next I’m helping rip a 500 pound switch out of a datacenter. Thankfully I have a great team to back me up.

How many years have you been a vExpert?

This is my 3rd year.

What advice would you give to others involved in the VMware community who are looking at becoming a vExpert?

Find a niche that your passionate about or working on and just start sharing what you find. It’s the most obscure blog posts or twitter posts that will often help someone who’s stuck. Don’t try to start writing essays, just start with something that you roadblocked on recently (like this morning I had an issue with a HDS array not letting me provision a pool). Discuss how you ran into the issue, how you identified a solution and what it was. These posts don’t take much more than 15 minutes.

Do you currently have a Home Lab environment?

Currently for a lab I am using our companies lab. It’s a VSAN Lab cluster (3 x ASUS servers Intel flash drives, Brocade VDX Ethernet Fabric). Hoping to get some downtime to get NSX up and doing magical things. We bought it during the vSAN closed beta as we wanted to vet the product.

How do you use VMware products or services in your daily work life?

We use VMware View internally. We manage View and VMware environments internally (VSPP/vCloud Air Network) as well as externally (managed services wing monitors customer clusters and proactively fixes and monitors the raw syslog feeds for warnings of issues we have seen before).

My favorite product no one has heard of right now is LogInsight.
I’ve also been doing a lot of VSAN deployments lately (although outside of upfront design there isn’t a lot to managing a product this “radically simple”).

What certifications do you currently hold (if any)?

VCP5-DT, VTSP/VSP (Assorted)

Tell us something about yourself that the community may not already know.

I used to work with bears. (Baylor University Chamber of Commerce live mascot program).

What’s your go to song or music genre when work stress becomes too much?

While I enjoy the sound of a storage array spinning up in the morning, its generally a playlist with EDB if I need to get work done quickly, or Taylor Swift if I need to act methodically.

Do you have a blog that you would like to share?

TheNicholson.com
Synchronet.com/blog

These are my general blogging spots.

Let us know how to contact you via social media.

Twitter: @Lost_Signal is the most reliable way to find me. Spiceworks I”m the Group admin for VMware, Storage, and Desktop Virtualization (I’m John773 over there) and co-lead the local Houston SpiceCorps.

John thank you very much for being a part of the vExpert Spotlight series! I appreciate you being able to take time out of your busy schedule to chat with me.

OK readers, please be sure to hit up John on Twitter & also on LinkedIn as well as his personal blog. John also loves to chat about VSAN, so I dare you to challenge him on that subject!

Lookup and browse the current 2015 vExperts in the vExpert Online Directory

Learn more about VMware’s vExpert Program: https://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/vexpert

Please do not forget to SHARE, TWEET, REPEAT!