vExpert Spotlight: Matt Heldstab

Matt Heldstab

This vExpert Spotlight interview is with Matt Heldstab. Matt and I have never had the chance to meet in person just yet but that will change this year in San Francisco at VMworld 2015! We ‘virtually’ met via Twitter while getting started with Cloud Credibility and joining our current kick ass team “The Sleeping Cloud“. Yes, I know, another CloudCred teammate. You should try it out, its kinda fun and educational. I did get a chance to stop Matt in his busy tracks for a few questions, here is the outcome of that conversation.

The Interview

Star Wars or Star Trek?

Star Wars

What was your 1st IT gig?

My first IT gig was back in 1996 with a State of Minnesota agency called the Board of Water and Soil Resources. I was responsible for our agencies implementation of a raster-based GIS system called EPPL7. Along with that, I was in charge of desktop support and was their Webmaster. It was back in the day of Netware 3.12.

Some of my responsibilities included managing our outstate coaxial networks. I think I still have some BNC “T” connectors and terminators in a drawer somewhere.   Only 3 of our 7 sites had internet access, and our Pegasus / Mercury mail environment leveraged an async gateway at our main office that dialed in to a different site every 10 minutes to distribute new messages. Those were the days!

What is your current job title and role?

I am the Server and Desktop Virtualization lead at the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities’ System Office (also known as MnSCU). MnSCU is comprised of 31 colleges and universities on 54 campuses in 47 communities, serving approximately 430,000 students throughout the state of Minnesota.

I currently manage 60+ ESXi hosts, and 250-odd Virtual Desktops in 4 datacenters. I am one of our primary Windows Systems Administrators, managing a couple-dozen Linux servers, a dozen Netscaler Load Balancers, several HP C7000 blade centers, HP & Tintri storage, as well as two medium-sized Exchange environments.

Other job duties include architecting and implementing consolidation projects, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) & Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions for some of our smaller campuses in the system.

How many years have you been a vExpert?

This is my first year!

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

Becoming a VMware vExpert is all about sharing knowledge. I have always taken great pride in sharing what I know with other Systems Administrators throughout our system. Being the leader of our MnSCU Special Interest Group (SIG) on Infrastructure Systems and Services for about 30+ SysAdmins is task in itself. Becoming a vExpert was a newer concept to me.

Although I had been a speaker / breakout session leader for many conferences in our system, I decided to start speaking more at VMUGs and User Conferences, as well as other industry events such as Tintri’s “Tintricity-on-the-Road”. I also decided to start my own VMware User Group in North Central Wisconsin in December of 2014, and was asked to co-lead the Minneapolis VMware User Group in February of 2015.

Do you currently have a Home Lab environment?

Yes, I do have a home lab. It is primarily for a vSphere 6 / Horizon 6.1 test environment running on VSAN 6.0. The environment consists of 2 Supermicro 1U servers with 2x Quad Core Xeon 2.5GHz processors, and 24GB RAM. I also have a single SSD and 3 SATA disks in each host.

My former lab was on a Windows PC with 1 Quad Core Intel Ivy Bridge CPU and 32GB RAM. I was CPU bound and decided to expand to the Supermicro servers. I carved out a 24GB ESXi VM to participate in a 3-node VSAN cluster with my Supermicro boxes.

Some of the technologies that I have running in my lab include, vSphere 6, VSAN 6, Horizon 6.1 with Workspace, and vRealize Operations for Horizon. I am also building out a lab using Ravello, in Amazon AWS.

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

I use VMware products every day. We have a lot of exciting projects coming up in the next year. Although many of my tasks are not around VMware technologies, they have been my bread-and-butter for a while now. We started using VMware ESX in 2006 back in the 3.0 days. It was a great success.

In January of 2009, our Associate Vice Chancellor for IT at the time (think CTO) asked me to research VDI. We decided to implement VMware View 3.0. I have been our lone VDI admin for the past 6 1/2 years. We may have an opportunity to expand that over the next year using either Horizon 6, or Horizon Air on premises (Desktone). It will be a very exciting project once it is approved.
What certifications do you currently hold (if any)?

I am currently a VCP5 in both Datacenter Virtualization (VCP5-DCV) & Desktop Virtualization (VCP5-DT).

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

I have been married to my wife Michelle for the past 15 years, and have two children (Maeve, 13 and Merrick, 10). I am an avid golfer, and was lucky enough to play at the college level. I was born and raised in the western suburbs of Chicago (Wheaton, IL), currently live in Western Wisconsin, and work in Minnesota. There is a little something for everyone to love, and hate, if you are from the US Midwest.

My sports allegiances include the Chicago Cubs, Bulls, Blackhawks, Minnesota Vikings, and Wisconsin Badgers. I have a 4-year degree from Bemidji State University where I majored in Geographic Information Systems.

I have been playing Bass in a classic rock band for the past 18 years, as well as playing both mass music and contemporary Christian music for the past 5 years in my church.

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

I have always had an extremely diverse range of musical tastes.

Christian Rock, Trance, Progressive Rock, Heavy Metal (extremely heavy at times), Classic Rock, and New Age. My five favorite bands/groups are the Foo Fighters, Rush, NeedToBreathe, Rank1 and Sepultura.

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

My blog is www.vmatt.net

Let us know how to contact you via social media.

I can be found at @mattheldstab on Twitter, and on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/pub/matt-heldstab/6/87a/273

WOW! That was some great info, Thanks Matt! Do not forget to link up with Matt on Twitter & LinkedIn as well as in the VMware Community or his personal blog. If you are going to be in San Fran for VMworld be sure to find him and say What’s up!

Stay tuned for more vExpert goodness!

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