Name: Jonathan Copeland
Blog URL: virtsecurity.wordpress.com
Twitter handle: VirtSecurity
Current employer: City of San Antonio
How did you get into IT?
I’ve been in IT since I was very young and was playing with the minicomputer in my dad’s office with its large external drive platters and chain printer for wide green bar paper. I guess my first x86 exposure was with the 8086/8088 and running CP/M and then DOS 1.2 and moving eventually through that creating BASIC programs and DOS batch scripts for menus and launching applications. I’ve done a little bit of everything and finally settled down with Virtualization and Security as my primary areas of focus.
How did you get into working with VMware and becoming a 2012 vExpert?
I remember hearing about Virtualization and started playing with it running a program called plex86 and Bochs x86 which were early Virtual x86 hardware emulators. I eventually got handed a box with VMware workstation and was asked to learn this. This was approximately early 2006 and this spun into using VMware Server. In the last 4 years I have gradually added VMware certifications to my repertoire and with the last 2 ½ years I have really reached out to the online community around VMware and Virtualization especially the Twitter folks out there.
What would you tell someone who wanted to get a job like yours to do?
Learn as much networking and storage as possible. The one aspect that I keep coming too in Virtualization is that while we may be a specialist in Virtualization we MUST be generalists in the datacentre. I would definitely try to work across as many teams as possible including the network, storage, and desktop teams if you have the ability to do so. Take classes around ITIL processes and change management and work to deeply understand what the real needs of IT are. IT is not about the coolest toys IT is about delivering the services to the customer with the least amount of aggravation and pain.
