Name: Mike Brown
Blog URL: www.mabrown.net
Twitter handle: @vMikeBrown
Current employer: VMware
How did you get into IT?
I started out in life wanting to be a professional musician, I played drums in a fairly successful local band in Oklahoma but at some point I realized it just wasn’t going to happen.
I packed up and moved to Indiana, where I’m originally from, and enrolled in some tech college classes for NetWare. Technology had always been a big part of my life and the Internet was just starting to boom so I figured it would be a good move. At the same time I got really into Windows NT and setup a home lab and actually ran some websites and hosted email off an ISDN line for a couple clients.
After getting my MCSE and Novell CNE I decided school wasn’t providing much for me anymore so I dropped out and got a job working for a VAR in Muncie Indiana. We mainly served the SMB market putting in custom built NetWare and NT servers along with some desktops and networking.
In 2001 I moved to Houston to work for a managed datacenter playing the role of a pre-sales SE and post sales consultant for Microsoft Server and Citrix products. After five years of that I wanted my own environment so I moved on to an Oil Company.
This is were I was first exposed to VMware technology at an Enterprise level and was instantly hooked. A year or so later I was the Virtualization Team lead in charge of around 140 hosts and 2500 VM’s, this was in 2007 or 2008. I became bored managing the same environment day in and day out so I looked at going to work for VMware.
At the time the travel schedule for PSO was too much for me so I took a position with a partner instead. Here I got to focus on all things VMware in addition to Cisco UCS, Nexus and Storage, mainly NetApp and EMC. After obtaining my VCDX in early 2012 and looking at the types of projects I was doing I decided it was time to look at VMware again as I was doing more and more UCS and Storage projects then I was VMware related ones and that’s just not where I wanted my career to go.
In April of 2012 I started with VMware PSO as a Senior Consultant on the Cloud Infrastructure and Management team. It’s been a great few months and I feel like I’ve finally found the place where I’m going to spend the rest of my career.
How did you get into working with VMware and becoming a 2012 vExpert?
I love social media such as Twitter. I think I started making a name for myself while I was going through the VCDX process and started blogging about my experiences with the program. Since obtaining my VCDX I’ve been a little slow on blogging but that’s something I’m working on changing.
What would you tell someone who wanted to get a job like yours to do?
Be prepared to always be learning. This industry changes constantly, which I love, but it takes a certain kind of person who has the capability and willingness to keep learning and question the way things have been done in the past. Virtualization changed everything and Cloud is looking to do it again and I couldn’t be happier to be along for the ride and hopefully shape it in my own little way.
