2010 – A Look Back

So the end of the year is coming up quick so I figured I would start on the obligatory year-end review.  A chance to look back at the year that is now almost over and reflect and make some observations.  I guess.. 

From a work perspective, this year has felt like a much busier year than in recent years.  From a statistical point of view, it seems that I didn’t find as much time to publish as many posts as I did in 2009.  This year will end up at about 110 posts for the year with 147 posts going up last year.  Honestly though, I am not sure if it was the lack of time or the consistent type of work I had.  It felt like I had many more opportunities to work on diverse types of projects in 2009 in contrast to 2010 as this year seemed to be a more consistent blend of product and solutions.  With the past diversification came more posts possibly.  This year however felt like the year of VDI for me.  XenDesktop projects seemed to dominate the majority of my billable time.  Citrix XenDesktops with Provisioning servers all running on VMware vSphere 4 hypervisors.  That seemed to be the de facto standard solution for almost all of my clients this year.  There definitely were some VMware View implementations sprinkled in there but they were few and far between. 

On the hypervisor front, it was ALL VMware though.  No sign of Citrix XenServer anywhere and only a handful of half serious inquiries entertaining the idea of putting Microsoft’s Hyper-V into test environments.  I thought there would have been more interest in XenServer or Hyper-V as clients built out infrastructures for VDI but VMware was the only platform I touched this year for clients.  While there was definitely an uptick of Windows 2008 R2 servers going into production, they were all VMware virtual machines and not the hypervisor hosts I thought they might be.

EMC World 2010 in Boston was the big conference I attended this year but I got a healthy dose of EMC at clients year round.  Between RecoverPoint and SRM or vSphere and CX4s, the synergy between EMC and VMware seemed really apparent to me and stronger than ever. 

As I am preparing for 2011, I am hoping to dive back into the Data Center solutions and the virtualization infrastructure involved in that.  I am hoping to grow my storage skills a bunch more and round out my expertise to better help clients figure out this private cloud everyone is marketing to them.  I am confident I will continue to do VDI implementations for my clients but keeping the users and desktop applications an arm’s length away is probably my preference for now (like I wrote before though, a little diversification is necessary for growth so I’m still counting on some XD and View projects in 2011).   

Whichever way 2011 shakes out for me, I’d like to take a quick moment to thank everyone for reading and supporting the blog (especially those without AD-Blockers! Just kidding Google!). 

Here’s to a prosperous New Year ahead of us all.