Are you Cisco, VMware and Citrix certified – no are you?

What skills do you want from an engineer?

Mike (that’s what we’ll call him) called me, like myself, he’s looking for work as a wintel engineer and he’d got a phone call from an agent:

“We’ve got a Wintel role here, it’s to move some blades running Windows physical and virtual machines as well as some running VMware ESX to another data center, do you have Advanced Cisco exposure?” asks the agent.

“No sorry, what’s the role? I’ve moved blade enclosures between data centers if that’s what you mean?” asks Mike

“Not good enough sir, we need advanced Cisco to reconfigure the routers and switches for the move, I can’t put you forward for it. I’ll leave you to it, they need Cisco.” replied the agent.

Mike was asking me, how many network guys are going to know about blades, VMware and Windows?

It’s fine, Mike’s just frustrated with the market, but it did raise a good point, this post in fact, about how the market place for engineers is changing, the typical infrastructure roles are merging as the environment gets more complex. Knowing just VMware or just Windows isn’t good enough. Let’s step back from the beginning, the olden days, just before we joined knowing Windows server and a little about the server hardware (Windows and Intel) to create Wintel.

If we take the olden days, there used to be strong dividing line between infrastructure and application based wintel engineers.

Infrastructure guys did all the infrastructure, the core Windows, desktop, layered infrastructure support:

• DC’s – domain controllers
• SMS
• File + Print services
• Notes/Exchange server support

Their infrastructure tended to be resilient, their oncall was therefore on the whole that bit easier

Application guys did server support and anything else mandated or required of the application teams:

• Application support and assistance – it’s difficult to sit and say I can ping the server when the trading system is down
• Application specific server configuration  -changing desktop heap, the page file, setting up specific sector sizes for the file system
• Clustering / IIS and Citrix support, web deployments and Citrix installs, application publishing etc

The application role tended to be more on call 24/7, available, we just can’t have application servers down, particularly if their customer facing or web based and therefore brand sensitive. The Market Data/ION systems for example might lead to fines if the systems go down during trading hours.

I’m generalizing of course, every role is different just as every site, and both roles are just as important as each other within their relevant business lines. However, in recent months, the ‘Wintel’ role has changed, it’s become much more diverse, the infrastructure and application roles are merging, virtualization has come into play as has blade technology where someone needs to configure the ILOs, the Cisco or integrated network switches.

This is fine, that’s the way the market place is going, my concern however is (and I’ve seen it before), if you ask for the world, you’ll get it, but whether you get someone with the relevant experience at the price your prepared to pay is another thing. We need to be more flexible with our teams, and understand that we cannot have every engineer certified and expert level in everything and anything, we want a diverse Wintel team of course we do, we want to be able to share knowledge, skills and business experience, but what is it we need from out Wintel engineers in my humble opinion? By Wintel I mean the typical core operating system support function, the role in which you look after a range of servers.

Exposure to:

• Microsoft Clustering, IIS and Citrix – again support and understanding of the concepts the related technologies.
• VMware virtualization, whether it’s using virtual machines, virtualizing servers or building ESX servers.
• Knowledge of what Active Directory is, groups policies etc – remembering in the enterprise, typically there’s a team that does only Active Directory design and support.
• Some knowledge of applications, of the business criticality of the infrastructure you support.
• Understanding of the Problem, Request, Task and Incident process under the ITIL framework including Change.
• Hardware exposure to rack servers, blades and some knowledge of SAN

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