I’ll admit, this year has been a whirlwind of activity that has left me without the time to submit any meaningful work on this blog, and for that I do apologize!
There are currently five articles in ‘draft’ that I’m hoping to have published by the year’s end, topics surrounding everything from Xen Culture and where I see things going, design considerations that I am hoping will start a dialogue concerning new ‘standards’ and some day-to-day maintenance tips.
I’m also going to be starting a series oriented more for the traveling person, whether that be a consultant or not. You can’t have traveled as long as I have without something to give back, and I intend to.
For now, I thought I would take a moment and update just what I’ve been up to this year.
I officially launched Eshelman Enterprises, Inc this year, both an exciting and terrifying for sure.
All of 2012 I worked primarily for the same clients-IPM and Citrix Consulting as a Resident Consultant. For the uninitiated, this means that I was functioning as either a Principal Consultant or in some cases as an Architect, either leading projects or being the technical resource for said projects.
The Year began as 2011 ended in Milwaukee, WI- fine tuning SAP on XenApp for a Manufacturing client, then going on to help them remediate issues with another customized application.
From there, I was whisked off to Brazil to architect a XenServer solution in Brazil. For three months I was in Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Brasilia; by the end of April I had both United Gold status and knew how to say Good Morning and Thank You in Portuguese fairly well.
My spring and summer were spent largely performing Infrastructure and Health Check Assessments. These are 1-2 week projects that focus on meeting with staff and assessing the current state and things that should change about an environment. The process is the truest form of consulting because you spend about 30 hours in meetings, and another 20 writing a document to deliver- in this case I have to say I’ve had the most professional growth, as Citrix has a very intense documentation standard. I am convinced that I wrote more words this summer than the entirety of my college experience. Each document was no less than 40 pages, some up to around 80.
Places visited for this type of engagement include Seattle, New Hampshire, Cincinnati, San Dieg0) and Portland, OR.
A similar type of engagement in San Francisco focused first on bringing a XenApp/XenDesktop Proof of Concept into production but also leveraging EdgeSight and forming an Operational Support Design (OSD).
Design work this year included design, deployments and proof of concept work with XenApp and XenDesktop in Manhattan (New York), Fayetteville, NC and even some remote work for a few clients (rare, but I’ll take it!).
I will spend the rest of 2012 and the beginning months of 2013 in Toronto, Ontario (Canada). I have been asked to be the technical design resource to deploy a XenDesktop and XenApp solution for a major financial institution which has the potential to service over 100,000 users. Needless to say I’m honored to be a key part of this deployment- we hope to reign in over 900 servers in a very advanced design methodology utilizing Provisioning Services, Streaming, EdgeSight, NetScaler, Cloud Gateway, EdgeSight for Load Testing and more in what will surely be a very visible transformation of their current infrastructure.
Needless to say, it’s been a very busy year, but my wife has been able to visit many of these places with me using my miles, as well as our Debt-Free Honeymoon 2.0 celebration in Maui.
I anticipate making United Premier 1K in mid-December, which is also very exciting. That means I’ve traveled over 100,000 miles this year.
For a map of where I’ve been this year, click or check out:
View 2012 Travel Map in a larger map
See you… Out there.
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