vExpert2014

The last five years have gone by in the blink of an eye!   I’ve been in and out of IT for about 16 years now, and in Virtualization specifically, for about five years.    It sure feels like an eternity though…

About two and half years ago, we came up with this idea to do a live show at Veeam to serve our mutual community in Virtualization.  As you can imagine, not many people were on-board with this live show idea to begin with, for various valid reasons.     One though was that we might have to deal with hecklers, competitors, and other people trying to derail the show since it is live (ever watch CSPAN hecklers? ha-ha).    Another concern was with the hosts (myself and Shawn Lieu) as we were a pair of unknown engineers new to Virtualization.

After some convincing, some gifts to our managers, we finally had the green light to move forward and also a small budget to buy some equipment for the studio (thanks to Dave Siles and Scott Lillis for their support).   Whiteboard Fridays was born, a live Whiteboarding show for the Veeam and Virtualization (VMware) community.    You can still watch some of these early shows on our online DVR, wow…I can’t believe people tuned-in, and stayed the entire time.

Despite our low budget production, we received tons of feedback from our first viewers (some of whom are still watching us two years later), GOOD feedback! We couldn’t believe it.  People wanted more whiteboarding, more shows, so we immediately asked for help from our amazing Internet Marketing teams (Maxim Ivanov and his team). We were also lucky to have our own in-house vExperts, like Rick Vanover and Doug Hazelman, as guests on our show who contributed to the growth and popularity of Whiteboard Fridays.     We’ve now had community leaders like Emad Younis, James Bowling, Josh Cohen, Jason Langer, Luca Dell’oca, Symon Perriman, Mike Resseler and many other great community leaders and contributors.  All of them have made this show a huge success within our community.  We will be producing our 70th episode in November.

Anyhow, all of this has led to meeting great people, making great friends, and now to joining an amazing group of community leaders and contributors known as vExperts.    I’m humbled and honored to be part of this group of people who devote their free time to enriching and enlightening the community.     It is because of these folks that Shawn Lieu, the Veeam teeam and myself who are behind Whiteboard Fridays became motivated to give back in one way or another.    We hope to continue this tradition to help other Virtualization newbies and admins, and maybe inspire them to give back as well for new generations of admins.

I just want to thank everyone that has made Whiteboard Fridays a possibility these last two years.  From our awesome guests, to our amazing management, marketing, and evangelists teams.

Links:

http://www.veeam.com/whiteboard

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