In my previous posts, I explained Why do I want to become a VCDX and How can I get started. In this post, I’ll explain the challenges I faced with my Conceptual Design, when I wanted to give up and how I got going again.
My Conceptual Design Nightmare
I started my journey in January fueled with energy and ready to go. At the end of January, I had my first version of my conceptual ready for review. My mentors reviewed it and I got roasted. Why? Because, I used a template from a previous project (don’t do it!) and re-used my requirements, constraints, risks, and assumptions. There were contradictions in my requirements, my constraints were no real restrictions. I didn’t have risks linking back to my constraints. My Uptime, RTO, and RPO were not aligned… I tried to take a shortcut. In your VCDX journey, there are no shortcuts. It’s about what you learn during the process.
In my second attempt, I created my own template and reviewed all my requirements, constraints, risks, and assumptions. A good help for me was to re-read the chapters in the VDI Design Guide about these topics. (It doesn’t matter if you are doing another track!)
I made sure that everything matched and was well thought off. I still had difficulties with making my Uptime, RTO, and RPO fit together.
My Colleague Jeffrey Kusters wrote I great blog about this: Dealing with Availability and Recoverability requirements in a VCDX Design.
It’s a great article and it helped me figure things out. Another helpful resource are VMware’s SLA’s for their cloud offerings and how they measure their uptime and how fast they can restore their services to “normal”. (Credits to Jeffrey Kusters once again!)
Another struggle for me is to keep things smart and simple (KISS). When you have a technical background you often make things too complicated. One of my biggest challenges is(!) creating drawings with Visio. I had no inspiration and never created a Visio design from scratch. I only modified existing ones. So, I reached out to ITQ’s Visio Picasso aka Johan van Amersfoort. He showed me some examples and I felt confident to create my own Visio art. The next drawing is a complete
I’m no Picasso but I like it!
Personal Challenges
A VCDX journey requires a lot of time and investment from you, your family, and your employer. I explained in a previous post that planning and timing are very important. This is a big challenge for me. Some of my personal challenges for 2020 are:
- We are expecting a child at the end of summer
- I want to help my new awesome colleague who wants to learn everything about Horizon
- I have some ideas to work on services for ITQ
- I want to become a VCDX
- I want to write blogposts
- I want to present about EUC at events
- I want to create lightboards about Workspace ONE
- I want to work on standardization for our EUC projects
- I want to test new technologies and stay up to date with everything EUC related
- …
As you can imagine there are not enough hours in a day to cover all this, even with a good planning. Then also Covid-19 happened and has an impact on our family life. A few weeks back I had no energy left to work on my design and to keep my focus. I could not keep this up and something had to change. I talked to some people who I look up to and they told me to take a break. I left my design a side for a few weeks and installed my newb lab (also something I want to blog about..) I started with some of my hobbies again and I felt my energy was coming back. I had a look at everything I wanted to do and scratched everything except becoming a dad of course and my VCDX journey.
Don’t quit your hobbies or other things that make you happy but plan accordingly and keep your focus. There is no shortcut in becoming a VCDX it’s about the journey. (Should I make T-shirt from that quote with the VCDX Unicorn?)
The original article was posted on: maartencaus.be
