Everpure Cloud – Part 4 of 6

Real-World Use Cases: Azure VMs, AVS, EC2, EVS & SQL Server

Post 4 in my Everpure Cloud series. New here? Start with Post 1 for the full roadmap.

We’ve covered the “what” (Post 2) and the “how” (Post 3). Now let’s get into the “so what” — the actual workloads people are running on Everpure Cloud today. If you’re evaluating this for your own environment, this is probably the post you skipped ahead to, and that’s fair.

Azure Virtual Machines

This is the use case that’s moved the most recently, so it’s worth spending extra time here. Everpure Cloud Azure Native for Azure VMs — a fully managed offering jointly engineered by Everpure and Microsoft — reached general availability in 2026. It lets you provision enterprise-grade block storage volumes and attach them directly to Azure VMs, fully managed inside the Azure portal. No appliances to stand up, no separate storage stack to stitch together: volumes mount as standard Windows or Linux disks, with thin provisioning, deduplication, and compression built in, and capacity and IOPS scale independently of compute.

For teams standardizing on Azure, this is now the lowest-friction entry point into Everpure Cloud — and given how recently it hit GA, it’s worth checking the current release notes for supported regions and configurations before you plan a rollout.

Azure VMware Solution (AVS)

This one’s personal for me, given my VMware background. AVS lets you run a native VMware SDDC inside Azure, which is a great option for organizations that aren’t ready (or don’t want) to re-platform their applications to be cloud-native, but still want the operational and financial benefits of running in Azure.

The wrinkle with AVS has always been storage — VMware environments have specific expectations around how storage behaves, and translating that cleanly into a public cloud context isn’t trivial. Everpure Cloud’s support for AVS is worth a close look if you’re supporting VMware workloads in Azure and want storage that doesn’t require you to relearn how you think about capacity, snapshots, or performance.

Amazon EC2

On the AWS side, Everpure Cloud Dedicated extends the same storage-intensive workload support to EC2 instances. This is where the “Dedicated works on both clouds” point from Post 2 actually pays off — if you’re multi-cloud, you’re not learning a second operational model just because you crossed from Azure to AWS.

Worth flagging for security-conscious teams: a recent platform update now deploys all Lambda functions associated with Everpure Cloud Dedicated for AWS inside your own VPC by default, rather than outside it. If your org has network isolation or compliance requirements around where cloud components execute, this is the kind of detail that decides whether a deployment clears review — I’d recommend confirming the exact version/rollout status with your Everpure contact before you rely on it in a compliance conversation.

Amazon Elastic VMware Service (EVS)

The AWS equivalent of the AVS story: native VMware workloads running inside AWS. Same logic applies — if your team already knows how to think about VMware storage operations, EVS plus Everpure Cloud is aiming to preserve that mental model rather than force a rebuild.

SQL Server 2025 on Azure

This is a good one to slow down on, because database workloads are usually where storage performance and protection requirements get the most demanding. Running SQL Server on Azure with Everpure Cloud underneath is positioned around hybrid flexibility — the ability to run demanding, transaction-heavy workloads with consistent performance and data protection whether the primary instance sits on-prem or in Azure.

If you’ve ever had to explain to a DBA why the cloud version of “the same database” performs differently than on-prem, you know why this use case gets its own line item instead of getting lumped in with “general VM storage.”

Which use case should you dig into first?

If I had to prioritize for a reader trying to figure out where to start:

  • Already all-in on Azure, standard VM workloads? → Azure VMs is your on-ramp
  • Running VMware and don’t want to re-platform? → AVS or EVS depending on your cloud
  • Multi-cloud shop? → EC2 + AVS/EVS combo, via Dedicated
  • Performance-sensitive databases? → The SQL Server on Azure story is worth a dedicated conversation with your DBA team before you commit to an architecture

Coming up

We’ve talked architecture and use cases — now let’s talk money. Post 5 digs into the FinOps side: predictable pricing, built-in data efficiency, and the questions you should be asking before you sign anything.

Subscribe below to catch it when it drops.

Everpure Cloud – Part 3 of 6

Architecture Deep Dive: The Unified Data Plane

Part 3 in my Everpure Cloud series. Catch up on Part 1 and Part 2 if you’re just joining.

Every vendor in this space has a phrase like “unified data plane” or “single control plane” somewhere in their deck. It’s easy to gloss over as marketing-speak. But since this concept is the actual foundation everything else in the Everpure Cloud series builds on — cost predictability, data mobility, consistent protection — it’s worth slowing down and actually understanding what’s happening under the hood.

What “unified data plane” actually means

At a basic level, a data plane is the layer responsible for actually moving and storing your data — as opposed to the control plane, which handles the management and orchestration decisions about that data. When a vendor says “unified data plane,” they’re claiming that no matter where your data physically lives — on-prem, in Azure, in AWS — it’s being handled by the same underlying operating environment, not three different systems duct-taped together with APIs.

Why does that distinction matter in practice? Because most hybrid cloud pain doesn’t come from any single environment being hard to manage. It comes from the seams — the translation layer between how your on-prem SAN team thinks about snapshots and how your cloud team thinks about them, or the migration project that turns into a six-month slog because the source and destination don’t speak the same operational language.

How this plays out for admins

If you’ve spent any time in the VMware world (and if you’re reading this blog, odds are you have), think about it this way: part of what made vSphere powerful wasn’t any single feature — it was that once you learned the operational model, it was consistent whether you were managing five hosts or five hundred. A unified data plane is trying to deliver that same consistency, but stretched across on-prem and multiple public clouds instead of just across your own data center.

Practically, that shows up as:

  • Consistent management — the same operational patterns and tooling whether you’re touching an on-prem array or a cloud-native deployment
  • Data mobility without refactoring — moving data between environments without having to redesign how applications talk to storage
  • Unified governance — visibility and control that doesn’t stop at the edge of whichever cloud you happen to be looking at that day

The migration angle

The “without refactoring” part is worth sitting with for a second, because it’s usually where hybrid cloud projects go sideways. A lot of storage migrations aren’t hard because moving bytes is hard — they’re hard because the target environment doesn’t behave like the source, so something downstream breaks: a backup job, a DR runbook, an application assumption nobody documented. A genuinely unified data plane is supposed to remove that class of problem entirely, because the operational behavior doesn’t change based on geography.

I’ll be testing that claim more directly in Post 4, where we get into real workload types — including a use case that’ll be familiar to anyone running Azure VMware Solution.

Where this connects to cost and protection

This architecture isn’t just a technical nicety — it’s the reason the two topics coming up later in this series (cost efficiency and data protection) are even possible to deliver consistently. You can’t have predictable pricing across environments if the underlying platform behaves differently in each one. You can’t have consistent immutable snapshots and recovery if protection is bolted on differently per cloud. The unified data plane is the foundation the rest of the pitch stands on — which is exactly why it deserved its own post instead of a bullet point.

Coming up

Part 4 gets concrete: Azure VMs, Azure VMware Solution (AVS), EC2, Amazon Elastic VMware Service (EVS), and a SQL Server on Azure workload example. If you run any of these today, that’s the post to bookmark.

Subscribe below so you don’t miss it.

Everpure Cloud – Part 2 of 6

Everpure Cloud 101: Azure Native vs. Dedicated

This is Post 2 in my Everpure Cloud series. If you missed the intro, Everpure Cloud – Part 1 of 6 to see where this is all headed.

Before you can evaluate whether Everpure Cloud fits your environment, you need to understand that “Everpure Cloud” isn’t one product — it’s two deployment models built for two different kinds of teams. Picking the wrong one, or not realizing there’s a choice to make, is the fastest way to end up frustrated three months into a rollout. Let’s break both down.

Everpure Cloud Azure Native

This is the fully managed option, and it lives directly inside the Azure portal — no separate console, no context-switching.

Who it’s for: Teams that want block storage to behave like a native Azure service. If your cloud team is already comfortable operating inside Azure’s ecosystem and doesn’t want to own another platform’s day-to-day management, this is your lane.

What stands out:

  • Fully managed — Everpure handles the operational overhead
  • Native integration into the Azure portal
  • A 30-day free trial available directly through Azure Marketplace, so you can kick the tires without a procurement cycle
  • New as of this year: a dedicated Azure Native offering for attaching volumes straight to Azure VMs, jointly engineered with Microsoft, reached general availability in 2026. Volumes show up to Windows and Linux VMs as standard native disks — no special drivers or extra tooling. We’ll go deeper on this in Post 4.

The trade-off: You’re trading some control for simplicity. If your organization has specific operational requirements that don’t fit a managed model — strict change control processes, specialized tuning, multi-cloud parity requirements — that’s where Dedicated comes in.

Everpure Cloud Dedicated

This is the customer-managed option, and critically, it’s available on both Azure and AWS — not just Azure.

Who it’s for: Teams that want (or need) more hands-on control of the storage layer, or that operate across both major clouds and want a consistent experience rather than juggling two different tools.

What stands out:

  • Customer-managed, giving you direct control over configuration and operations
  • Cross-cloud availability (Azure and AWS)
  • Purchasable directly through an Everpure partner, or via the AWS and Azure Marketplaces
  • Free trial options available for evaluation, though the process runs through a partner rather than a self-service portal

The trade-off: More control means more operational responsibility. If your team is lean or you’re trying to reduce the number of platforms you actively manage, that’s worth weighing against the flexibility you gain.

A simple way to decide

If I were advising a customer on this (which, let’s be honest, is basically what this whole series is), I’d ask three questions:

  1. Are you single-cloud (Azure only) or multi-cloud (Azure + AWS)? Multi-cloud pushes you toward Dedicated by default, since Azure Native doesn’t cover AWS.
  2. Do you want a managed service or operational control? This is the classic managed-vs-DIY trade-off that shows up in every infrastructure decision — pick based on your team’s bandwidth, not what sounds more impressive on a slide.
  3. How fast do you need to start testing? Azure Native’s self-service 30-day trial through the Marketplace is the lower-friction path if you just want to see it in action this week.

What’s next

In Post 3, we’re going under the hood to look at the architecture that both of these deployment models share: the Unified Data Plane. That’s the piece that actually delivers on the “consistent management across environments” promise — and it’s worth understanding before you commit to either flavor.

Subscribed yet? Hit the button below so Post 3 lands in your inbox instead of getting lost in your feed.

Everpure Cloud – Part 1 of 6

Why Everpure Cloud?

If you’ve been reading Spooky Solutions for a while, you know my pattern by now. I get curious about a technology, I go down a rabbit hole, and eventually that rabbit hole turns into a blog series. This time, the rabbit hole is Everpure Cloud.

Here’s how I got here. Between customer conversations, VMUG chats, and my own timeline, one theme kept surfacing over and over this year: teams that are done treating “cloud strategy” and “storage strategy” as two separate conversations. Everyone’s running some mix of on-prem, Azure, and AWS, and the pain isn’t the workloads themselves — it’s the seams between environments. Different tools, different cost models, different ways of thinking about data protection depending on where the bits happen to live that week.

That’s the problem Everpure Cloud is built around, and it’s why I wanted to spend some real time with it instead of just skimming a press release and moving on.

Quick naming note before we go further: if you know this company as Pure Storage, that’s still the same company — it rebranded to Everpure in early 2026. Same team, same technology, new name showing up across their products and docs.

So what is it, in plain English?

Strip away the marketing language and Everpure Cloud is a hybrid, multi-cloud storage service that extends enterprise-grade storage across your on-prem environment and the public cloud — specifically AWS and Azure — through what they call a “unified data plane.” The pitch is simple: manage, protect, and move your data the same way, with the same operating model, no matter which side of the hybrid line it’s sitting on.

It comes in two flavors, which we’ll unpack properly in Post 2:

  • Everpure Cloud Azure Native — fully managed, baked right into the Azure portal
  • Everpure Cloud Dedicated — customer-managed, available on both Azure and AWS

There’s also a cost angle here that caught my attention as a former customer who’s had to defend infrastructure spend in front of a CFO more than once: predictable, subscription-based pricing instead of the usual cloud storage surprise-bill anxiety.

Why I’m doing this as a series, not a single post

Because a single post would either be 4,000 words nobody finishes, or a shallow overview that doesn’t actually help you make a decision. Instead, I’m going to break this down the way I’d want it broken down if I were the one evaluating it for my own environment:

  1. Why Everpure Cloud? — you’re reading it
  2. Everpure Cloud 101: Azure Native vs. Dedicated — the two deployment models, side by side
  3. Architecture Deep Dive: The Unified Data Plane — how the tech actually works
  4. Real-World Use Cases — Azure VMs, AVS, EC2, EVS, and SQL Server on Azure
  5. The Cost Angle: FinOps & Data Efficiency — what it actually means for your budget
  6. Data Protection & Getting Started — snapshots, recovery, and a walkthrough of the trial

If you’ve got specific questions you want answered along the way — cost comparisons, migration gotchas, how this stacks up against tools you’re already running — drop them in the comments or find me on LinkedIn. I’ll work them into later posts where it makes sense.

Let’s go

I’ll be honest, I don’t know yet where I’ll land on this by Post 6. That’s kind of the point of doing it out loud instead of writing a tidy conclusion after the fact. If you’re wrestling with hybrid storage strategy, cost predictability, or just want to understand what “unified data plane” means beyond the buzzword, stick around.

Subscribe below to get the rest of the series as it drops — I’m aiming for every other week so this doesn’t turn into another multi-year gap like my posting history apparently allows for. 😅

Next up: Post 2, where we break down Azure Native vs. Dedicated and talk about who each one is actually for.

Tips, Habits & Grit – What Successful Engineers do to Advance their Careers

Hello #vCommunity friends. Today I’m going to share a presentation that I gave recently at the Atlanta VMUG UserCon event. This was originally going to be a joint presentation between myself and my good friend Ariel Sanchez. Due to a scheduling conflict though, Ariel was unable to attend so I made it my own. The premise is a simple one. What have we as engineers done over the years to be successful? What are some of the tips and tricks that we picked up over the years that we can pass on to you all?

This topic came about over a number of conversations that Ariel and I had over the years. I even had the bright idea of trying to turn it into a book at one point but life got in the way of that. At least that is the excuse that I am going with. I did however write a previous blog post on this topic, which you can find here: How To Be An Awesome IT Professional

This presentation however, is a more up to date version of that post.

The topics that I focused on are the ones that I find most important. This list may be different for you, but that’s OK. Although, if you have other ideas, I’d love to hear them. The topics that I covered are as follows:

  • Be Educated
    • Never Stop Learning
    • Get certified, for the right reasons
    • Know your role, and its expectations
  • Be Organized
    • Develop good habits and routines
    • Create and follow standards
    • Learn how to create and maintain documentation
    • Automate as much as possible
    • Leave a place better than you found it
  • Be Like Water
    • Adapt, improvise and overcome
    • Adopt a growth mindset
    • Be a failure and learn from it
    • Have a Plan B
  • Be Vulnerable
    • “I don’t know” is OK
    • Don’t be afraid to ask for help
    • Find a mentor(s)
  • Be a Detective
    • Learn troubleshooting skills
    • Knowing the answer is not as important as being able to find the answer
    • RTFM – Read the Friendly Manual
    • Create a blog and use it as your own personal help file
  • Be Approachable
    • Don’t be that person……seriously, they suck
    • Break out of your shell
    • Be uncomfortable
    • Try to find ways to say yes
    • Be a good teammate
  • Be Collaborative
    • You’re not alone
    • Share the knowledge
    • Train others
    • Be “social”
    • Participate
  • Be Dependable
    • If you say you’ll do it, DO IT!
    • Earn a reputation for getting things done
    • Always have integrity
    • Do the little things
    • Listen and W.A.I.T (Why am I talking?)
    • Give your full attention to others
    • Volunteer to help
  • Be The Business
    • Know what your business does
    • Know your role in the business
    • Take a business approach to technical challenges
  • Be A Mentor
    • Give back
    • Lead by example
  • Be Rested
    • You can’t be on all of the time
    • Time management is critical
    • Maintain a work/life balance
    • Don’t lose sight of what is important to you
    • Burnout is real
    • Be present
  • Be Relentless
    • Never stop improving
    • Keep learning
    • Ask questions
    • Be curious
    • Be your best self
    • YOU ARE AN EXPERT WHETHER YOU KNOW IT OR NOT!

Check out the slide deck below and please reach out to me at @NScuola on Twitter with your thoughts on what I covered. I hope that these tips are helpful in your career journey. I’m always willing to discuss this topic 1 on 1, to a group, over video chat, the phone, smoke signals, carrier pigeons, you name it. I’d love to get more of a discussion going around this topic as I think it is critical. If this is something that you’d like to see in a podcast or video form, let me know that too. Please enjoy, share and make my slide deck below your own. See you next time.

Tips, Habits & Grit – What Successful Engineers do to Advance their Careers

NOTE: We will be presenting this topic again at the #ChicagoVMUG UserCon on October 24th. If you’re going to be in Chicago, please come by Salon 8 at 4:15 PM and join in the discussion. You can register for the event here: Chicago VMUG UserCon 2019

Upgrade Your Technical Skills Using a Business Approach

It’s been a while since I posted but with #Blogtober kicking off, I figured that this was as good a time as any. Here’s a bit more about Blogtober itself straight from the source. Thanks for the Motivation Matt!

This is going to be a short post with some links to content. I recently got on stage at VMworld for the first time. I submitted a topic to the vBrownBag call for content around the importance of not only understanding the technical aspects of your career but also the business aspects.

This concept has been particularly eye opening for me especially in the last 5-10 years of my career. I was always technically sound and took pride in doing a great job in all that I set out to do but there was something missing. I wasn’t even aware of it at first. It wasn’t until I worked with someone who clearly knew the importance of knowing the business along with the technical that it finally clicked for me. I told this story during a Meet the Expert interview with @arielsanchezmor here (fast forward to the 12:15 mark for the story):

Long story short, how can you know how to architect a solution if you don’t know the business outcome that you are trying to solve for. That’s really what the point of this presentation was, I wanted to take the business oriented approach that I use and share it with all of you. Rather than trying to transcribe everything that I talked about, I’d rather just share the presentation with you.

Here is the recording of the VMworld presentation. A link to the slides can be found below.

POWERPOINT – Upgrade Your Technical Skills Using a Business Approach by Nick Scuola

The New RTFM, Part 2 – The Presentation

ZertoCON 2019 has come and gone. For those of you in attendance, thank you. Thanks for supporting Zerto and coming out to learn about IT Resilience and how it’s changing the way we look at data protection. For those who didn’t make it out, fear not. You can check out the majority of the presentations on YouTube. You’ll find that one of those presentations is actually mine. I was fortunate enough to present for the first time at ZertoCON (Disclaimer: I did participate in a customer panel in 2017). The title of the presentation was “Take Me Home, Ops Road“. We were in Nashville, so all of our presentations had song inspired themes.

What was my presentation all about? I’m glad you asked. It was RTFM come to life. A lot of people know what Zerto does at a high level. (Provide IT Resilience via Disaster Recovery & Backup, Workload Mobility and Cloud Agility.) How do we do it though? What makes Zerto different from other platforms? Why would you spend money on us? Can we make your job (and your life) better? (The answer is yes by the way, I speak from experience. Former customer, remember?) At ZertoCON, I talked specifically about the why and the how of Zerto. What are the different operations in the platform? When and WHY would you use each? How do they differ from the way that you do things today? If you’re interested in learning more, check out the link below for the full ZertoCON Presentation.

Also, if you’re going to be in San Francisco, for VMworld this August, come by the Zerto booth to meet me and learn more. I’ll also be giving a lightning talk version of RTFM at the Zerto booth. There may even be stickers 🙂 Hope to see you there!

 

The New RTFM

Most of you who come here know that I post A LOT about the #vCommunity. What you may not know is that I actually have a day job. Who would have thought? In between being a dad, and a husband, and a VMUG Leader in NYC, I’m also a Solutions Engineer for Zerto. I’ve been in this role for over a year and I love it. I really enjoy speaking to customers and learning different and innovative ways of doing things.

As part of this totally awesome gig, I get to talk to a lot of customers and prospective customers about their disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC) plans and approaches. One of my favorite questions to ask is this:

“How many people went into IT to become a DR admin?”

I usually get crickets. Not because it’s a bad thing to be in BC/DR (I make a great living from it), but because it’s not a sexy job. It’s usually a task that gets dumped in your lap for legal or compliance reasons and it takes you away from the things that you WANT to do. It usually involved getting a whole bunch of different teams (Virtualization, Storage, Networking, DBAs, App/Dev, etc) involved and spending a few weeks (usually a few months) preparing for a test that is almost always done during a (holiday) weekend. Who the hell wants to work on the weekend? I sure don’t, that’s why I made the move to the vendor side but that’s a whole other story.

There’s one other component that I haven’t mentioned yet. Runbooks. Ugh. Just the thought of those things make me cringe. Who remembers or still uses those huge loose-leaf binders with hundreds of pages of step by step instructions that were written (and probably not updated) years ago. Once a year you would have to dust them off for instructions on how to recover your environment in the event of a disaster. Then you would have to go page by page with a bunch of other team members and hope that the system matches what is on the page.

You know what is really helpful with this kind of situation? The simple acronym RTFM. I come from the military and this acronym had a very simple meaning

READ

THE

F*ING

MANUAL

That however, is the old RTFM.

Since working at Zerto, I’ve come up with a new meaning.

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

RECOVER

TEST

FAILOVER

MOVE

 

These are some of the essential functions that any IT Resiliency Platform should be able to provide you. By performing these functions, you’ll ensure that your workloads are protected, your data is intact, and your processes are valid. Let’s take a quick look at each of these functions:

 

RECOVER

This is the ability to restore your data. It could be restoring, or as we like to say resuming your VMs or applications. Or it could mean restoring files or folders from a point in time before a disruption.

 

TEST

Testing is probably one of the most important but also most overlooked operations when it comes to IT Resilience. Testing is how you know with great confidence that your systems will work when you attempt to get them back up and running. It’s a way to recover your VMs or applications in practice before having to do the real thing.

 

FAILOVER

Failover is a misleading term. This is actually recovering your VMs or applications at the target site. Think of this as initiating your DR plan in a live scenario. If your production site becomes unavailable for whatever reason, this is how you recover your workloads and make your users happy again. Simply put, when you’re down, get yourself back up and running.

 

MOVE

Zerto has a function called Move VPG which provides you with Application Mobility by migrating a Virtual Protection Group (VPG) to another location. (NOTE: A VPG is comprised of the VMs you are protecting) This could be moving to another storage platform, or another datacenter, moving from one hypervisor to another or even moving to, from or between cloud providers.

 

In order to have a complete IT Resilience platform, I believe you need to be able to perform all of these functions simply and consistently. Stay tuned as I will dive into each operation a bit more and how Zerto specifically performs each function.

 

PSA: Before you upgrade to vSphere 6.7

***I recently posted this topic on the NYC VMUG Community Forum (Found Here). I thought it would be a good idea to add it here as well.***

I want to provide a little guidance to anyone looking to upgrade to vSphere 6.7.

One thing that I see constantly with my customers and VMware admins the world over when a new version comes out is that everyone wants to install it as fast as possible.

DON’T.

Take a deep breath.

Do your homework first.

Make sure you start out by reading the VMware support document in reference to upgrading. Important information before upgrading to vSphere 6.7 (53704)

Along with this document, there are a number of factors that you need to check before you upgrade. Here are a few that I can think of off the top of my head.

  • Hardware Compatibility
    • Have you checked the VMware Compatibility Guide? VMware Compatibility Guide
    • Is all of the hardware in your environment supported?
    • Do you need to be on a specific firmware version
  • Software Compatability
    • Do you have any applications that rely on vCenter to function? (Ex.Zerto, Veeam, SRM, Citrix) Will they be affected when you upgrade?
    • Prior to upgrade, you must ensure that all of your 3rd party apps will function with the new version of vCenter. If they are not supported at this time, can the vendor provide you with a timeframe for support?
    • Will these applications be down during the upgrade process? For how long? Will that impact your end users? (<—- MOST IMPORTANT QUESTION) An example of this would be if vCenter is down, will I be able to provision new desktops?
  • Operations
    • Is there a particular order in which you need to upgrade your environment? Host firmware before ESXi upgrade? vCenter before ESXi (YES!), vCenter before SRM?
    • Do you need a maintenance window for the end user impacting upgrades?
    • Can you upgrade the firmware of your ESXi hosts, prior to upgrading them to the new version of ESXi? Will that version be supported on your current version of ESXi as well as the new version? This is another great opportunity to look at the VMware Compatibility Guide
    • Same goes for your storage platform. Ensure that your storage array will work with the new version as well.
    • Do you need to upgrade any certificates? Are there any additional security concerns?

These are just some general guidelines that you need to consider before moving ahead with a vSphere upgrade. The old adage “Measure twice, cut once” really comes into play here. The more prepared you are prior to implementation, the more successful you will be.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the matter, Did I forget anything? Have you run across this in any of your previous upgrades? Would you share any other tips? Please let us know.

The Importance of the #vCommunity – Part 2 – The Benefits

Hey everyone, it’s time for Part 2 in my #vCommunity series. Today I’m going to talk about some of the benefits that the #vCommunity can provide you as an individual.

Friendships

You’re going to make friends.

I’m going to put this one first and foremost as it’s the most important aspect to me. You’re going to meet a lot of really good people. What is great about the #vCommunity to me is the fact that you’re meeting like minded individuals. I touched on this a bit during Part 1 of the series. Most of the people that I’ve come across that are involved in the #vCommunity participate because the genuinely want to be there. They are selfless and encouraging almost to a fault and always seem to be willing to lend a helping hand. To me, those are some of the most important qualities that I look for in my friends. I have been lucky enough to make a lot of friends in the #vCommunity that I plan on keeping for a very long time. It doesn’t just have to be people you meet in person, it could people you hardly ever or never meet that you talk to on Twitter. When people share a connection, it’s very easy for that to turn into a friendship.

Increased knowledge

You’re going to get smarter.

Whichever route you choose to engage in the #vCommunity, someone, somewhere is going to teach you something. It goes both ways too, you may teach someone else something. You’ll come across great training, blog posts, great speakers, study groups, hackathons, Git repositories, you name it. Once again, people will have a common goal and will look to work with others to get there. vBrownBag is a great example of #vCommunity members coming together to build awesome content that is by the #vCommunity and for the #vCommunity. Study groups have been pretty good to me in the past and I always try to share the knowledge whenever I can. You should too.

Career advancement

You’re going to get a better job.

Even if you love your job, there’s plenty of other ones out there. You may not have the skills today or have the right relationships to advance at your current spot but the #vCommunity can help with that too. The #vCommunity provides for awesome networking. Not the route/switch kind of networking but the LinkedIn kind. The more people you meet, the more relationships that you’ll build. Yes, skills are important to land a job but relationships are way more important. Having the right person recommend you for a position or even make you aware of a position is critical for landing the right job. Plus, having existing relationships at a company make the transition easier for everyone involved.

Mentorship

You’re going to teach someone else to be awesome like you.

I don’t know many people that have made it to where they are today without a little help or guidance. I for sure didn’t make it here alone. I’ve had a lot of great mentors along the way. Now that I am fortunate enough to have advanced in my career, I try to give back as much as I can. This is one of the main reasons that I became a VMUG Leader. It gives me the opportunity to meet new people and provide any guidance on how they can learn more about technology but also advance their careers. I’ve been through enough over the years that I’ve experienced lots of ups and a few downs as well. If sharing some of my experiences can influence others in a positive way than I’d be more than willing to do so. It’s also one of the reasons that I became of the Tech Level Up Project. I’d recommend checking it out. It’s just another way that you can give back to the #vCommunity. If you’re looking for a mentor, you just found one.

Improved public speaking

You’re going to talk to a room of people at some point.

This one may not be for everyone. I get it. Not everyone is comfortable getting in front of a room of people (especially a room of strangers) and speaking. That’s cool. You don’t have to be comfortable but it’s a great skill to have. It helps when you are comfortable presenting not only to your peers but to your management and customers as well. It takes practice and not everyone gets the opportunity to do it. I’m still learning how to be comfortable in front of a room. One of the best ways that I found to practice is to volunteer for a user presentation at a VMUG event or better yet, if your local VMUG does Whiteboard Meetings like we do at NYC VMUG, you’ll have the opportunity to get up and present to a smaller group of people to build your confidence and just get the repetitions in. Like anything else, practice makes perfect.

Recognition

You’re going to get noticed.

Some people live for this stuff, whereas to others it’s still a little weird. There are different forms of recognition. It can come in the form of an award, such as vExpert, Cisco Champion, Microsoft MVP, etc. but this isn’t the only form. The most rewarding experience that I’ve had was when someone came up to me at a VMUG event and mentioned that my article on my certification experience helped them pass the test as well. Another great example is meeting someone that you’ve spoken to on Twitter at an industry event like VMworld or Re:Invent. It doesn’t have to be limited to #vCommunity recognition though. Sometimes your work in the #vCommunity will be recognized by your employer as well which will lead to getting paid more money. Last I checked, people usually like money. 🙂

As you can see, these are just a few of the many benefits that being part of the #vCommunity can provide you. I’m sure that I forgot a bunch but I’ll make sure to keep this updated as they come to me. In part three of this series I’ll dive a little deeper into VMUG and how you can get involved.