Virtual Infrastructure Professionals Ltd

The Virtualisation Architect 

With the growing adoption of virtualisation technologies in the industry raises the need for professionals able to design new kinds of architectures, mastering new tools and interpreting new results.

It's common considering a virtualisation professional in the same fashion of a system engineer or architect, given similar needs to handle operating systems and applications.

But virtual technologies have raised the bar of required skills at new levels. Much higher than how many companies are realising today.

Server virtualisation experts in particular have to present an impressive background to be satisfactory.

Value of cross competence

Usually an average system engineer will have a deep understanding of one or more families of operating systems and a solid but limited amount of networking knowledge.

In the virtualisation world that wouldn't be enough.

Today's virtualisation projects, both when building a new infrastructure from scratch and when migrating a physical one, involve storage, network and security aspects to be considered carefully.

As soon as hardware will become more powerful and virtualisation firms will provide more tools for virtual machines automation, these aspects will grow even more in importance.

The modern virtualisation professional has to be highly competent on several disciplines, aware of differences between storage architectures like Storage Area Network (SAN) and Network Attached Storage (NAS), between network connections like Gigabit Ethernet and InfiniBand, between authentication schemes like Radius and LDAP, between servers form factors like traditional rack systems and blade systems, etc.

For each option, the architect has to be clear on expected implementation issues and performances results, so to choose the best one depending on customers' requirements and budget.

The virtualisation expert must be comfortable with high availability solutions, knowing which impact will have an approach at network, operating system or application level in the virtual datacenter.

In similar fashion he has to master different backup technologies, perfectly understanding how they will influence virtual machines performances and availability, and which virtualisation product works with which 3rd party solution.

If this won't be enough, holes in virtual platforms capabilities, oblige virtualisation professionals to bridge the gap with scripting languages, which require a whole set of skills on their own.

And if the project aims to offer a thin computing environment for hundreds or thousands of concurrent users, what today is usually called virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), the candidate has to also bring a notable experience in terminal services, to handle complexity of this very particular scenario where minimal errors can compromise business productivity in a substantial way.

If you believe you have these skills and would like a career at VIP.  Apply to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it