Expand Your Knowledge With WEI Technology Workshops

We recently sat down with WEI’s Senior Architect and Virtualization Ambassador, Mark Gabryjelski to ask him about his active role in creating, updating, and delivering technology workshops. Mark has been with WEI for more than ten years and is the founder of the "IT Architect Series" of books. As part of the series, he co-authored?"Foundation in the Art of IT Infrastructure Design" and "Stories from the Field, Vol 1."

?What is your role around WEI technology workshops?

That’s a good question – I’d say pretty much everything at this point. I spend roughly six months per year focused directly on creating, updating, and delivering WEI’s workshops. I also assist in other workshops that WEI has and continues to formalize. These trainings are a very important to our customers’ success.?

?What does serving as WEI’s workshop leader mean to you?

Well first and foremost, I get to educate our customers, and that’s a value this company has had well before I even started here. Giving our clients an opportunity to be trained on our technology solutions is a major plus because, let’s face it, would you really want untrained employees held responsible for meeting your business goals?

?Staying as involved as a I do with our customers means that I get to influence how they approach running a datacenter, and that’s pretty cool. It’s self-fulfilling that I get to help map a customer’s business requirements to the actual features and benefits that the software can provide. The frontline IT support staff members that I assist are important, too, because I can help map business objectives to the software used to meet their goals. We all know that technology can do a lot of things, but if it doesn’t align with the business requirements, then why use it?

?What are the critical points you make to workshop attendees?

That you need to start with a goal and that goal should map to a business requirement. As IT professionals, WEI is successful if we meet the stated goal for our customer. Doesn’t matter if it is applications designed to be performant, securing workloads, improving end user experience, backup or recovery…we need to meet the requirement that we say we will. But it starts with the customer identifying their business objectives and progressing from there.

?I try to emphasize that during the design phase the importance of minimizing the ongoing ownership tasks (or improving the TCO). You know, things like simplifying the management of hosts to the context of a cluster (which has many hosts). I think that approaching things in this manner reduces the “points of management” to just the cluster object, and all hosts inherit the policies and business requirements. This simplifies many ongoing tasks.

?Since many of the workshops we do are designed around the consumption of software, I like to stress the KISS principle – keep it simple! Just because nearly all software running in the datacenter has many “knobs and dials” so to speak, that does not mean you should tune all of them. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. You have to understand the repercussions of those decisions ahead of time.

?Why do you pride yourself on taking these trainings so seriously?

Well, the backstory here is about 20 years old, so I may be dating myself, but here goes. I do think the logic is still valid, though.

?Since 1996 I have worked at a VAR (value added reseller). In 2002, I was training customers on the technologies that they were consuming.

?Everything really kickstarted for me with VMware back on ESX 1.5.1. At that early point, there was next-to-no education available for engineers getting acquainted with x86 virtualization.?It started as a set of customer build guides that I created, along with the start of the best practices for the set up and deployment of the solutions.?These technologies were new to many people, and since ESX was based on Linux.

?Where I’m going with this is that it brought a lot of IT professionals out of their comfort zone. Going just deep enough and explaining the technologies involved so that you could consume with confidence, and of course, assist the customers with the actual implementations while doing these trainings. Essentially, when I finished delivery of the course material I had created, the attending customers had a fully functional solution that was built by THEIR team with me, and the confidence to take on the operational aspects of the solution. They knew I was only a phone call away if they ever had any questions.

?With WEI workshops for VMware vSphere, Nutanix, disaster recovery products, Veeam, Horizon View, vRealize, and PowerShell available to our customers, it’s critical to keep our customers up to date with this knowledge as the solutions go through changes over the life of the solution. It’s not surprising for a best practice to change once a new software version is rolled out.

?What are the real benefits to a WEI customer if they attend a training workshop?

Have you ever bought a car without knowing how to drive? Or knowing how to maintain it? Chances are you haven’t. And I think that’s a fair analogy to purchasing new software if you don’t understand how they meet your company’s main objectives.

?WEI has always put its customers first, and I stated as much at the start of our conversation. The only way we can instill confidence in our customers is if we can enable them to understand, consume, and operate the solutions that they are using in their daily operations. And for the engineers that are new to technology and setting their career path forward, I really believe it is our job to provide them a solid foundational knowledge. As for our engineering veterans, it is important that their ideas and skill sets are consistently validated within the respective subject matter. If not, then should you really be tasked with meeting your company’s objectives?

WEI provides (and identifies other) continuing education opportunities, which can help any organization to avoid risk in operations and design of solutions. I know that the WEI staff is always available to our customers to discuss ideas, changes, or the maintenance plans they have.?

Interested in Attending a WEI Workshop?

View our remaining technology workshop schedule for 2022:

• Nutanix
• PowerShell
• Veeam Backup and Recovery
• vSphere 7.0