My whole career has been about having things thrown at me and learning on the fly. This works out pretty well most of the time, especially when it’s a new-to-us technology that’s been around for a while already like Active Directory (which we didn’t start using until Server 2003 was out). With all of the published best-practices and configuration guides that were available by the time we implemented AD, it was practically a walk in the park.

There are times, however, when you’re actually keeping up with the trends in technology and have to deploy something that’s fairly new. I first deployed VMWare ESX Server a few years ago and there weren’t so many configuration options as there are now. It was a standalone server with a lot of local storage, and then all I had to do was manage the resources. Easy! So easy that we got another one to run some automation systems for the Engineering Department. Another success! After successfully reducing our hardware inventory without lowering our availability or system performance index, I convinced the powers-that-be that a full-blown virtualization platform was clearly the next step in our technological evolution. » Read more: Virtualization: best practices for real life.