Notes on building and running infrastructure at scale.
20+ years in enterprise IT — from Exchange migrations and data center builds to designing cloud platforms for major financial institutions. I write about the real work of keeping systems running.
- March 10, 2026
Building an Internal Cloud Platform from Scratch at Scale
What it actually takes to design a cloud platform for a major financial institution — the architecture decisions, the trade-offs, and the automation that holds it together.
- March 5, 2026
NSX-v to NSX-T Migration: The Playbook Nobody Gives You
Having led this migration at enterprise scale, here's the real playbook — including the gotchas that aren't in VMware's documentation.
- February 26, 2026
The Case for Keeping Hyper-V in a Multi-Hypervisor Strategy
Everyone's talking about VMware alternatives after the Broadcom acquisition. But Hyper-V has quietly become a very solid option for certain workloads.
- February 18, 2026
Why I Stopped Using vCenter Alarms and Built My Own Monitoring
vCenter's built-in alerting is fine until it isn't. Here's how I replaced it with a lightweight stack that actually tells me what matters.
- February 10, 2026
Why I'm Writing About Infrastructure
I’ve been doing this for over 20 years. From my first sysadmin role at a school in New Jersey, through email server migrations at manufacturing firms, building data centers for industrial …
- May 27, 2020
When Virtualization Goes Wrong: Lessons from Real Production Incidents
Production incidents in virtualized environments have a different character than physical infrastructure failures. The failure radius can be much larger (one host failure impacts many VMs), the …
- March 9, 2020
Capacity Planning for Small VMware Environments Without Enterprise Tools
Enterprise VMware environments have tools like vRealize Operations for capacity management. SMB environments running five to twenty ESXi hosts typically don’t — and they don’t need to. …
- February 18, 2020
VMware vSphere Health Checks: Building a Weekly Operational Routine
The best VMware environments I’ve managed didn’t stay healthy by accident — they had a consistent operational review process that caught problems before they became incidents. A weekly …
- January 15, 2020
Performance Baselining in vSphere: What to Measure and When to Act
“The VMs are slow” is the most common call I get about VMware environments, and it’s almost never useful information on its own. What I need to know — and rarely have if …
- October 22, 2019
PowerCLI Basics for VMware Administrators
If you manage VMware infrastructure and you’re not using PowerCLI, you’re doing the same tasks manually that a few lines of PowerShell would automate. PowerCLI is VMware’s PowerShell …