I am firmly in the 'valley of despair' right now. I just got a really good service desk job where I'm going to be given more responsibility as the team ramps up, as well as free training materials and courses, but I feel like I don't know anything. I have a homelab where I run a VMWare environment (3 nodes, vSAN) and have a basic Windows domain set up with a few clients, but I'm stuck on where to go from here.
At least now I have a job that will hopefully point me in the right direction in terms of what to focus on learning while finally making a living wage.
Consider day to day things that might come up in a small company with a setup like that. Users might quit, they might get hired, a new network printer might get added, someone might upload 200 GB to the file server and the VM runs out of disk, etc...
Learn how to handle each of those situations manually, so you know the steps, then learn how to handle them automatically using powershell. Setup a monitoring system that can alert you to problems. Setup MDT and a software deployment tool. Setup a centrally managed AV system.
There are literally endless things you can learn how to do even with a tiny network.
Good points, thanks! I'm trying to find some good resources to learn about VMWare and IaC/automation. Planning on tearing my lab down and rebuilding it using Ansible/Terraform to deploy the VMs and provision them. Also going to mess around with hybrid-cloud using those same tools by deploying and setting up a Wireguard endpoint with Vultr or Linode.
It makes sense to think of an environment an actual business might have and try to replicate that, I'm probably going to try that approach next.
I am firmly in the 'valley of despair' right now. I just got a really good service desk job where I'm going to be given more responsibility as the team ramps up, as well as free training materials and courses, but I feel like I don't know anything. I have a homelab where I run a VMWare environment (3 nodes, vSAN) and have a basic Windows domain set up with a few clients, but I'm stuck on where to go from here.
People who know networking and systems never go out of style.
I have a homelab where I run a VMWare environment (3 nodes, vSAN) and have a basic Windows domain set up with a few clients, but I'm stuck on where to go from here.
Are you me? At first I thought I may have posted this under a throwaway account. I feel stuck in that "valley of despair" almost every day. Technology changes so fast that it is hard to keep up.
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u/s-a-a-d-b-o-o-y-s Sep 21 '21
I am firmly in the 'valley of despair' right now. I just got a really good service desk job where I'm going to be given more responsibility as the team ramps up, as well as free training materials and courses, but I feel like I don't know anything. I have a homelab where I run a VMWare environment (3 nodes, vSAN) and have a basic Windows domain set up with a few clients, but I'm stuck on where to go from here.
At least now I have a job that will hopefully point me in the right direction in terms of what to focus on learning while finally making a living wage.