Stats of a Consultant

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if your using two nodes total make sure you have an external LB for the CAS
or a single CAS, which i'm not sure the purpose of

 

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Coincidentally, I'm going to Zurich next tuesday. I'm free wednesday evening for beers ;)

Phoenix: Yeah, Exchange 2010 is a lot of fun, do you get to spend any time using the storage calculator to size the environments you build, or has that been done for you prior to coming on assignment? My customers so far have been huge... takes several days of meetings for everyone to commit to any numbers

 

My customers are huge and short sighted (well this one aint that big LOL)
I got told by this one we can set quotas to 2GB, notbody has mailboxes that big, 1.3TB of mailboxes

err no
turns out they have plenty of clients with 8+ GB mailboxes and over 4TB of mail
glad they had all the extra disk space.. silly people!

 

Noted!

 

The Client Access Servers are not high-availability aware unless you help them a little bit, i.e. by providing some form of load balancing, either via a hardware load balancer (preferred), or DNS round-robin, a software app like TMG, or Windows load balancing built into the OS itself.

However, when you collocate this role with a mailbox server, a hardware load balancer is a must.

Hub Transport and UM servers however, are high-available out of the box and can manage servers going off-line just fine.

So many little things to take care of to have the best possible environment for running Exchange efficiently.

 

Here you go mate
the top line is out of date on the career summary, that ended in Oct 2010 and my new role is Senior Solutions Architect from Oct 2010

 

You are the man Ryan!

 

Were they all roles that were upwards? or were some side ways or steps down? there's almost a definite path there though from Support > Engineer > Consultant > Architect. Also a lot were short, were they contract roles? or did you jump ship for a reason? or did you get promoted after a few months?

Thanks for sharing that mate, it's a really helpful piece of information from a serious IT Professional

Cheers mate

 

Sorry for being rude, but... people giving themself a 5-star out of 5-stars are most of the time people who don't know what is possible at all.

I have seen guys aged 22 giving themself a 5-star for networking or security.... yeah sure.

I believe you have great knowledge, don't get me wrong... but I just can't believe you having a 5-star knowledge on networking, security etc...

Also giving yourself 5-star on presentation, speaking.. its just... well.. kinda bragging to say "I am the best there is..." or maybe worse, saying "I Think I am the best and know everything"... but to think you know everything means you don't see possibilities to learn more.

Even the BEST network expert doesn't know everything... and then I'm talking CCIE-people.. and I honestly don't think you get even near CCIE...

 

His current role speaks a lot louder than them five stars. Talking the talk and walking the walk are different things indeed, but he is actually doing a **** load of walking. I don't think it is as literal as you make out. He isn't saying he is the best in the world, he is saying he is damn good, IE good enough to walk into most companies and be one of the most knowledgeable if not THE most knowledgeable, also, if you do motivational speeches for a living, should you not put five stars? or is that bragging? It's all about how you value your self.

 

I wouldn't necessarily use the stars as an indication of how good I am at product X or Y.

For example, there are subtleties in AD or Exchange which are only known by a handful of people that programmed the software. And these guys may not know other parts of AD or Exchange that were developed another team.

However, those stars could be an indication of how comfortable you are in approaching a given situation. I may not be the best AD guru out there, but I would rank my "comfort zone" in approaching an AD or Exchange problem or design as a 5 out of 5. Anything I don't know, I can always research. But being able to go into a meeting room and not breaking a sweat when a customer lays down the situation is what may count as a method of piling on those stars.

 

Generally speaking people are interested in how long you have done something (in years) and your level of it (often in the American style, 100 - 500 level) the star ratings combine both approximated

Precisely, not to say 'im the best ever' just to say 'i do this at a 500 level and have done for 10 years'
Seems to have gotten me my last two jobs in a matter of days, so i guess it works

 

I passed my CCIE written in 2001, I was 19. then moved away from the majority of it into virtualization
I don't do much networking outside of switching these days, and a lot has evolved since my time as a hardcore network geek, but the fact is i can still walk into an empty datacenter with a pile of boxes in a corner, and have it fully functioning from the patching, the networking, the routing, the storage, the virtualization and the core enterprise applications

Most for upward roles, I did some contracting but not much, some of those perm roles were very short, but i have no regrets, generally every move exposed me to more tech, better salary and often brighter people to work with

in fairness though a lot of my early jumping was done in an economy that supported it, and i've been doing this since i was 14. Ignoring the job titles (because, people give you funky ones) but yeah that was pretty much the path, although I was architecting for quite a while before I was a consultant

 

Phoenix, you really are an inspiration mate.

Reading this thread alone has made me realise what can be done with hard graft and enthusiasm (and of course the brains!).

I thank you for that.

 

Question that comes to mind is:

"Would you be the youngest CCIE in the world?"

Apologies for my sarcastic reference to posts from a while ago

 

Well no, I never did the Lab
it would of been a weekend in Brussels and 1600+ GBP back then

 

It takes a bit of luck, and a bit of right time right place, but its certainly attainable with the right attitude mate
i work with a couple of consultants here who are early twenties earning six figures, especially if you can get up to speed with new, in demand tech quickly,

 

What are you tips for being specifically a consultant?

 

Master Google, read LOTS of blogs, make sure you can talk to business people about business problems, you don't know everything, don't act like it and the tech is irrelevant

I can elaborate on those a bit more, but that's what i see most of us faced with