Until you spread your wings, you‘ll have no idea how far you can fly.- anonymous

Almost five years ago, I made the decision to make a change or risk the chance of possibly never getting the opportunity to spread my wings. After having worked for my company in South Africa for just over three years and having grown from someone on a three month contract tasked with creating an IT equipment inventory of all the companies IT equipment to being a permanent employee and the Systems Administrator I handed in my notice and decided I wanted to move to the UK to try get a job with a large IT organisation and work with cutting edge technologies. I left my then girlfriend (now wife), parents, lifestyle and comfortable job back in South Africa and make a leap of faith that I could do it. I’m proud to say the risk paid off and five years down the line, I’m working for one of the biggest IT companies in the world, working with innovative technologies and have grown immensely from when I first came over to the UK both personally and professionally. However, the time has come yet again for me to push myself out of my comfort zone and try spread my wings even more. So as of the 12th of December, I will be joining Xtravirt as a Technical Consultant specialising in virtualisation and complimenting technologies. I have loved my time at EMC Consulting and owe so much of my growth to the people I have worked with at EMC and previously Conchango and the opportunities both have granted me to grow and keep advancing my knowledge.

My leaving is not down to disliking my role at EMC Consulting, as I’ve loved it immensely. I’ve felt that the next logical step in my career was to test and hone my skills and knowledge in the consulting arena as a consultant and Xtravirt have given me an amazing opportunity to learn and grow an immense amount while joining a very exciting team of people working on loads of very exciting projects.

If you haven’t heard of Xtravirt before, you should have and I have full confidence you will hear a lot more of us in the future. Some quick facts about Xtravirt:

• Xtravirt were awarded VMware EMEA Consulting Partner of the Year at this year’s VMworld Europe.
• Xtravirt are also very well known in the virtualisation community for their tools especially the Free vAlarm application which David M Davis of Trainsignal fame covered in one of his VMware vSphere Performance Monitoring Training lessons and the vLogView application which provides the ability to store, view and search ESX Server log files from multiple ESX Servers, without requiring individual login, navigation and manual file transfer to name but two.
• Xtravirt is a knowledge-based company that delivers its expertise in virtualization online and in person. They have a reputation for astute leadership and expertise through their work with an impressive array of organisations. It is this real-world experience that drives the ability to provide the best professional consultancy services available

I’m still planning on blogging as much as possible and am actually very confident of being able to blog about a lot more technologies and a much broader base due to Xtravirt having no affinity to any specific vendor or technology. Although I don’t know about any Hyper-V postings I’ll still be on twitter whenever I have the opportunity and will still try answer and help people on the VMware Communities and try attend the London VMUG’s and vBeers.

Gregg