So I guess I'll start things off:

1. I am part of the the VMware Alliance Marketing Group here at EMC. I am the one that get's a lot of the content related to VMware and EMC up on the web; therefore if theres something you need or would like- let me know.
2. I am Canadian citizen; and just happens, one of many on the VMware and EMC team; our own virtualgeek is also Canadian; but you knew that "eh?"
   
3. I am a huge sports fan; being that I went to Syracuse University- any other SU fans out there?
4. I know I am only supposed to say three, but I couldn't help it. I have never been to Vegas before and I am more than excited for VMware's Partner Exchange in Vegas next week... who is coming?

Hi Everyone!!!

Thought I would chime in and introduce myself.

So 3 things about myself.  Here we go.

1. My name is Ben Dunning.  I am a Sr. vSpecialist with EMC's VMWare Technical Aliance or Chad's vArmy.   I am super passionate

about virtualization and technology in general.  If you have meet any of the guys from our team passion is absolutely at the core of our culture.  Not to mention workaholics who love playing with technology as well as talking about it.  http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/11/the-pros-and-cons-of-being-part-of-chads-army--.html  If you are interested in the same things.  We want to hear from you!

2.  I have been with EMC a little over 9 years.  Started in Symmetrix MFG (Third Shift! ugh.) then moved to EMC IT as part of a team Designing/Deploying EMC's Internal cloud.  My career then shifted to the role I am in now.  Its has been a long ride!  Plenty of challenges to overcome.  I couldn't be more excited about how far EMC has come since I started and I am even more excited about where we are going!

3. I was born and raised in RI.  (Yes the little state most people forget about.)  I live outside of Boston now and love the city but I miss being able to shoot down to Narragansett beach or Newport in 30min.

Reach out if you want to chat about technology and are in the area!

Ben

Hey Brittany looks like I'm the first non-EMC employee to reply!

OK here we go:

1- I'm Didier Pironet, I live in Brussels, Belgium capital of Europe! I'm a contractor working with VMware products since 2004 and ESX 2.x. I like very much the spirit of company such VMware and the ideas behind virtualization and the cloud computing concept. I'm also blogging at http://deinoscloud.wordpress.com The coming years will be even more exciting!

2- Currently I'm working for a huge gas and oil services company. 4 years ago I introduced virtualization to them for a Disaster Recovery project building their largest VMware farm on HP Blades and EMC Symmetrix DMX-4 as the back end storage. Since then trust within virtualization with VMware has reach all layers of management.

3- I'm a big fan of motor sports, football and moutain bike but my passion goes to my little baby girl, the due date is April, 17th

First of all let me say how nice it is to see EMC getting into the community spirit!!

So here goes, 3 things about me!

1. My name is Craig Stewart, I'm based in Edinburgh, Scotland which is one of the most beautiful cities in the world to live and work in (If you can stand the weather!).  I am a Lead Infrastructure Analyst with an investment company and am currently working on a new vSphere 4 Enterprise Plus deployment with PowerPath/VE and a CLARiiON CX4 backend. This years deployment is a big vote of confidence for VMware within my organisation, long may it continue.
   
   
2. I have had an unhealthy fascination with all things virtual ever since I began working with ESX 2.x.  I have subsequently worked with virtualisation products from Citrix (XenApp), Microsoft (Hyper-V) and VMware (VI3, vSphere 4) throughout various projects which has only served to wet my appetite further.  To feed this unhealthy habit I started my own blog www.virtualpro.co.uk back in 2008 and have found writing to be a tremendous learning tool, one I wish I could dedicate more time to.  I'm also a member of the EMC EMEA Customer Council, which is a great privilege,  it is a brilliant forum and one that I have no trouble putting time aside for.
   
   
3. I'm a mad keen snowboarder and in approximately one month I'm off to Alaska for a full month of snowboard mountaineering, heli-boarding and of course some serious camping out in the wilds of Alaska!!!

I work in a branch office of a major corporation in downtown Atlanta, Georgia. I am extremely interested in VMware; it's hard to learn a lot if you are a hands on person I'm trying to as best I can. How do you get any hands-on experience if you don't have a server to build? Nonetheless, I am learning what I can by reading for now...and hopefully here.

I've been in IT for 25 years, running the spectrum from analog computers, simulation mainframes, SGI (Irix), HP-UX, HP's backup tools, Brocade switches, earlier EMC frames (3430, 3700, 3930, 8800, DMX800, DMX 2000), automatic alerting tools, and currently I'm an Enterprise Architect.

I've done a lot of research on cloud computing which only heightens my interest in VMware as a prevalent cloud service provider technology. I'm looking forward to visiting the site and learning!

Hi Brittany, and everyone else !! 

I manage a team of database administrators for a large mid-western health care organization. We have 14 hospitals and dozens of clinics and outpatient facilities throughout Missouri, Kansas, Oklahoma and Arkansas. We are headquartered in St. Louis, Missouri. I have a team of 17 DBAs supporting Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server and Cache.  (Cache is a non-relational database used by our EPIC system.)  Most of our databases reside on EMC storage.

We are currently virtualizing our entire Intel-based Windows & Linux environment, migrating all our systems to new HP blades running VMWare. This is our "private cloud."  The migration includes our SQL Server databases.  So far, we haven't hit any major obstacles. I would love to hear from any of you who have had experience running big, busy SQL Servers on VMWare.

I've been in IT for 30 years.  Some days I think how nice it would be to retire, but other days -- I think, how could I give this up when I'm having so much fun with all this cool technology!!!  My wife (married 31 years) and I have raised 5 kids. We have 1.5 grandchildren (#2 is on the way in September.)  I enjoy swimming, bicycling, and playing my Martin (1973 D28.)   I am an adjunct faculty member at both Washington University and St. Louis University, teaching evening undergraduate computer classes. 

Hi gang.... My name is Les.  I live in Arkansas and today the weather is beautiful.

1)  I've managed the IT Dept for a small bank in Arkansas since 2002. I worked as a contractor since 1995 (when I retired from the US Army) and the Bank was one of my customers.  The Bank has $500M in assets, 10 locations and about 150 users.  After they decided to bring support in-house, they hired me as the first dedicated IT person.  My department has grown to 4 and I also picked up management of the 4-person Proof Dept which processes all the checks for the Bank and runs the host AS400 systems.  I've been working in the IT field for about 25 years and absolutely love my job.

2) I’m a rabid VMware fan!  We stumbled onto VMware and virtualization in 2006 while researching ways to improve our disaster recovery processes.  We had been experiencing problems when trying to recover our check processing Wintel systems during DR testing and had almost given up on a decent solution.  Since we starting deploying VMware in the spring of 2007 we have expanded our virtual environment to include 95% of all systems, and have been pressing our application vendors to start delivering and/or supporting running on virtual machines.  Now our standard is everything is installed on a VM – the vendor must prove their product will not run on a VM before we will consider using physical servers again.  And since we include that requirement in our RFQs, any vendor that doesn’t support running on VMware is pretty much excluded from further consideration.  We use Dell EqualLogic SANs for shared storage and with built-in LUN snapshots and replication, are able to move VMs between our 2 datacenters at will.  (We saved so much money by using VMware we were able to build a second datacenter for D.R.)  Our virtual environment has about 75 VMs on 4 vSphere hosts at the Production datacenter and 14 VMs on 2 vSphere hosts at the D.R. datacenter.  The datacenters are connected via a 50MB dedicated fiber from the local cable company for about what the phone company wanted for 2 T-1 circuits.  We’ve actually testing running the entire Bank on the D.R. hosts.

3) My wife and I love to travel.  While in the Army, we lived in Germany for 6 years, Korea for 1 year and many places throughout the U.S.  Now that we’re back home we take at least 2 extended vacations a year to travel.  We have a Honda Goldwing and about half of our trips are on the motorcycle.  A few years ago we rode through Montana, southern British Columbia, Washington state, Wyoming – and many other places on a 12-day bike trip.  This summer we’re planning a trip through northern California and Oregon.

My name is Chad Sakac, and I'm informally "Mr VMware at EMC".   Best job ever :-)

3 things to know about me:

1) I love any wind/water related sport, and anything to do with astronomy.

2) I have two girls and a wife who are awesome, and whom I love to bits.

3) My greatest fear is losing my technical touch and becoming a talking head, so when I get sick of politics and other bulls%#$ - I retreat to my lab for a day, play with latest (and future) tech, and use that to recharge and simultaneously stay sharp.

I'll throw two  bonus answers:

4) While proud to be a EE P.Eng. and comp sci by education, I love (LOVE) talking to and working with customers.

5) While I can't believe how much I get out of being the author of http://virtualgeek.typepad.com now, Chuck Hollis needed to push me kicking and screaming into social media :-)

I'm lucky to work with (and as part of) a team of folks at EMC across all parts of the company that are all as passionate about VMware as I am!

My name is Joe Gremillion and I:

1.  Work for Dallas County Community College District at the District Service Center.  I am the Virtulization/Storage and Backup Guy.  DCCCD has 7 Colleges and 12 locations around Dallas County.  We have a Spring 2010 enrollment of 80,000 + and we are the largest Graduate institution in the state of Texas.

2.  I am a VCP and an EMCPA

3.  I have three boys, 19, 17 and 4

Ok, here goes -

1) Jamie Orth - currenlty working at Publix Employees Federal Credit Union.  We are an EMC / Vmware shop (DMX - with SRDF, vShere, Site Recovery Manager, SourceOne, AppXtender, DiskXtender, Centera).  From what I understand we were one of the first implementations of SourceOne on vSphere in a production environment.  I have been in I.T. for 20 years supporting Financial Institutions, both large and small.

2) Live in central Florida - so the weather is great.  Married, 3 kids - girl (12), boy (8), and girl (3).  My son has Aspergers so we are very supportive and involved in the Autism community.

3) Getting back into the certification route after taking several years off to get my degree in Business focusing on I.T. management.  I am currently studying for my CCNA, VCP, and probably will look at updating some (old) MCSE certs...  Like Chad had mentioned earlier - you have to stay sharp on the technical side.