Five Traits of Highly Effective Solution Architects

The role of Solutions Architect is one of the most versatile, challenging, and rewarding positions I've personally had. I've worked alongside hundreds of such folks across roles and companies and think the following five traits are at the heart of all those that I would consider highly effective.

Goodbye (and Good Riddance) EC2-Classic

AWS has recently announced the retirement of EC2-Classic, albeit a year from now. For those that follow AWS, this is quite unique. They have an utter propensity to not depreciate or retire anything. Google could learn a lesson or two or (a thousand) on that.

vSphere 7 Home Lab Build Saga – Complete Overhaul

One of my pandemic projects that may have gotten a bit out of hand was building a vSphere home lab. The initial plan was to simply upgrade a 7-year-old standalone ESXi server, but quickly turned into buying a 1/4 height rack.

vCenter Won’t Start (Database Full)

There are a number of reasons that vCenter won't start. One really fun one is a full database. If vCenter was installed with SQL express than there is a 4GB database size limit. Read further for instructions.