For the last ~ 11 years of my professional life I have been with the VMware family.

These years have been a great journey for me, but unfortunately every journey must come to an end at some point.

During these years at VMware I had the oppportunity to be part of different teams, work with some of the best folks, and be part of some really cool projects.

VMware gave me lots of great opportunities to work on. But not only that, it gave me an opportunity to meet some great folks.

I had the opportunity to work on automating and supporting critical core infrastructure, I have been part of the team which worked on building, operating and automating the private cloud of VMware. I have also developed tools and systems for cross-datacenter migration back in the day, when there was no such support in VMware vCenter. I’ve developed an ncurses vSphere client and a distributed vSphere API proxy for collecting metrics.

I have also worked on the design and implementation of VMware’s internal Configuration Management Database (CMDB) system, which collected Configuration Items (CIs) from various systems such as Cisco UCS blades, Dell servers, Isilons storages, ESXi (obviously), vCenter, vCloud Director, load balancers such as BIG-IP F5, NSX, etc, and pretty much anything that makes up the whole infrastructure.

All that data which we collected was then persisted, and later on complex relationships have been established between them. This in turn enabled various IT processes such Impact Analysis, Change Management, etc., and was the source-of-truth system for our (virtual and physical) assets.

I had developed various monitoring plugins and systems for products, for which there was no upstream support yet. Some of them got open-sourced later, so the Open Source community could benefit from them.

I was on the team which worked on refactoring and simplifying the overall process of getting VMware products (ESXi, vCenter, NSX, etc.) to the end customers.

I have also developed a scalable system for performing malware scanning of binary artifacts, which could peek into every layer of the binary in order to provide better visibility over the artifact that we provide to our customers. This system was a release gate for publishing our products to the customer facing system.

These are just a fraction of the things I have worked on. All in all, VMware gave me challenges, but also gave me an opportunity to work on them, to learn and grow, and to meet great folks.

I had the pleasure and honour to work alongside some of the best and smartest folks in the industry, learn from them and become friends with them. And I am grateful for being part of such a team. I am going to miss these folks a lot.

A picture of the team in the VMware office in Bulgaria, Sofia.

It is sad to me to say this, but after 11 years I have decided to move on. After Broadcom acquired VMware, things are never going to be the same, and I can already see this happening.

I should also say that I was not impacted by the Broadcom layoffs. Actually I got an offer to work for Broadcom, which I then declined. The decision to walk away and not join Broadcom is a personal choice, and I won’t go into the details about why I won’t be joining Broadcom.

What follows below are some pictures from different places I have visited while travelling on business (thank you VMware!), which bring some good memories.

My first visit to San Francisco, California, 2013.

Rocky Mountains, Colorado, 2016.

Trying to push that rock …

Going back to Cali in 2019.

Me and my friend Vanyo while we present our poster at the VMware R&D Innovation Offsite (Radio) in San Francisco, 2019.

Some stats about me and how long I’ve been with VMware.

And finally I want to wish all the best to my colleagues and friends at VMware, and I really hope our paths cross again! Keep rocking folks, and till next time!