I’ve been a big fan of virtualization since the day I’ve discovered Windows Virtual PC somewhere back 5-6 years ago. At that time, my thought was its free, its convenient and it triggers a lot of new ideas for testing purposes. In 2005,my team (consist of me, my brother and my boss) had to handle a software upgrade for a very well known big multinational corporation.. Their technical team was kind enough to show us a software called VMware.

I first registered myself to VMware email subscription in 2008. VMware wasn’t really big during those days but I heard that they are getting stronger by the day. Earlier this year in July, I attended a virtual event conducted by VMware after receiving an invitation below:

I notice that such event utilized a lot of internet bandwidth. I had my network guy screamed at me for using most of the bandwidth during that time of the hour. I don’t really blame him, he maybe wasn’t equipped to handle such enormous request. Anyway, he left the company to pursue a better position. Enough about that, I find the virtual event to be quite dull since I can’t listen to any of the web conferences because of the bandwidth issue.

Last October, I received an e-mail invitation:

vSeminar Series 2011 – Online Registration is Now Open

Join us at vSeminar Series to discover the latest cloud infrastructure and management solutions to accelerate IT and your business, and learn how you can further leverage your virtualization investments to reduce capital and operating expenses and improve business agility.

vSeminar Series is a free one-day multiple track event where you will be able to hear from VMware and experts from our partner ecosystem as we share the latest technologies in enabling Your Cloud to meet your company’s specific business needs.

If you’re an IT professional tasked with virtualizing and managing your IT environment, or taking your organization to the Cloud, you won’t want to miss this opportunity to:

• Explore the latest technologies to aid your transformation to deliver a flexible, agile IT-as-a-Service delivery model
• Learn the latest infrastructure and management solutions that enable greater efficiency, agility and choice for IT organizations – including vSphere 5, Site Recovery Manager 5 and View 5
• Create a modern, user-centric approach to personal computing that delivers secure access to applications and data from any device, such as the iPad
• Experience technology demonstrations from the exhibition showcase by VMware and a broad range of technology partners
• Dive into operational best practices, performance, tuning and troubleshooting for your IT environment
• Learn how, by using VMware vSphere, you can increase the performance of mission critical applications and how your organisation can accelerate its transition to the cloud

Don’t miss the opportunity to acquire best practices tips and strategies for virtualization and learn how to develop a cohesive, secure and compliant cloud strategy in three core areas: infrastructure, applications and end-user computing.

Register now in the city closest you and don’t miss a seat. We look forward to seeing you!

Malaysia

Date: Tuesday, 15 November 2011 Time: 8:00 am to 6:00 pm Venue: One World Grand Ballroom First Avenue, Bandar Utama, City Centre 47800 Petaling Jaya Selangor Malaysia

 
I immediately register myself. At first, I thought the event wasn’t going to have so many people. I was so wrong. Just look at these photos I’ve taken:

This was at 8.30am! I couldn’t believe it. When the event started, the speaker told that there were a thousand people who had registered and come to event. I then realized, VMware is huge!

Check out my mega photo gallery I’ve taken during the event:

Since one of my role in the company is to suggest better ways to manage the IT infrastructure for both ourselves and also to our clients/prospects. Virtualization is definitely the way of the future. My team has been fiddling with Oracle VM Virtualbox to maximize the use of our development and test servers in the office. So far, the only restriction that we have is the shortage of physical memory for the hardware. The cloud wasn’t really a solution for us since we need to utilize what we have and keeping the cost down (although we have 2 virtual private servers running in the US for hosting purposes). Overall, virtualization has helped us in our IT deployment stage.

Back to the event, I must say that the event was way much cooler and more fun than any techno events I’ve ever been to and this was in Malaysia by the way. Kudos to the organizer and to all the sponsors for organizing such a wonderful event. Looking forward to next year’s VMware vSeminar Series if VMware decided to held one again next year.

A couple of weeks ago, I attended a 2 days conference. If it wasn’t for my boss who had to go to Jakarta, I wouldn’t have to attend it. Anyway, the conference was a totally different industry, the construction industry. This is a huge industry with huge players. The event was jointly organized by UiTM (my former university) and The Chartered Institute of Building (CIOB) which was sponsored by CIDB Malaysia. I have never heard of CIOB before so it was new to me.

The welcoming address was done by Associate Professor Dr. Masran Saruwono, Dean of Faculty of Architecture, Planning and Surveying, UiTM. Opening address was done by Dr. Yeow Yoon Foo, President of CIOB Malaysia. Keynote Address and Official Opening was done by YB Dato’ Sri Ir Dr. Judin Abd Karim, the newly appointed Chief Executive Officer, CIDB Malaysia.

A little disclaimer here. I am not from the construction industry and what I’m going to write is from my own perspective.  If for some reason the information is not correct, misleading or gibberish, I would really appreciate any comments or feedback.

Session 1 –  Paper 1 : Case Studies in Sustainability for Major Construction Projects: The Veritas Experience by Mr. David Mizan Hashim.

The introduction given by the moderator to the first speaker was quite lengthy but really interesting to listen.

Once Mr. David Mizan gave out his talk, everybody including myself became very attentive towards what he was talking. He is quite an interesting speaker. Let’s check out his slides:

17 of the 20 tallest buildings in the world are in Asia and the Middle East.

For the first time in history, more than half of the world’s population is urban.

Three types of Green Building Rating Tool from Singapore, Malaysia and USA were compared.

There were 4 case studies were featured,The LCCT, Menara Binjai, Menara Chua and PKNS HQ. I kind of get the understanding of what the speaker message is since I’ve read about the Malaysia Green Building Index.

In this case study, the speaker mentioned about conserving energy by making an open design for the building.

If you’re familiar with engineering, the diagram above does make sense to you.

Some design view of the LCCT.

Case study 2: Menara Binjai. Don’t ask me where the building is, I have no idea.

The objective of the building design is to bring as much as natural light inside the building thus a lot of glass is used.

Case Study3: PKNS HQ. I have live in Shah Alam for almost 4 years during my study years. I love Shah Alam and Kompleks PKNS is one the earliest shopping mall my father used to bring me when I was little.

Did you know that the lake in Shah Alam is owned by PKNS? I didn’t know that. It is said that PKNS wanted to fence the entire lake area in Shah Alam since it is located their private land. Of course there were an uproar from the people in Shah Alam so they decided to leave it open to public. So the designer proposed this design:

The idea was to open up the building so that the public can go through instead of around it.

The building also is targeted to score a Platinum Level on the GBI scale.

I do gain a lot of knowledge just by attending this conference but I don’t want to write about the whole content of the conference. It’s not because I am lazy or so, it’s because this industry is not really related to what I am paid to work for. So, I’ll just summarize this entire post with photo galleries taken using my mobile phone down below:

I am a Windows guy so when it comes to Linux, I am a complete newbie although I’ve been exposed to a few RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) version 5 x86_64 tasks related to Oracle database administration. I’ve played around with Ubuntu and Fedora but I find it hard to adapt since I’m so used to Windows environment. Earlier this month, I was invited to attend a free half a day RedHat Workshop conducted by ECS Pericomp. I’ve dealt a few software purchase with them and so far I’ve been satisfied with their level of service.

ECS Pericomp is located in Kota Damansara. I had to hustle the peak traffic jam, I am puzzled of why is it that during the fasting month of Ramadan, the road traffic are more congested than usual. Maybe I was driving on the wrong route. Anyway, I arrived there slightly late and the presentation started:

I must say that ECS ICT Berhad is quite big. They have a list of smaller companies within their own premises. My company is way smaller than them.

Mike Lai is the Technology Specialist at ECS Pericomp. I really admire his presentation style because I think he loves to share stuff instead of selling.

Some brief explanation about what Open Source is all about.

Some of the software development milestone related to RedHat.

Some of the tools and features of RHEL. Mike continued to share that a lot other organization clone the RedHat to become their own, one is example is the Oracle Linux where the OS are fine tune with Oracle products.

Now this is what the entire workshop is all about, “Virtualization”. I’ve been exposed to virtualization ever since the creation of Virtual PC. From there, I moved on to VirtualBox and read a little bit about VMWare. It is really an interesting topic to learn and implement. I have a couple of ideas I wanted to experiment since my company has its own small data center and the aging servers are really hard to manage. Now comes the best part, demo:

In the demo, Mike showed how he actually makes a live migration. The Virtual Machine (VM) used is Windows XP. He opened a text file and without saving it, created an exact copy of the VM and launches it. The exact opened text file appears sort of like a clone. Of course this is no surprise for people who have been familiar with Virtual PC such as myself. However, the web-based virtualization tool used reminded me of Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute EC2 I’ve been playing around 2 months ago.

As much as I marvel all this new cool technology, conveying the virtualization idea and practical issues is something to work on. Overall, this workshop benefited me well enough thanks to ECS.

There is a career fair happening at PWTC KL at the time I’m writing this blog post. It reminds me when I was still unemployed, really missed those good old days while doing job hunting. Anyway, my job hunting experience is rather different than any one else. I never attended any proper interview, one day I set an appointment to meet this person in charge of the company, the next thing I knew, I was offered the job. So far, I never rejected any job offering and I’m not looking for a new one at the moment.

After a week of learning all there is from the SOA/ADF Oracle training, I found this job advertised by a big multi-national company that matches what I have learned so far. Before I write about it more, I wanted to share with you some screenshots of what I’ve learned from the Oracle training I attended, here you go:

What you see above is a screenshot of Oracle Jdeveloper tool in designing a work flow of a credit card process. At first, following the step by step instruction in the tutorial was easy. Not until the end part when you have to test to see if the work flow application you’ve just created could run or not. It was sort of a relief when it run successfully. But when you see an error message appears, there is where you start to scratch your head opening up every little components which you’ve thought was so simple and realized it has become so complex. It’s like doing math problems during school but with some visuals added to it. For those people who loves the challenge, this is an ideal job for you. I can’t really say it is for me although I do like it once in a while.

This is a view of Oracle Enterprise Manager. It’s a heavyweight application which I believe involves BEA Weblogic application server. My laptop couldn’t take that application therefore I had to connect to the instructor’s laptop to view. If you are familiar with online dashboard, PHPmyadmin or others, you’ll get the hang of it. All of these activities I’ve shown to you requires a lot of ‘experiencing’. It’s not something you could just read and digest. So if you are lazy ‘doing’ but love to just ‘read’, this is not something for you. I love experimenting (up to a level where I don’t see too much disappointing error messages) so this might be a suitable task for me.

Alright, enough about my ranting, here is the job description of a Oracle BEA Weblogic Portal Consultants:

Job Description

Systems Integration Consulting professionals are responsible for delivering large-scale, complex programs that marry processes with technology to help our clients achieve high performance.

Oracle Weblogic professionals design, implement and deploy Oracle Weblogic Portal and Oracle Weblogic Integration solutions to achieve defined business goals. They maintain skills in Oracle Weblogic Portal and WLI solution architecture, design, configuration, development, integration, testing and deployment; and Oracle Weblogic Portal and WLI technical architecture.

Key responsibilities may include:

• Supervising functional and technical design activities
• Creating functional requirements as an input to application design
• Developing and testing detailed functional designs for business solution components and prototypes
• Supervising application build, test, and deploy activities
• Planning and executing data conversion activities (e.g., test data)
• Driving test planning and execution

Qualifications

Well versed with Oracle Weblogic Portal skills.

1. Portlets, Page Flow, Web Flows
2. Weblogic Portal Configuration, Administration and Performance Tuning
3. Weblogic Portal Clustering Design and Implementation
4. Web Services Integration
5. Portal Content repositories
6. Content integration and management
7. Access Management Integration or Single Sign-On
8. Rules-based personalization
9. RIA technologies such as AJAX / Adobe Flex

Well versed with Oracle Weblogic Integration skills.

1. WLI Clustering Design and Implementation
2. WLI Configuration, Administration and Performance Tuning
3. Human Workflow Design and Implementation
4. Process Integration Design and Implementation
5. Synchronous (e.g. SOAP, Web Services, EJB, RMI, CORBA) Integration Architecture, Design and Implementation
6. Asynchronous (e.g. JMS, MQ) Integration Architecture, Design and Implementation
7. Batch Integration Architecture, Design and Implementation
8. Canonical Data Model and Data Transformation including XML, XSD, XPath and XQuery
9. Service Orientated Architecture
10. Oracle Database Integration (JDBC, SQL)

Other Related Skill Requirements

• Knowledge and experience in implementation of Oracle WebLogic Server based solution
• Knowledge and experience in implementation of Java Open Source Framework (e.g. Spring)
• Knowledge and experience in full application development and implementation lifecycle
• Recognized Degree from good universities

Experience Preferred

1. Manager: 8 years and above of relevant experience including Project Management and Solution Architect roles
2. Consultant: 4 years and above of relevant experience including Team Management and Web Architect roles

Professional Skill Requirements

• Proven success in contributing to a team-oriented environment
• Proven ability to work creatively and analytically in a problem-solving environment
• Desire to work in an information systems environment
• Excellent leadership, communication (written and oral) and interpersonal skills

Phew!! That’s just too much to handle for me. I can’t imagine myself learning all those skills just to become an Oracle BEA Weblogic Portal Consultants. I know that this job can offer triple or more the salary I’m earning right now. However, I am missing a lot of requirement in becoming one for instance, a degree. So I guess my only option at the moment is to work closely with my company to maybe provide services for this role. Although my boss would not probably give me triple salary earning, at least I can still make use of what I have learned so far.

By the way, the product line my company is selling can be used with BEA Weblogic server. I think I’ll try and find some time to fiddle around with that one first. Hope you get an insight of what my job is at the moment.

Have a nice day everyone.