Since leaving VMware/Broadcom and the IT industry at the end of last year, I looked back at what I can do next that would be more fun. Photography has been a big hobby of mine since grade school, in the 35mm film days.
Recently it's given me the opportunity to travel all over Colorado to photograph the awesome places we have here.
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My trip last week took me to Marble Colorado and Crystal, to shoot the famous Crystal Mill
The mill was built in 1893 and is considered the most photographed site in Colorado.
The mill and the old town of Crystal, are on private property, and the current access to the mill area is limited to the road, there is no longer any access down to the river or across the river. 
Just a short walk up the road is the town of Crystal, with some of the original structures from the mining days, 
pictured below.

For our trip, we stayed in Marble, and took a special photography jeep tour to Crystal and the Mill from the
Crystal River Jeep Tours. The tour is catered to photographers, giving us 3 plus hours and during the evening Golden Hour so we could get the optimum shots. They have an exclusive contract with the owners of the Crystal Mill and property and are very knowledgeable of the mill and surrounding area. 
From the town of Marble to Crystal is about 6 miles, on a narrow one lane 4x4 road.  If you are in good shape you can hike it, or driving a 4x4 with 2 inches or more clearance is possible.

A few notes from my trip this fall:

• There are no grocery stores or gas stations in Marble, so stock up in Carbondale
• No cell service or Internet, there is free wifi at the Hub Coffee Bar even when it's closed
• The Yule Mable Quarry is well worth a visit.  Seeing the giant blocks of marble is pretty amazing
• If you are going to photograph the Crystal Mill, be aware the only access is from the road, there is a cable barrier that runs along the road. You can put a tripod on the other side of the cable, but you cannot step over it
• From my observation, there are maybe 3 to 4 good locations to shoot the mill
• No Drones are allowed in Crystal

If you stay in Mable, there are some good photo op's at Beaver lake as well:
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I'm glad I finally got to Marble and Crystal to shoot the Crystal Mill with some fall leaves still around.​

The 2024 vExpert awards were announced in February, and I somehow forgot to post this!!
Congratulations to everyone who was selected this year!!
I was honored to be selected as a vExpert for my 12th year! More than likely this will be my last year, as I decided to not continue with Broadcom after the acquisition last November. There had been a lot of speculation on how the vExpert program would continue after the VMware/Broadcom acquisition, gladly it has remained mostly as it has been, with minor exceptions. I hope the program and all of the great engineers and people who contribute to it will continue.
I am currently working as a consult, conducting security assessments and policy writing. As security is an important topic, I will have other posts related to these shortly....
All the best!!  

I have been wanting to get this certification for several years. I finally had some time to enroll in an on line bootcamp given by SimpliLearn which did a fair job in covering the material and providing additional info for studying for the exam.
The old saying for the CISSP is that it's a mile wide and an inch deep!  Well I agree with that when looking over all of the areas and material you need to learn and review to be able to pass the exam.  
I have a good amount of experience in networking, configuring firewalls, and writing security processes and procedures.  I have also deployed disaster recovery solutions and products for a number of companies, but the BCP DRP info in the class and study guides went way deeper!!
The CISSP is made up of 8 Domains:

• Security And Risk Management.
• Asset Security.
• Security Architecture And Engineering.
• Communications and Network Security.
• Identity and Access Management.
• Security Assessment and Testing.
• Security Operations.
• Software Development Security.

The estimated percentage questions you may get covering each domain is broken down to:
1.Security and Risk Management15%
2.Asset Security10%
3.Security Architecture and Engineering13%
4.Communications and Network Security14%
5. Identify and Access Management13%
6.Security Assessment and Testing12%
7.Security Operations13%
8.Software Development Security10%

So, with that, I felt I basically needed to study all of the information in each domain!!

Here is the things I used to prepare for the exam after completing my bootcamp:

• Cybrary.it CISSP training videos and labs.  This is a monthly subscription, and I ended up renewing the videos several times.  Kelly is a great instructor and adds some comedy in the training too, so it's enjoyable, as best it can be.
• I read the complete ISC CISSP Official Study Guide, 9th Edition, from Amazon
• The Study Guide includes practice exams and flash cards, and I think I took all of the 900 available questions
• I read several of the documents that Kelly provided at the end of the Cybrary.it CISSP class. 
  
• Here is the Dropbox link to the documents 
• Watched these You Tube videos to get more clarity on the topics-
• Kerberos: https://youtu.be/kp5d8Yv3-0c?t=23
• Identity management: https://youtu.be/Tcvsefz5DmA?t=18
• Cryptography: https://youtu.be/jhXCTbFnK8o?t=6
• Cybersecurity: https://youtu.be/fSErHToV8IU​

One issue I faced was the bootcamp included vouchers for the exam.  However SimpliLearn had to schedule the exam on my behalf. So I first had to find a few opening at the local Pearson Vue test center.  
Well, I could not find any available opening for the next two months, even at other Pearson test centers in my state!
I selected a few possible openings that were a month out and provided them to the scheduler.
Finally after a couple of weeks I got a confirmation email for my exam date, in 2 weeks! 
OK on to cramming for the exam!!
One of the tips I read suggested to take the day before the exam off and not study, I tried my best to not study and felt that maybe I would be ok.
Bright and early Monday morning, I arrive at the test center.  Finally get seated for the exam after 30 minutes.

The exam is adaptive, and you may get up to 175 questions. Reading some blogs from others who had recently passed stated if you get to 130 to 140 questions that should be enough for a pass.
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I get to question 140, it keeps going, 150 keeps going, finally after question 156 and it says you have reached the end of your exam. Nothing else... I'm worried!!
I finally get out to the reception and they hand me my report-
Congratulations! We are pleased to inform you that you have provisionally passed the CISSP examination.

Phew!!
For sure one of the hardest computer based exams I have taken!
I hope these tidbits help others in passing this exam!!

VMware vSAN ESA was actually launched in vSAN 8 back in late 2022, you can read some details here. 
Now with the addition of the Amazon i41 Metal instance type, vSAN ESA will be available in the VMware Cloud on AWS.
The i4i metal instance will be the only supported hardware to deploy a vSAN ESA Cluster on your VMC on AWS SDDC. However all cluster types will be supported-​

Since vSAN 8 ESA has been out for some time, there are a number of articles and blogs that go into the new architecture and features.
Some of the more interesting new features are:
-Lower CPU usage per IO
-ESA does not have Disk Groups, all the hosts disks will  be added to a Storage Pool, and all disks provide capacity and performance.  There is no dedicated caching disks.
-RAID-5 and RAID-6 at the performance of RAID-1
-Compression enabled by default, and 4x increased compression
-Component count per host limit is increased from 9,000 components to 27,000 components
​-support for 25GB network adapters
-Improved snapshot performance
-Data at Rest Encryption enabled
-Updated Skyline Health, based on the cluster health score
-For VMC on AWS SDDC's, different Storage Policies:
• 3-5 nodes uses RAID5/FTT = 1 for management and workload
• 6+ nodes uses RAID6/FTT = 2
For more details on the new features and architecture, check out the FAQ Page

As shown above, when running the esxcli vsan cluster get command on a host, it will show the vSAN ESA Enabled: True

Shown above, the esxcli vsan command lists the option to display the Storage Pool.

For VMC on AWS SDDC Clusters, the new Storage Policies can now provide RAID-5 FTT=1 on a 3 host cluster:

Skyline Health shows health score for the cluster, which allows you to view past health scores and select the details from the Health Findings:​

I am currently testing vSAN ESA for the VMC on AWS rollout, and I will add more details when it is released.

For more info you can watch the Virtually Speaking Podcast on vSAN 8 ESA.

Enjoy!!