10 of 10 with Mostafa Khalil

With this ping pong of questions and answers, we continue with a new sort of subject on the blog: the interviews. There are 10 questions that will leave us valuable information such as who is the interviewee, his experiences and his point of view about the present, past and future of technology.

Interviewees are mainly writers, bloggers and people related to the technologies discussed in this Blog.

Today, we have the pleasure to know more about Mostafa Khalil. Mostafa is Director at VMware Cloud Technology Support and principal author of Storage Implementation in vSphere 5.

1- Who are you? What do you do?

My name is Mostafa Khalil. I am a technical support director of VMware Cloud Technology with VMware GSS. I am also VCDX02 on vSphere 3, 4 and 5.

2-When did you see your first Virtual Machine?

It was an early distribution of Linux back in 1999 running in VMware for Linux beta.

3-Can you tell to us the virtualization technology you found most amazing?

SDDC (Software Defined Data Center) and general and Network Virtualization especially. The extent and the complexity of the virtual network you can create is amazingly comprehensive and more flexible than the physical counterpart.

4-If you had to recommend study a specific virtualization subject, what would be?

Storage.

5-Why?

Storage is my specialty and my favorite topic. It is one of the most important components of any Virtual Data Center.

6-What is your point of view about virtualization technologies for the next three years?

I see virtualization spreading so much that it encompasses all aspects of everyone's life. For example you can work from anywhere in a secure manner regardless of what gadget you use. You can use your smart phone to access your virtualized corporate copy of your phone OS with all approved apps. You get a call from you kid asking for help with home work, you just switch back to your personal phone OS and use video conferencing app (like face-time). We have started to see such environments already.

7-What new company got your attention in the last two years?

Nicira, long before VMware acquired it.

8-Could you recommend three Blogs you usually read?

Duncan Epping's Yellow-bricks.com
William Lam's virtuallyghetto.com
and Alan Renouf''s virtu-al.net 

9-If you didn´t work in IT today, what do you think you would work in?

Medicine! I used to be a doctor :-).

10-What can you tell us about your next book?

It will be for the next major release of vSphere (2015) and to include all new storage enhancements added since 5.0 as well as an NFS storage section. I hope I can fit all these in 700 pages or less as I did with my first book "Storage Implementation in vSphere 5".


Thank you so much Mostafa!!!