I have been working in IT infrastructure for 16 years. Not in meetings. Not in slide decks. In datacenters, racking servers, pulling cables, troubleshooting at 2am, and figuring out why something that worked yesterday suddenly does not work today.

Over the years I have worked across some of the most demanding environments you can find: semiconductor manufacturing, global banking, space agency operations, and large-scale cloud platforms. The one thing they all had in common: when something breaks, it costs real money, and someone needs to fix it fast.

This blog exists because this industry never stops moving, and not always in the right direction.

VMware got acquired by Broadcom. Licensing models changed overnight. Budgets that were planned two years ago suddenly did not cover renewals. Organizations that built everything on vSphere had to make hard decisions: move to VCF, migrate to Nutanix, rebuild on Microsoft, or find something in between. I have been in those conversations. I have seen what works and what does not.

HCI platforms promised to simplify everything. Sometimes they did. Sometimes they created new problems nobody had a guide for. Vendor roadmaps changed. Products got rebranded. Features that existed in version 6 disappeared in version 8. Certifications expired before you finished studying for them.

And through all of it, the infrastructure still had to run.

That is what I write about here. Not marketing. Not vendor whitepapers. Real-world problems, real-world fixes, and honest opinions on where this industry is heading. VMware, HCI, vSAN, NSX, VCF, Azure Local, storage platforms, air-gapped environments, patch management without internet access, migration projects that went sideways. If I have dealt with it, I will write about it.

Sixteen years of hands-on experience does not fit into a LinkedIn profile. It fits here.

I am Can Karahaliloglu, based in the Netherlands. You can find me on LinkedIn or reach out via the Contact page.

Welcome.