About

I’m Raj Patel. I work on enterprise infrastructure for a living, and this site is where I write down the things I had to work out the hard way.

I’m Manager of Project Services at Winslow Technology Group, based near Waltham, Massachusetts. Before that, I spent two years inside Nutanix as a Resident Consultant, and before that I was the HCI lead at Winslow. Somewhere in the middle of all that, I started writing posts instead of the same email over and over.

What I Write About

Mostly Nutanix — AOS, AHV, Prism Central, Files, and the automation surface around them. VMware where it still matters, which is more places than people admit. Storage, disaster recovery, upgrade paths, and the end-of-life announcements that quietly ruin someone’s quarter.

The posts fall into a few shapes:

  • Procedures I’ve actually run. Step by step, with the version numbers stated, because the version is usually what matters.
  • Release breakdowns. What changed, what it means operationally, and whether you need to care yet.
  • Failure modes. The defect advisories, the compatibility errors, the things that look fine in testing and go wrong at scale.
  • Deeper series. Like the Nutanix v4 API series, which walks the whole API surface from a first authenticated call through to locking down service accounts.

If a feature is half-finished or a migration path is genuinely painful, that goes in the post.

How I Got Here

I’ve been in IT since 2002, starting in K-12 support at Shrewsbury Public Schools — roughly 200 lab machines, 300 laptops, and a great deal of Ghost imaging. From there to enterprise system administration at Shrewsbury Electric & Cable, running the networks, the backups, and the budget for a municipal utility.

I moved into Nutanix work in 2016 as a virtualization engineer, joined Winslow Technology Group in 2017, and grew into the HCI lead role — serving as a subject matter expert across VMware, VxRail, and Nutanix implementations, building the methodologies, health checks, and training programs the team ran on. In 2021, I joined Nutanix as a Resident Consultant, embedded with customers for 2 years. I returned to Winslow in 2023 and now run project services.

Credentials

  • Nutanix
    • Nutanix Technology Champion — part of the NTC community program, and attending NTC Tech Connect at Nutanix HQ in 2026
      • Nutanix Technology Champion 2026
      • Nutanix Technology Champion 2025
      • Nutanix Technology Champion 2024
    • Nutanix Certified Associate 7
    • Nutanix Certified Professional – Multicloud Infrastructure 7
    • Nutanix Certified Professional – Business Continuity 7
    • Nutanix Certified Professional – Unified Storage 6
    • Nutanix Certified Expert – Multicloud Infrastructure 6
    • Nutanix Certified Services – Multicloud Infrastructure Professional
    • Nutanix Certified Services – Multicloud Infrastructure Expert
    • Nutanix Certified Services – Multicloud Infrastructure Master
    • Nutanix Certified Services – Core Associate 6
  • VMware
    • VCP – Data Center Virtualization 2024
    • VCAP – DCV Design 2021
    • VCIX – Data Center Virtualization 2021
    • Partner Cert – Proven Professional, vSphere Pre-Sales
    • Partner Cert – Proven Professional, vSphere Architecture
    • Partner Cert – Proven Professional, vSphere Implementation
    • Partner Cert – Proven Professional, vSphere Support
  • Dell Technologies
    • Associate – PowerEdge v2.0
    • Specialist – Implementation Engineer, PowerEdge v2.0
    • Specialist – Implementation Engineer, VxRail Appliance v1.0
    • Associate – Converged Systems and Hybrid Cloud v1.0
    • Associate – Information Storage and Management v3.0
  • Rubrik (2)
    • RCCS – Rubrik Certified Cloud Specialist
    • RCRS – Rubrik Cyber Resiliency Specialist
  • Microsoft
    • Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals
  • MBA, University of Phoenix

The NTC badge is the one worth explaining: it’s a community recognition program, not a job. It gets me access to briefings and product teams. It does not get me a script to publish, and nothing here is reviewed by Nutanix before it goes up.

Outside the Data Center

For eighteen years, I ran Shrewsbury Robotics, a FIRST Robotics program in the Shrewsbury public schools, with 100 high school students, 20 adult mentors, and the budget and logistics that go with it. Teaching people to debug something they built themselves turns out to be excellent preparation for enterprise infrastructure.

Get in Touch

If a procedure here didn’t work in your environment, if something’s out of date, or if you’ve hit a problem I’ve written about and want to compare notes, I’d like to hear about it. Corrections are genuinely welcome — several posts on this site are more accurate because a reader pushed back.

Everything published here is my own work and my own opinion. It does not represent Winslow Technology Group, Nutanix, or any other vendor mentioned.