Virtual Design Master is a great initiative by Eric Wright (@discoposse), Angelo Luciani (@angeloluciani) and Melissa Palmer (@vmiss33) with the original idea to build an “IT reality” build around a team competitors with a design challenge that puts their knowledge to the test, requiring many skills and disciplines from the virtualization industry.
Is something really interesting that demonstrate the power of the communities effort and is complementary with other community activities like #vBrownbags or study groups.
Also if you are not directly involved with the competition is a great opportunity to learn from other projects (check the design documents on the official web site).
The 2014 edition is the second one (for more information on the first winner see this post) with lot of news and more challenges and really some interesting designs (some with completely different approach).
This year I’m also a judge and I have to confirm the value of this initiative that could be really useful for VCAP and or VCDX candidates, but not only: as written there are some project not only implemented with VMware solutions, so it could be really useful for everybody involved in virtualization design.
You can follow the community on Twitter with the hashtag #VirtualDesignMaster, or the episodes live, or simple see the results on the web site.
To know more about the Virtual Design Master you can also watch the Community and the IT Imaginarium video with Eric Wright (Virtual Design Master initiative is mentioned in the last part of the video)