Hi, I’m Gregor — a Technical Account Manager at VMware by Broadcom, based in the Greater Munich Metropolitan Area.
My day job is working with enterprise customers on VMware infrastructure: helping teams navigate the complexity of VCF deployments, VKS environments, and everything that comes with running business-critical virtualization at scale. It’s work I genuinely enjoy — not despite the complexity, but because of it.
Why “gex”?
Grex is the original Latin form of the name Gregor — a detail worth looking up on Wikipedia if you’re skeptical. In Tyrol, the “r” is pronounced with some conviction, and when the time came to pick a handle, Rex wasn’t an option: that name was already taken by Austria’s most famous TV police dog. gex it was. The name stuck before the internet did, which is either good timing or the kind of thing you stop explaining after a while.
Why this blog exists
gex.guru started as a place to write down things I’d figured out and didn’t want to forget. It turned into something more deliberate: a technical blog for practitioners who want to understand how things actually work, not just how to make them stop breaking.
The topics follow what I actually run and think about:
- Enterprise IT — virtualization, infrastructure decisions, curated reads from the industry
- Selfhosting — mailcow, Nextcloud, and the rest of a stack that I operate on dedicated server hardware with OPNsense handling the network
- Smart Home — Home Assistant and Frigate, built to actually be reliable rather than impressive at demos
If something took me an afternoon to figure out, it probably deserves a post. That’s the bar.
Background
I’ve been working in IT infrastructure since before virtualization was the default answer to everything. Over the years that’s meant hands-on work with storage, networking, security, and eventually landing deep in the VMware ecosystem. The Broadcom acquisition brought changes — like it did for everyone in this space — and navigating that complexity for enterprise customers is what I do now.
The homelab runs alongside all of this. Not as a career move, but because staying hands-on with infrastructure that actually matters to me keeps the work honest.
What shaped me
Some things run deeper than a CV.
Engineering is in the family — my grandfather worked metal, my father built a career around engines and workshops before moving into uniform, and I grew up around the idea that understanding how things are made is more useful than just knowing how to use them. I extended my mandatory military service voluntarily, which tells you something about how I relate to structure and responsibility.
The HTL — Austria’s technical secondary school — put that instinct into a framework. Wirtschaftsingenieurwesen in Innsbruck: electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, telecommunications, IT, and business administration in one curriculum. The old saying fits: „Dem Ingeniör ist nichts zu schwör.” Nothing is too difficult for an engineer. It’s less a boast than a posture — the assumption that unfamiliar problems are just problems you haven’t taken apart yet.
For about ten years I led a Scout group. Before that I was a Scout myself. The leadership part came with its own education: planning things that work under pressure, keeping a group moving when conditions change, and knowing when to improvise. Skills that transfer.
I’m a Master Diver (SSI). I only dive in salt water, on holiday, and I keep my certifications and first aid training current every year. Diving rewards preparation and punishes improvisation — you either know your equipment and your limits, or you find out why that matters. It’s one of the few hobbies I know where complacency has direct consequences.
Find me elsewhere
- LinkedIn — professional updates and the occasional industry commentary
- gex.at — an older blog, completely archived
- Advocacy posts on this site are curated reads from Broadcom’s Employee Advocacy program — original copyrights remain with the source authors
Gregor Holzer — TAM, Innsbruck/Munich