Development of the Windows administrator. Where to dig?

Question

System administration

Good afternoon!
Tell me in what direction to develop further?
I am 29 years old. Experience in IT - 6 years. At the moment I work as a system administrator in a company of ~ 100 people. Basically, I admin (keep afloat) servers on Windows Server (CD, Exch, Sharepoint, File Cleaner) a little Linux and 6 ESXi machines with a bunch of test / development servers. Well also I bring small changes to Tsisok configs.
Recently set out to and received an MCSA on Windows Server. On Linux, I have basic knowledge, sufficient only to set up something according to the manuals and read the logs (I have no knowledge of hard troubleshooting). Things are a little better with ESXi/vSphere.
The question is where to go next? To finish knowledge in the field of Windows Server (MCSE)? Pull Linux? Hitting Tsiska or hitting vSphere? Also, because development office, there is a chance to gain knowledge on DevOps.
Because there is a slight stagnation at the current place of work, that is, time to study something of the above.
In spirit, I'm interested in virtualization. But where then to apply the acquired knowledge without experience in large offices? On the other hand, there is a desire to apply the acquired knowledge to increase earnings.
I will be glad to advice.

Answer 1

Learn the direction of automation and virtualization.
Do you know scripting languages? bat/bash/python to automate various things.
Php + html + sql at a minimum level, it is useful to quickly build a web interface for some kind of stray, or put, for example, a corporate wiki for internal instructions.
Look at services like jenkins, ansible, chef, zabbix, monit Get
active in English. upper-intermediate is the minimum for an IT specialist who wants to make some career moves.

Answer 2

to improve the skill of administering servers on Linux,
it is now more cost-effective to install virtualization on nix systems and deploy everything else in it.

Answer 3

In my opinion, you should not rush about - if you are engaged in MS technologies, then it makes sense to develop them.
Yes, it is worth pulling up knowledge to MCSE (Communication or Server Infrastructure in your case).
It is worth looking towards automation (ConfigMgr/PowerShell DSC).
Pay attention to virtualization - in your case, either Hyper-V or vSphere.
Also, it is probably worth changing the place in the end (if possible) - since your server park is small and your knowledge will not be unclaimed for sure.
I advise you to try to get a job as an integrator, if there is such an opportunity - the development will go much faster.

Answer 4

The best direction is Virtualization + Linux.
All this is best seasoned with networks and firewalls (the vlan level and the rules associated with them are usually not necessary deeper).
It is better to move away from Microsoft and VmWare, because their money appetites are only growing. Switching to VmWare Standard costs so much money that businesses think hard about expediency.
Therefore, OpenStack, KVM(Proxmox), distributed file systems.
In particular, preparing OpenStack correctly is difficult and is now in demand.