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As some of you may have heard, I recently made the next jump in my career, and in a move that shocked nobody who knows me, I am now working for Veeam. One of the biggest “cons” that was on my list while evaluating the opportunity was the fact that I would no longer be a part of the Veeam Vanguard, a program that I have the utmost respect for - for its mission that it is looking to accomplish, the fashion in how it strives for this, and of course the people. ...

With many of us being in a “work from home” situation these days, it’s had all sorts of crazy impacts. Up in my neck of the woods, gas hasn’t been this cheap in a long time … possibly since the olden days of the 1990s. Pollution has also been shown to be clearing up in parts of the world. And it has finally become the year of VDI. All kidding aside, the World is going through something that we have nothing in living memory to compare it to: COVID-19. I’m not going to turn this into a “what you should do to stay safe” blog, as there are some great ones out there. (Spoiler Alert: stay home / stay away from others). But aside from staying home, I wanted to offer a couple of other suggestions of things to do that may help out the overall fight against COVID-19. ...

So yeah, I totally went for a spammy title for this blog post 😊 Know why? Spam is deceiving, kind of like thinking there is an easy way into vExpert 😉 So what’s the point of this post? For one, I am a vExpert Pro, and part of my duty is to assist folks where and when I can, with regards to getting into the vExpert program. With that in mind, I wanted to write something up to assist folks with their vExpert applications. Below is some food for thought – it is not meant to be an “if you do this, you’ll be in” type of list, but rather “if you are serious about this, pay attention to these points”. This post was more or less spawned by this tweet: ...

Last week I had the opportunity and privilege to present at the Pittsburgh VMUG. In true vCommunity fashion though, there was a lot more going on than just the VMUG. I had to say, Pittsburgh does things right – I was there for two nights and it was non-stop work, networking, and learning. First off, there was a VMware TAM (Technical Account Manager) Customer Roundtable. I won’t go into too much detail as most of my readers likely don’t have a TAM (but you should!). What I saw there blew me away. The local team, along with the SMEs who came in for the event, were able to answer and assist customers with many of their problems and needs. What really stood out to me was how often customers were engaging each other. Questions around architecture, or why specific decisions were made were going back and forth. Congrats to the local VMware team for creating and fostering such a great community. ...

Yesterday, VMware unveiled its vExpert Pro program. For those of you who aren’t aware, VMware runs a program called vExpert. Despite its name, this is not a technical accreditation. Rather, it is an invite-only program (although nominations, and self-nominations are open) and is intended to recognize individuals who give back to the “vCommunity”. The exact criteria for entry are kept confidential, to avoid folks gaming the system. However, for reference, you’ll find that a lot of vExperts regularly blog, present at conferences or user groups, and just generally try to help folks. Along with the title, there are some great perks. Things such as a Pluralsight subscription, NFR license keys, and access to the vExpert party at VMworld. ...

Earlier this year I had the opportunity to present at VeeamON 2018. The topic in question revolved around the numerous restore scenarios that Veeam Backup & Replication offers. More specifically, I wanted to highlight some of the lesser-known methods. These methods largely came about through conversations that I had with folks, usually at my SWOVUG events or VMUGs. Yes, the conference was back in May, and it is now (barely) July. Firstly, I wanted to check with Veeam first to ensure that I could share the content. Secondly, with the new job, things have been a bit busier as I try to get back into the swing of things. This also explains the infrequent blogging as of late. ...

We are just about halfway through March now, and with that, a lot of the major IT industry influencer programs have kicked off. I am extremely excited to be a part of a few of these for 2018. Yes, a lot of them may have fancy titles, but that is somewhat beside the point. In most cases, folks are accepted based on contributions that they have made, usually in a public fashion. ...

A big thank you to the 50+ attendees who made it out to the Q3 SouthWest Ontario Veeam User Group (SWOVUG) yesterday. As always, it is great to see returning faces, as well as new folks. The one downside I find personally as the group grows is it is hard to chat with everyone. Not a bad problem to have though! We were also fortunate enough to have Paula Melvin from Veeam’s Ohio office come up for the event. In addition to that, the Guest of Honour was Vanny Vanguard - the “unofficial, official mascot of the Veeam Vanguard” (pictured above). ...

Things have definitely been busy as of late, between VMworld, studying, and yeah … work. September is not shaping up to be any different either.. Whenever I have a few “events” all close together, I like to toss together a quick post to let folks know where I will be. The point is so that if anyone reading this is there, that hopefully they’ll let me know and we can get together for a quick “hi"if nothing else. ...

While at VMworld 2017, I received an invite to attend a HPE Blogger Briefing hosted by Calvin Zito. The idea was to layout some of the current, and upcoming, goings on that HPE has coming down the pipe. The areas that we covered were primarily storage-focused, which I’ll cover in more depth below. First, however, I wanted to give a quick shout out to the HPE team for not dancing around the question of how their relationship with VMware has changed since the Dell EMC acquisition. The short version is that Dell fully recognizes that competition is natural in the market; along with that, it is also clear that VMware has a neutrality that it needs to keep in regards to partners and solutions. My take away was that Dell EMC and HPE are competitors, whereas VMware and HPE are still partners. ...