Last year I wrote a post summarizing my 2016 - this may not be the most interesting of topics for most readers, but it is something that I have found useful. I get value from this exercise as it forces me to reflect back on my year and see what goals I achieved, and which ones I didn’t. I also find that the action of writing down a goal (publicly, in this case) also makes it real. It makes it something to strive for. ...
Earlier this year I decided that I wanted to renew my VCP cert via a different track (as opposed to getting a VCAP). The reason being is that I was just looking to broaden my knowledge. I don’t do a lot of super technical work on the daily basis, so something like the VCAP might be “overkill” (for lack of a better term). It was a toss-up between the VCP-NV and VCP-DTM. In the end, DTM won out. ...
Today was that magical day of the year known as the Toronto VMUG UserCon, and it t’was a good day. I was fortunate enough to make it down early for opening (which involved me leaving the house at about 05:30), which was great because I wanted to make sure to catch the keynote by Frank Denneman ( @FrankDenneman on Twitter). It was also nice to get there in time to pound back a couple of cups of coffee. ...
I’m happy to announce that Tintri has recently signed up as a sponsor for my site. A BIT OF BACKGROUND In the saturated storage market, Tintri is a vendor that stands out with their unique ability to provide VM-aware storage (VAS). Whether you are using their Hybrid Array or their All-Flash Array, with Tintri’s VAS there is no need to worry about LUNs anymore. You can use their solution to complete common tasks such as dealing with noisy neighbors, or reviewing latency from the array, across the network, and onto the host. Their interface is simple, intuitive, and frankly, one of the most visually pleasing that I have seen from a storage vendor. ...
Just a real short (but deeply meaningful to me) post today. Yesterday I was thrilled and humbled to be invited back into the Veeam Vanguard program, for the second year in a row. I have written about the program in the past, as have many others. Thus far, I think Dmitry has one of the most comprehensive pairs of posts that I have seen on the program. This year, we are up to 62 folks. Of the new folks, a large number of them are names that I immediately recognized due to their influence in the ‘vCommunity’. Going back to one of the key values of the program (your peers), I am truly looking forward to meeting these fellow Vanguards, as well as what the 2017 program has to offer. ...
Anyone who knows me knows that I am a huge proponent of the ‘vCommunity’. Since I upped my game at VMWorld 2015, I have been addicted to not just consuming community resources, but also giving back. I decided that I wanted to get involved and help out. Towards the end of 2015, my local VMUG group was not looking for any sort of additional leadership help, so I did the next best thing - I started my own user group. ...
Me on a panel discussion at the Veeam User Group held in Las Vegas at VMWorld 2016 About a year ago, I wrote a self-reflective post about what stood out to me in 2015, and what I had hoped to accomplish in 2016. Reading through it, I have to say, that I did not accomplish two out of the three goals I had listed. With regards to the ’networking’ goal, that just didn’t happen, although it is still something that I might try and pursue in 2017. ...
VDM 30 in 30 Wow - November 30th has arrived, which marks the last day of the Virtual Design Master 30 in 30 challenge. So, how did I do? Well, I managed to get a post out each and every day. I did try to keep them mainly on topic, and I aimed to hit at least 500 words per post, but I also made sure I was not just adding words to the post in order to make the sentences, and thus the word count for the post longer (see what I did there?). ...
Earlier this week I held the Q4 meeting for the SouthWest Ontario Veeam User Group (SWOVUG) in Mississauga, and thus far the feedback has been great. This time around, we had Mid-Range and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise sponsor the event, as well as some great giveaways (iPad Minis and a speaker). We kicked things off with a great high-level overview from Garth Reid of where Hewlett-Packard Enterprise is heading. One point that was made clear is that they are striving to work with organizations to not only make sure they can find storage solutions that fit but that those data sets are properly protected. ...
I’ve been using FreeNAS for many, many years. I believe I started back in the .6 beta days, which if memory serves would have been somewhere around 2009ish? Over that time, I have had a handful of machines doing the work - three if I’m not missing anything. Power-related issues killed the first two (PSU / board death on one, and blown capacitors on another). I then scraped together some ‘old’ hardware at the time and built what is now my ‘current’ FreeNAS box. It is comprised of a whopping Pentium Dual-Core E6500 CPU and 4 GB of RAM. The real kicker is that it is running on a single 1.5 TB SATA drive. ...