vSphere (as do some other hypervisors) make use of a handy format known as Open Virtualization Format, or OVF for short. It is an open standard that is used for packaging up virtual machines, namely appliances and whatnot that are meant for distribution. An OVF package consists of multiple files, including one descriptor file (with the .ovf extension). These contents can then be packaged up into a single file, known as an OVA file. ...
Veeam recently went GA with their Backup for Microsoft Office 365 product, and like a lot of folks, I’ve been looking forward to it. I was fortunate enough to be involved with the beta, so I knew going into it that setup would not take long (just a couple of minutes really). What I didn’t test a heck of a lot of though were backup locations. The Problem Veeam Backup for Office 365 UNC Error ...
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?). ...
A glimpse of IOFabric’s dashboard Trevor Pott recently introduced me to some of the fine folks at IOFabric and suggested that I have chat with them. Going into the call, I didn’t know a heck of a lot about their flagship product, Vicinity. I did a bit of research and gathered that Vicinity allows you to use existing storage and manage it via one interface. It turns out that is only part of the picture. Note that this is not any sort of sponsored post, and I was not compensated in any way to write this, but rather it is a cool product that I thought I would share. Also, writing helps me understand and digest information. ...
Earlier this year I had the opportunity to take the Veeam Certified Engineer video-on-demand course, which was actually a better delivery mechanism that I had expected. After I completed the course, I did a bunch of studying to sit the VMCE exam, but I failed :( The good news is that it made passing the exam all that much better when I did re-sit it. Failing did offer have some benefits, though. First off, I was able to get a taste for the exam, specifically the wording. The best way I can describe it is to say that it is written for technical correctness, not for ease of reading. The questions can be fairly hard to interpret at times, and this is a common piece of feedback that I have heard from other test takers. ...
When I first looked at the lineup for Tech Field Day 12 (which was before I was asked to join), I was excited to see the list of companies. Some of them I know reasonably well, while there were a few on there that I had never heard of. DriveScale was one of them. When I wrote my ’ primer’ post about them, it was a bit challenging as there is not a ton of information out there about them, but that also makes it fun. Having a bit of background on the presenting companies is great, but it is also engaging to learn about them during these presentations, in most cases from their founders or lead engineers. ...
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. ...
Recently, when I attended the Toronto vForum, I found myself hanging around the Veeam booth … a lot. I know quite a few of the local folks, so I enjoy chatting with them. They also work with me on my Veeam User Group, so sometimes the conversation steers that way too. But, I also have a passion for helping people. Given that I usually have some form of Veeam swag on, it isn’t uncommon for me to get questions from folks who assume I’m an Systems Engineer. I am always very quick to point out that I don’t work for Veeam, and I find that usually changes the tone of a conversation. Folks like hearing from customers, the good and the bad. I’ll usually try and loop an SE is as well since a) it’s not my booth and b) they will have different experiences and potentially different suggestions. ...
A few weeks ago, I wrote a post covering Tintri’s recently announced synchronous replication. At the time, I was also given a walkthrough of another upcoming feature: snapshot replication to S3 data stores. This is another big feature that I was glad to see previewed at VMWorld, and even more excited to see an in-depth demo of. For a quick bit of background, S3 is Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) Simple Storage Service which is an object storage system. Although S3 was designed by Amazon, there are many providers out there that offer S3-compliant data stores. This is definitely an emerging market, and the fact that you can have cloud-capable data stores in your datacenters has it’s own curiosities. All of that, however, is beyond the scope of this post - I just wanted to point out that AWS is not the only S3 provider. ...
Just a short post on this one. I am very pleased and excited to announce that I have secured my first sponsor for my blog: Turbonomic. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Turbonomic (formerly VMTurbo), they offer a management suite that determines pain points and bottlenecks, but also alleviates and rectifies them before they turn into problems. Turbonomic does have an offering for a ‘free for forever’ monitoring tool, which you can also check out here. ...