As I mentioned in a post a little while back, I am super excited to get the Southwest Ontario Veeam User Group (SWOVUG ?) rolling. It has taken some time to coordinate schedules and locations, but we have our first meeting scheduled for Thursday March 3rd. Full details: Where - Waterloo Memorial Recreation Complex / Room 200 Date - Thursday March 3rd, 2016 Time - 11 AM - 2:30 PM (lunch will be provided) ...
One of the newly introduced features in Veeam Backup & Replication 9 is Scale-out Backup Repositories (SoBR), and frankly I have been waiting to try this out. This is a fantastic solution that will be welcomed in a lot of environments, large and small. The concept behind it is that many of us have small ‘islands’ of storage - maybe a SAN, some NAS storage, and / or some direct-attach somewhere. Previously it would have been a real pain to leverage all of these as you would have to setup a separate repository for each ‘island’ and then maintain the jobs to make sure that a) there will be enough space and b) keep track of what is going where. ...
After much anticipation, Veeam V9 was released earlier today. Normally I would hold off before installing a new upgrade, however after using Veeam for years now, I know they have some great QA, and in this case the benefits of the new features outweigh the risk for my environment. There are lots of places to find details about what is in Veeam 9 (including this blog), but I wanted to highlight a handful of the features that will have an immediate impact on my environment. ...
The Windows PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE) I’m not as hands on with my infrastructure as I used to be (due to promotion and expansion of roles), but along with that I do find my time is far more valuable now. With that in mind, I made a conscious effort to learn at least some basic PowerShell commands for often requested tasks. I found myself wasting a lot of time opening ADUC, finding the user / OU I was looking for, and doing whatever task was required (ex. adding to a group, resetting password, disable password expiration, etc.). Prior to Office 365, we were on a hosted Exchange 2007 platform and did not have PowerShell access. One of the big motivators for the switch was to open up scripting access so that we could start to see time savings. ...
Me trying to get a glimpse of my future. With only a few days left in 2015, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on my year and plan for 2016. In my mind, unless goals are written then they aren’t real, so I figured I might as well put these on the internet to hold myself accountable. First off, there were a couple of experiences in 2015 that really stood out to me: ...
December has been an abysmal month for my blogging; this actually marks the first post of the month, and I thought I owed it to at least myself to write up a post as to what has been going on. First off, lots of holiday stuff. My wife and I are of different religious backgrounds, both of which have holidays in December. Combine that with a couple of kids, and all of a sudden you have a bazillion family events to attend. Good news is that they are generally a great time, the kids are kept occupied for a bit, and the adults get to catch up. On the plus side, my kids have received lots of Lego which gives me an excuse to play with it again (see image). ...
I have been using version control for a little while now and although I am not a developer, I really got into it once I was involved with a web app project. The developer had done most of the work, but due to time constraints he couldn’t always get around to all the bug fixes. I initially started making small changes like fixing typos, but once I got used to the idea of version control I started getting braver as I knew I could easily roll back changes if I screwed up bad. ...
I’ve been having some discussions within my organization as of late with regards to how IT can help the business outside of the traditional break/fix scenarios. In the past our IT has been involved with all sorts of non-typical projects including (but not limited to) installing communications gear on-site at jet fuel line install at a major airport, assisting in environment monitoring in a skyscraper, and being involved with a window replacement project (glass windows, not MS Windows). ...
I recently came into a situation where I wanted to update the CA certificate on my Tintri T820 with a new one from Active Directory. As I went through the process I realized it was not just a point and click process, so I opted to grab some screen shots and document the process. To get started, you should (not mandatory but highly recommended) check to see what algorithm your AD is using. Mine was still using SHA1, which has already been deprecated by some of the newer web browsers (*ahem* Google Chrome, I’m looking at you). I figured if I was going to go through this process now, I might as well follow the best practice and upgrade to a newer, more secure algorithm. ...
I’ve been a long time user of Veeam, and something that sold me on it almost immediately was its Instant Recovery feature. For those of you who are unaware, Instant Recovery allows you to mount a VM from a backup (while writing changes to a delta file, thus leaving the backups ‘pristine’) without the need to copy the full VM back into production. This means that you’ll get a pretty quick turnaround on recovery - think minutes instead of an hour or more for larger VMs. ...