Posts

As we find ourselves quickly coming upon the start of what I’ve come to think of as “IT Conference Season”, one conference that I’ve been a fan of for years in VeeamON. Granted, I’m biased given that Veeam is my current employer, but I’ve long felt that VeeamON is a conference done right. The content has always been strong, technical experts always abound, and the amount of organized social activities seems just right (whereas things can be overwhelming at VMware Explore). ...

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. ...

Last week was VeeamON 2022 in Las Vegas. After a lot of internal back and forth, I ended up making the decision to attend. Going into it, I knew that I had really missed seeing people in person after 2+ years of lockdown, but I really underestimated how great it would feel to see folks in person again. All that aside, I wanted to reflect on some over-arching trends that I saw at the conference as a whole. ...

Yes, it has been awhile, but I figured this was as good a time as any to dust off the login credentials for this site :) As the title alludes to, I am beyond excited to have the opportunity to be a part of the Veeam Vanguard program again for 2022. The last few years have been a bit different for the program, and despite having limited in-person interactions, it did spawn significantly more frequent get togethers (whether formally organized webinars, social events, or special one-off sessions). We’re all hopeful that with 2022 we’ll all be able to see each other at the annual Vanguard Summit. However, with the way the world has been for the past two years, I’m not placing any bets on it yet. ...

Yes, yes, I know … NSX-V is a little long in the tooth, but there is still a large install base out there. Additionally, it still has general support until 2022-01-16, and I fully expect there to be many customers still using it well after that date. With all of that being considered, I figured I would share this tidbit in the event that it helps someone else. THE PROBLEM Recently, I was fiddling about in my home lab with the intent of testing some NSX-V related alerting with LogInsight. When setting up the syslog server in NSX-V Manager, I came across what appears to be a bug, albeit not documented. In short, if the second part of the FQDN used for a syslog server starts with a digit, you’ll receive the error “Invalid IP or hostname”. ...

A little while back I was playing around with the CDP feature coming in Veeam Backup & Recovery V11. One of the requirements to use it is installing an I/O Filter on your ESXi hosts. The filter is how the magic happens, and there is nothing unusual about this step. Many vendors have I/O Filters available for ESXi . But given that this is a homelab, I tend to do a lot silly things in there. In my case, I found that I was unable to vMotion a VM, which led me down a rabbit hole … ...

Anyone who is a Veeam user is likely well aware of Veeam’s “upcoming” CDP (Continuous Data Protection); it has been somewhat notorious as it was announced way back at VeeamON 2017 in New Orleans. Over the course of time, the release date has slipped a few times, but largely for good reason (e.g. stability or performance issues were deemed unsatisfactory by Veeam’s internal QA process). I most recently wrote about it again last year, when we got another preview of the tech at the Veeam Vanguard Summit. ...

I recently took a week of vacation time away from my job; despite the situation that the world is currently in (i.e. pandemic) and the fact that I couldn’t really go anywhere, it was an extremely relaxing and satisfying time off. It was somewhat labour intensive at times (I built a deck, stained and put together some chairs, built some shelving, etc.), but it was a mental break for me. ...

Recently I was in a situation where a customer needed to capture esxtop data during a performance impacting event, however the cause of the event was unknown. What this resulted in was hours and hours of testing (e.g. throwing large amounts of traffic & compute load against some VMs), hoping that the event would trigger. There were a few downsides to this approach, most notably: Significant investment in time, most of which was spent watching nothing happen; Not knowing what datapoints we needed to capture to isolate the problem (e.g. host, storage, network, application metrics, etc.)l The risk of missing something during an event (which may last 30 seconds … there is a lot of data to look at in that time, especially if you don’t know what you are looking for). Just like how PING is one of the most useful tools when troubleshooting network issues, esxtop is up there with displaying all sorts of data about your ESXi host, including VM performance and networks stats. ...

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. ...