I am very excited to announce that the next Southwest Ontario Veeam User Group (SWOVUG) has been booked for August 18th, 2016. Based on the attendance at the last meeting, most of the attendees came from the Greater Toronto Area. With that as a consideration, the next meeting will be held at: Rib Eye Jack’s Ale House 6531 Mississauga Rd Mississauga ON L5N1A6 Phone: 905.820.6300 Time: 11:30 - 2:30 ...
Between work and planning my next Southwest Ontario Veeam User Group (SWOVUG) meeting, blogging has been tough lately. The good news is I have about a dozen notes of varying detail on things that I need to do / blog about. So expect a slew of content soon. In the meantime, I had a great chat yesterday about getting a sponsor lined up for my next SWOVUG meeting. Nothing is set in stone, but I am aiming for mid-August, pre-VMWorld. Once we confirm the date and location, I’ll be sure to post more details, but it is shaping to be a great event. The tricky thing about sponsorship for a user group is ensuring they (the sponsors) are relevant to the subject matter. In this case, I’ve found a Veeam Elite Alliance Partner who is excited to help out a community event. I’m looking forward to what they’ll bring to the event … more details to follow soon. ...
I definitely don’t know this. A non-technical post today. As a disclaimer, this post is not aimed at anyone I know in particular. It is based on personal observations that I have made. Over the course of my career, I have worked with many folks. These people may have been subordinates, peers, or leaders. At times, I have noticed at all levels a similar reluctance to admit that something was not known. I’ll be the first to say that I have definitely been in this boat. It is still something that I try to be conscious of. Unfortunately, I still see it quite often in others (a likely in myself after enough self-reflection). ...
As some of you may recall, there was a little bit of a hub bub recently regarding ‘Making VMUG Great Again’; the crux of the issue came down to getting users more involved, particularly on the presenting side. You can read my thoughts on it here, along with some comments that folks left. Shortly after publishing that post I was contacted by an organizer for the upcoming VMUG Virtual Event and was invited to present a short community session. Well, it was time to put my money where my mouth was, so I accepted (along with the fact that I saw I was listed on the schedule). Side Note: Feel free to join me Tuesday, May 17th at 4:00 CT for my session: Make Your Backups Work For You. ...
I recently found myself in the midst of having to setup some VLANs from scratch in an environment that was a hodgepodge of switches. The terms alone between vendors can drive you mad (e.g. access mode vs untagged, dot1q trunk vs. tagged, etc.) Long story short, we got the switches down to either Cisco Catalysts or Cisco Small Business switches. After hopping between switch models enough times, the commands would just get muddled up in my head. Finally, after the umpteenth typo, I made some cheat sheets for myself as I found I was issuing the same commands over and over, but depending on the switch product line, it was slightly different. ...
Recently there has been some talk on Twitter about ‘Making VMUG Great Again’. Along with that, there have been a couple of great blog posts by Alastair Cooke and Eric Siebert, which I recommend you read. I’ve been following the conversation, albeit usually a good 12 hours or so late. https://twitter.com/DemitasseNZ/status/719651965383213056 I wanted to add my $.02 to the topic, but I don’t think Twitter is a great medium for this (largely due to me ‘missing’ the conversations). As a recent first-time co-presenter I was excited to finally be part of a presentation. I have been attending VMUG UserCons for years, and local user group meetings when possible. I have always wanted to contribute back, but I never have until recently. So what changed? In short, I was invited by Rick Vanover to co-present his session. I eagerly accepted. ...
I received some very welcome news in my inbox yesterday as I returned from lunch. I was delighted and thrilled to learn that I had been accepted into the Veeam Vanguard program for 2016. So what is the Vanguard program? According to Google, Vanguard has three definitions: a group of people leading the way in new developments or ideas; a position at the forefront of new developments or ideas; the foremost part of an advancing army or naval force. Going by the third point, it sounds pretty risky (hence the need for shelter). I don’t believe there were any casualties with the 2015 members. With that in mind, I’ll assume that Veeam is using the first two points as a reference. ...
Veeam has a bit of a history with releasing products or enhancements that once seemed unlikely. Two recent examples that come to mind are support for tape and support for physical machines (both Windows and Linux machines). Now, without much fanfare, Veeam has conjured up another surprise announcement with their new addition - Veeam For DOS. As odd as it sounds, this is actually a sector of the market that is often overlooked. There are many business out there that have old code running on even older machines. In the event of an accident, this could spell instant disaster. Given that Veeam is all about data availability, Veeam stepped up to the challenge to product DOS-based workloads. ...
With Part 1 and Part 2 in the bag, it’s time to wrap up this series. In Part 3 we’ll be covering some optimal settings for your backup jobs, as well steps that you should take to protect your repository from real-world dangers. I will also touch on the new Scale-Out Backup Repository feature towards the end of this post. Backup Jobs Veeam Backup Job Advanced Settings Knowing the difference between the backup job types is imperative. I was in a situation a little while back where my backup speeds dropped dramatically (like down to the single digit MB/s). In the end, it turned out that the storage was being hammered due to some recent changes. In my case, the jobs were older and were using reverse incrementals. Switching it to a forever forward (Incremental) job instantly increased the speeds and shrank the backup window. ...
In Part 1 of the series I covered off some of the basic hardware recommendations along with best practices for interacting with your storage. In Part 2 we are going to look at using Windows as a repository, along with RAID best practices. Using Windows as a repository If you are using Windows as the OS for the repository, there are some specific considerations to pay attention to. ...