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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. ...

I have been spending some time over the last little bit trying to put together a new repository for my Veeam backups. Finding a simple set of recommendations hasn’t been easy, though, largely due to the fact that every environment is different. Despite there being no simple ’this is what you should use for every install’, I took the effort to review a lot of material and put some notes together. A lot of the details were from VeeamOn videos, the Veeam forum, or from their various Veeam eBooks. After going through all of that, I think I have come up with a good solution that fits my environment. ...

So the first Southwest Ontario Veeam User Group meeting is in the bag. A big thank you to everyone that came out. Also, a big thank you to all the support that I have received from Veeam. In particular Paula Melvin, David Sayavong, and Bob Scott. I wanted to post a quick recap of the event as there were some folks who let me know ahead of time that they could not make it. In no particular order (largely due to my poor memory), a few of the topics we covered were: ...

Veeam TOVMUG 2016 Today was the annual Toronto VMUG UserCon. I believe it is the largest VMUG event in the Southern Ontario area. This year I opted to stay over in Toronto last night for two reasons: What is typically a 1-hour drive would be closer to 3 during rush hour and I was asked to co-host the Veeam session, so I didn’t want to be late. It also turned out to be a great decision given how bad the weather was. ...

The past few weeks have been one of the longest stretches without a post on here. I’ve been quite busy with work, family, sickness and community commitments. I wanted to toss out some information on the community front, so if you happen to see me at any of these events, feel free to yell ‘Hey, Matt! How you doing’ from across the room and I’ll awkwardly give you a half wave in acknowledgement. ...

This morning I was humbled, honoured, and excited to find out that I made the grade to become a vExpert for 2016. I know there are a ton of posts out there with more or less the same first sentence, but I don’t think a lot of posts go much deeper than that. What does it mean to me? Sure, I look forward to some of the potential benefits (I currently personally pay for VMUG Advantage as well as Pluralsight - both because I believe they are quality products), but more than that there are two things that becoming a vExpert means to me: ...

Just a quick post: registration is now open for the inaugural Southwest Ontario Veeam User Group meeting on Thursday, March 3rd 2016. You can register for the event here: https://go.veeam.com/user-groups.html I have some basic details in my previous post, but if you have any questions or comments, please do not hesitate to hit me up on Twitter ( @MattThatITGuy), by email (matt AT 42u.ca) or via a comment on this post.