TFD12 Group Photo

Wicked Cool! Tech Field Day 14, Here I Come!

As readers of this blog may know, I was invited to participate in Tech Field 12 last November. For those who are not familiar with TFD, it is an event where a panel of delegates (consisting of bloggers, analysts, industry folks, etc.) get to sit down with vendors of all sizes. The delegates get to pick the brains of the vendors, and the whole event is recorded and streamed live. ...

April 19, 2017 · 2 min · matt
Veeam Enterprise Manager - Add vCenter

Veeam's Useful vCenter Plug-in: Quick and Easy Install

I love talking about Veeam with folks, whether it is at a VMUG, the Veeam User Group I run, or even over a couple of drinks. Many of these talks lead to folks finding out about features that may not be all that well known (and for the record, it is not uncommon for me to find out something new). For example, did you know that Veeam Backup & Recovery has a vCenter plugin? Do you know what version it was released in? (the answer is V7). ...

March 27, 2017 · 3 min · matt
TOVMUG-slider

It’s a wrap: Toronto VMUG UserCon 2017

Today was that magical day of the year known as the Toronto VMUG UserCon, and it t’was a good day. I was fortunate enough to make it down early for opening (which involved me leaving the house at about 05:30), which was great because I wanted to make sure to catch the keynote by Frank Denneman ( @FrankDenneman on Twitter). It was also nice to get there in time to pound back a couple of cups of coffee. ...

March 24, 2017 · 5 min · matt
Nimble SWOVUG

Save The Date: SWOVUG Q2 2017

A New Year is upon us and it is time to get the SouthWest Ontario Veeam User Group back into action! Our last event was in November, and due to some scheduling conflicts I wasn’t able to pull something together for Q1 2017. However, I am excited to announce that our Q2 2017 meeting will be held Thursday, April 20th at: Corporate Event Center Centre for Health & Safety Innovation Conference West Room 5110 Creekbank Road Mississauga, ON ...

March 13, 2017 · 2 min · matt
Veeam Backup Copy Job - Cloud Connect

Setting Up Veeam Cloud Connect - Client Side

One of the great features that Veeam has is the ability to easily off-site your backups and replicas for you. This can be done in a few fashions, such as using a backup copy job to move data to different media, or you might use the replication feature to move a copy of your VMs offsite. Reminder: replicas != backups; corruption will just be replicated. ...

February 21, 2017 · 7 min · matt
Tintri

New Sponsor: Tintri

I’m happy to announce that Tintri has recently signed up as a sponsor for my site. A BIT OF BACKGROUND In the saturated storage market, Tintri is a vendor that stands out with their unique ability to provide VM-aware storage (VAS). Whether you are using their Hybrid Array or their All-Flash Array, with Tintri’s VAS there is no need to worry about LUNs anymore. You can use their solution to complete common tasks such as dealing with noisy neighbors, or reviewing latency from the array, across the network, and onto the host. Their interface is simple, intuitive, and frankly, one of the most visually pleasing that I have seen from a storage vendor. ...

February 15, 2017 · 2 min · matt
Veeam Vanguard

Veeam Vanguard 2017

Just a real short (but deeply meaningful to me) post today. Yesterday I was thrilled and humbled to be invited back into the Veeam Vanguard program, for the second year in a row. I have written about the program in the past, as have many others. Thus far, I think Dmitry has one of the most comprehensive pairs of posts that I have seen on the program. This year, we are up to 62 folks. Of the new folks, a large number of them are names that I immediately recognized due to their influence in the ‘vCommunity’. Going back to one of the key values of the program (your peers), I am truly looking forward to meeting these fellow Vanguards, as well as what the 2017 program has to offer. ...

February 1, 2017 · 1 min · matt
TintriPlugin03

Step By Step - Installing Tintri's vSphere Web Client Plugin

I have Tintri storage in my environment, and one of the aspects that I love about it is the visibility it provides into our vSphere environment. The VMStore itself has all sorts of great dashboards and analytics, but the integrations don’t end there. Tintri has a vCenter plugin which extends some features over to the vSphere client. Installing this plugin is not something that I commonly do. After all, if I find myself regularly blowing away my vCenter, then I probably have other issues. With that in mind I wanted to document the installation process so that a) if / when I need to do this again, I can do it quickly enough and b) if it is helpful to others, then great. Note that most of the below is for the VCSA vSphere 6 appliance, not a windows based install. I do have a file path for a Windows configuration file listed below. ...

January 30, 2017 · 4 min · matt
vmw_vmug_logo

Corporate Name Calling & Collateral Damage

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a huge proponent of the ‘vCommunity’. Since I upped my game at VMWorld 2015, I have been addicted to not just consuming community resources, but also giving back. I decided that I wanted to get involved and help out. Towards the end of 2015, my local VMUG group was not looking for any sort of additional leadership help, so I did the next best thing - I started my own user group. ...

January 7, 2017 · 4 min · matt
Veeam User Group - LAS

2016 - How did I do?

Me on a panel discussion at the Veeam User Group held in Las Vegas at VMWorld 2016 About a year ago, I wrote a self-reflective post about what stood out to me in 2015, and what I had hoped to accomplish in 2016. Reading through it, I have to say, that I did not accomplish two out of the three goals I had listed. With regards to the ’networking’ goal, that just didn’t happen, although it is still something that I might try and pursue in 2017. ...

December 28, 2016 · 5 min · matt