I recently wrote about my experience with seeing Turbonomic as part of Tech Field Day 14. Despite the fact that it is almost a month later, I still find myself thinking about their product. Specifically, how it can result in real-dollar savings in a lot of environments. A lot of tools can give you ROI calculations, or other “soft” savings. Turbonomic, on the other hand, is able to give you a solid, real-world dollar figure, based on your own environment. ...
Turbonomic (formerly known as VMTurbo) will be making their sixth appearance at a Tech Field Day event come Tech Field Day 14. So what does Turbonomic do? To the casual observer, they might just seem like another performance monitoring and reporting tool, however, that would be a gross understatement and a large injustice. Turbonomic, founded in 2009, has appeared on the Inc. 500 which is a list of some of the fastest growing companies. In 2016 they achieved a 3-year growth of %954, which is quite impressive, to say the least. So what has been the cause of all this growth? To put it simply: desired state. ...
Veeam recently went GA with their Backup for Microsoft Office 365 product, and like a lot of folks, I’ve been looking forward to it. I was fortunate enough to be involved with the beta, so I knew going into it that setup would not take long (just a couple of minutes really). What I didn’t test a heck of a lot of though were backup locations. The Problem Veeam Backup for Office 365 UNC Error ...
I could have sworn that I have written about this before, but a search of my blog didn’t return anything. Oh well, if I did write about this, please point it out if you find it so I can see if my viewpoint has changed / wavered at all. A common ’trait’ (for lack of a better word) that I have come across in IT folks in the past is a hesitation to engage vendor support. I know I was guilty of this early on in my career, but now I definitely try to avoid this. So, what do I mean by this? ...
Today I was fortunate enough to present at the Toronto VMUG. That’s two talks that I’ve given at the TO VMUG this year - not bad considering I only started ‘participating’ in the vCommunity earlier this year! As always, I see these opportunities not only as a way to give back to the community but also as a way to practice and develop my own skills. I am constantly trying to improve my public speaking - I have found that the key for me is to be able to turn my presentations into a conversation (admittedly it is a one-sided conversation). It still takes me a bit of time to ‘slip into’ that mode, but I’m definitely getting better at it. ...
Something that I think is often over looked when it comes to backups is security. I’m not referring to physical security (e.g. locking the media up in a vault), but rather making sure that the backups aren’t being abused. There are plenty of horror stories kicking around about folks who have their backups wiped out. This might be due to a malicious admin, bad hardware, or (more and more common) something like Cryptolocker. ...
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. ...