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I want to run through such an easy thing to do but wanted to document it nonetheless. Setting a Group Policy to have a shiny new Veeam background on all your domain machines. (obliviously you don’t have to have the Veeam wallpapers) I as many of my visitors have their own home lab or are leveraging a public cloud for their lab purposes. I have just spent my Monday going through my home lab and have upgraded all my servers to Windows Server 2016 and I have also updated all my Veeam components to the latest version 9.5. When I rebuilt this lab a fewRead More →

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I have seen many a post recently that dives into the IT professionals bag and divulges the secret travelling tech products or just the cant leave without amenities. I decided to jump on this and let you know what I carry around in my bag. The Bag I have a choice of two and this really depends where I am heading, if I am heading out for a conference I prefer a backpack, easier to march around airports and conference centres with a backpack but if I am rocking a suit or have a particular customer meeting then I would probably go for the messengerRead More →

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Another year done here at vZilla and I would say a very successful one. Besides all the political melting pot either side of the Atlantic and the horrendous year for celebrity deaths. I personally have had a pretty good year. I started the year as a Systems Engineer with Veeam where I had started in the March of 2015. Kicking the year off with Cisco Live which was in Berlin and then heading over for the Annual ETL (Extract, Transform and Load) NetApp A Team symposium over in Sunnyvale. That’s when things started to change I have detailed the start and finish of that transitionRead More →

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The halfway mark for the #VDM30in30 and with a conference in the middle for a week it was always going to be tough to keep the content going at a post a day, although whilst at the conference I was able to jump on with some old friends and talk about some community and highlights for NetApp Insight and also about the newly announced Veeam 9.5 being GA during the same week. It’s always a great thing getting to speak to the guys that run the NetApp TechONTAP podcast as well catching up with my good friend Pete Flecha who is now at VMware, watchRead More →

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Here we are again post 6 for the #ProjectTomorrow HomeLab series, In this post I want to talk about how I am using the spinning rust and my shared storage along with a small part of SSD storage within the home lab. I mentioned in the 2nd post of the series about the copious amounts of Direct Attached Storage I had in each server and also the lack of RAID controllers. If performance becomes to unbearable then I will go out and buy some controllers for the servers I had but so far they are giving me what I need. No RAID Controllers Yes againRead More →

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Last week on Tuesday I attended the Microsoft UK Partner Summit at Twickenham Stadium, London. As a huge Rugby fan boy as well as becoming more and more Intune (Pun Intended) with what Microsoft are doing from a Microsoft standpoint I was rather intrigued to see the technical track at the event but also spend the day at Rugby HQ. The week prior to the summit I was closely tuned in from afar to the Microsoft Ignite conference in Atlanta, there were some great announcements and some we knew were coming but needed to happen. In the post I am going to highlight the keyRead More →

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Throughout this post we will look at the methods and processes that form the Veeam backup file structure. The file structure really depends on each backup method and schedule; it can also vary slightly, dependant on the tuning of settings. Backup Methods There are fundamentally three backup methods that Veeam support across their customer ecosystem, the following sections outline these methods and in which environment they are best suited. Forever Forward Incremental – The most space efficient method of backup. This will keep one full backup file and then only incremental backups thereafter. When the retention period is met the oldest incremental blocks are mergedRead More →

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Since at least the beginning of 2016 I have been waiting and watching the technical marketing community and thinking more and more this is where I would like to be and how could I speed this process up. I really upped my game at the start of 2016 with a goal to achieve the above, even though I didn’t really know how long it would take to be honest. I started making contact with peers in the industry all over the place to find out what they were doing out there in the communities and also on their own personal brand, I took the baitRead More →

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Back in June 2016 NetApp made a handful of big software development announcements firstly a new naming convention, out went the many operating system variants, CDOT, Clustered ONTAP etc. to be replaced by just ONTAP. ONTAP 9 was announced and in the first weeks of September we saw the General Availability of that source code to the current FAS hardware range as well as the newly rebranded ONTAP Select, ONTAP’s Software Defined Storage version. Another part of that announcement was a more formal, 6 monthly release cadence and without disappointment NetApp have this week announced ONTAP 9.1. Three things really stand out in this releaseRead More →

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The unveiling of Cisco HyperFlex Systems On the 1st March 2016 Cisco will announce a new HyperConverged solution based on their existing UCS C & B Class compute, existing UCS Fabric Interconnects and a new Software Defined Storage approach that allows Cisco to offer that “Complete Solution” inclusive of Compute, Storage and networking where as other HyperConverged are missing that element that Cisco do really well, Networking! “True Hyper-convergence” Before I dive into the deep information regarding this new range from Cisco I want to touch on the current state of Hyper-convergence, a caveat from myself here is that I for one do not doRead More →