“Where do you make time to learn new things?”

There seems to be a common misconception that for you to learn new things it must be out of work hours!

Let’s address this straight away, if you are learning a topic that will benefit your day to day job then any boss (a good boss or company) is going to approve such learning on the job, if you are learning photography and you are a developer then the likelihood that this reflects to your day to day job is probably slim and I can understand why your boss would not maybe fund this time. But then again I would then argue as we have been locked down I expect the majority of us have all done more hours at our desks than our normal allotted work time so maybe that is an angle to still continue that learning photography theme. But the premise of the blog is really to highlight that learning things related to your role or business is going to benefit you, but it will also benefit the business.

The Idea

I got the idea from several companies that run a learning hour each week for their staff and you basically bring a topic and present on that. I have also seen this called architecture meetings that maybe enable the team to learn about other areas of a product but basically spending an hour learning something new or a different perspective is where the idea came from.

The concept of what I have done and what many other companies have implemented is that learning hours are a way for us to learn something new. Another idea I had was if you could buddy up with a group or a similar person to you and attack a topic together, this would give more benefits as you are then getting different perspectives along the journey as well. Another idea is that whether you are learning on your own, part of a small group or with a team. You can take your learning and consolidate that to deliver that to a wider audience.

My idea was to book out an hour a day for “the learning hour” at the beginning of the year, I just setup a recurring calendar item that spanned the entire year for the same time each day. The rules are you can move the learning hour because if you are like me you cannot commit to 10-11am every day of the week for this task so you can move it around, but you have that hour to perform some sort of learning.

The Rules

Ok, so hopefully I have explained myself that this is as much for you as it is your employer, and if they cannot see that then maybe you need to find a new one! In this section I mention rules, obviously you don’t need to follow them, but this is what I have done, and they seem to work quite well.

We have our calendar sorted and we have an hour a day to attack our new learning adventure, but first we need to think about a few more things.

Choose what you want to learn?

For me this was an easy task as I was put into a position where I would be focusing on Kubernetes and DevOps in general, this gave me the overwhelming list of topics to learn, I am not going to get into the areas I have been working on but there is a new upcoming post and video series I am working on that shares this learning journey some more.

Think about the learning journey

Now depending on your topic you have to start thinking “well how deep do I need to know this topic” for me I cannot be an expert in everything but I do want to have at least a foundational knowledge of all of the areas associated to DevOps. But then you might be studying or wanting to study for a specific exam and that requires that focus to become a pro and you have the background foundational knowledge to get there. Anyone can pin an idea on the wall and say I want to learn DevOps but you have to really think about that, what level are you wanting to get to and also what are the topics that you want and need to learn to get there. I suggest that getting a foundational knowledge is going to be the first part of the journey, this way as well you can become more of a generalist than a specialist and because I said it on Twitter is must be true.

Decide the best way that you are going to learn the topic or topics

We have our plan coming together we have our topic and we have our level to aim for, now we need to determine the best platform or medium to use to get from A to B. Over the last 15 months of the pandemic I have become addicted to YouTube, lots of great tech content on there to learn from, different perspectives and concise content to get into, some people like and prefer reading. I have also been heavily working through training platform content on Pluralsight and Udemy. Then we also have hands on lab, all of these are just ideas on how to consume content to learn the topics you want to learn.

Think about sharing your learning

The final thing is thinking about sharing your learning journey, this could be a blog, GitHub repository following 100days of something, YouTube videos or all of them. This is how the community gets better and learns more. Those 20-minute YouTube videos I have been watching took a lot of effort to create but they were also great content for me to learn and I would love to give back to the community with my content. I always say that if my blog or YouTube videos help one person then it is worth doing, if we all have that attitude then we will have so much content and perspective out there to learn from. Not only that but a great way to cement your learning is by presenting and teaching others, there is nothing like a breakout session to get you better prepared on a topic!

I have been doing this for 6 months and every day I have either spent watching some YouTube content, reading blogs or hands on in a lab. Hopefully the biggest takeaway from this if you got this is far, invest in yourself with training and learning, your employer should absolutely back you in this venture as well for the win win scenario, let me know what you are learning or what the goals are and how you plan on getting there.

You might also want to check the warranty if you are going to do this, I did not check because there is always a fallback plan if you have a backup! But you have been warned.

Dual boot Ubuntu with Windows 10

For this walkthrough, I will be having Windows 10 pre-installed and wanting to carve out some space to have Ubuntu 20.10 running as a dual boot operating system on the laptop. There are some prerequisites within Windows that we must ensure is done before this will work (This is the reason for the blog, I lost many battles)

We are going to need the following:

• A backup of your Windows 10 machine! (cannot stress this enough, given what I do for a living) (free tools out there hint hint, Veeam Agent for Windows)
• Ubuntu ISO downloaded – https://ubuntu.com/download/desktop (I am using the Ubuntu 20.10 image)
• Software to create a bootable USB – https://www.balena.io/etcher/
• A USB Drive (I used a 4GB capacity drive, I did not test smaller options)
• Free disk space on your existing Windows OS or another disk available, I decided to shrink down the 500GB disk I have available and carve out 150GB for my new Ubuntu Installation.

Create a bootable USB drive

Using the downloaded Ubuntu ISO and the Balena Etcher software downloaded and installed on your machine we can now begin to create a bootable USB Drive. This software is super simple but will show all three steps and completion.

First, select the Ubuntu ISO.

Next, select the USB Drive, when I am doing things like this I tend to just use one at a time so I do not complicate things.

Then hit flash!

This process should take around 5 minutes, remove the drive safely when complete and put it to one side for now.

Windows Configuration Steps

There are a few steps we must complete so that we maintain the Windows OS we already have installed on the laptop.

Shrinking the disk.

For the record, this is not the system I used but the process is the same, open disk management you can find this by typing in disk management into the search bar next to the start menu.

Locate the disk you wish to use, my laptop only has one disk so that was straight forward, this system has multiple disk options. A warning here if you have a 500GB disk and it has 400GB of data (windows should prevent you from doing this) but don’t try and shrink it below what is being used. Right-click on the disk and you will see in the context menu “Shrink Volume”

Select Shrink Volume, enter in the amount you wish to shrink in MB I wanted 150GB so I made those changes. If you are working in GB which you will be then a quick Google for “150gb in mb” will give you a quick number to use.

Then select Shrink and your disk management should look like this below image and show an unallocated space, this is what we will use later for the Ubuntu Installation.

Secure Boot

This must be done for you to get things working. Secure Boot I think was a feature that came in with Windows 8. It was initially again I believe for security reasons to prevent boot viruses and the like, well in order for us to dual boot with our Ubuntu OS we need to turn it off. We start by searching for Advanced Start-up and we choose the top option in the menu below.

We then need to select Restart now, WARNING this is going to reboot your machine so if you are on the machine and reading this blog then you will be losing it and the next steps.

Your system is going to reboot into what I can describe as a safe mode option or boot mode. From here we are going to select “Troubleshoot”

Next is Advanced Options

Next is UEFI Firmware Settings

Then finally (well finally in this nice blue set of screens at least) hit restart

Next, you will find yourself in the BIOS of the system, use the arrow keys to move along to security.

Navigate down to secure boot and make sure this is disabled. Then save and exit, you will then be booted into Windows again.

Ubuntu Installation

Now we are finally ready to get Ubuntu installed on our system. You have your USB drive; you will need to reboot Windows and then make sure that the boot menu goes to the USB drive. On the Razer Blade Stealth, you need to press F12 on boot to access the boot menu. I am not going to walk through each step as this has been done a hundred times across the internet, The first and thorough walkthrough I found from a google search was this one here.

The only bit that I need to mention is taking that free 150Gb space we carved out in previous steps, this is where we need to state a few things here. There are three options that you will get that is not covered in the above walkthrough and they are: On this menu, we should choose “Something Else”

Then you will be back in a similar process to the linked walkthrough article and I have modified the images and hope the author doesn’t mind. Based on the free space that we now see in our list of drives, we need to select that and then the + we need to create 3 partitions as highlighted below. We will first create the system partition and we will make this 20GB, we will create an 8GB swap area partition and then the final partition in your home (where you store your documents etc) and this number will be the remaining total available from that 150GB so it should be around the 120GB mark.

Click through the rest of the wizard and you will be asked to create user accounts and join your networks. Out of the box this all worked for me, there are lots of stories out there about the graphics drivers but out of the box, Ubuntu used the open-source option which I later changed to NVIDIA drivers for the 1650TI. I did go through and then start installing my apps and updates and everything is running super smooth so far. I am yet to find anything that does not work, even the 4K touch panel works! Which I was shocked but equally pleased about as this was one of the reasons I went for the 4K option.

Another note is that the GRUB loader is super tiny, if anyone knows how to increase the size of this that would be super helpful although I can read it, it is very tiny on the 4K screen. I think that covers everything, if you have any questions then please reach out to me on Twitter @MichaelCade1 and I will gladly help or improve this article to help others.

Anyone that has done this will then see the GRUB loader be super tiny and almost unreadable on the 4K version of the Razer Blade Stealth. This may not bother you as by default this is going to boot into your Ubuntu desktop and you can just about select the Windows boot option there as well.

To fix this we have to make 1 tiny little change to the grub.cfg which can be found at etc/default/grub.cfg you need to remove the # from the

I did the above change using VI in the terminal, once you have made that change then run

Edge Computing is here and is going to be coming faster and harder as we move into 2020, the requirement for businesses to get processing functions to the specific location where it is needed at the edge of a company network in locations such as traditionally could be called Remote Offices but realistically this could now be a windfarm and IoT devices living on each wind turbine.

This craze and adoption will have to come with some serious investment around network architecture and how this is dealt with. 5G will contribute massively here also.

What is Edge computing and why it matters

Kubernetes

The world of Kubernetes is already well and truly here, it managed to pull 12,000 attendees to KubeCon in late 2019. It would be an easy win for me to just choose Kubernetes for the choice of 2020.

“Kubernetes has become the standard for container orchestration, with all major technology giants supporting the project via the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).”

My prediction as well as what Leah has picked out in here article linked below is, I predict there is going to be some form of simplified deployment of Kubernetes really arrive in 2020. There are tools there today but few of them. I expect to see this gap shorten further in 2020 to make Kubernetes that anyone could deploy a secure cluster.

Kubernetes Trends for 2020

Container Security

I have already mentioned Kubernetes being the leader in container orchestration, but security wise it gets a B-, there are a number of APIs that are exposed if not correctly deployed and leaves doors open for unwelcome breaches.

2020 will see a focus around container security. A really good article on this and the areas is posted below. Data point number 1 that Chris below highlights is the most concerning that needs to be a solid aim for 2020.

Five trends shaping the future of container security

Open Source

Find me an enterprise data centre that doesn’t use open source on some level?

As the article below alludes to Open Source is everywhere these days, cloud, containers, big data, IoT, Edge computing and probably tonnes more.

Open Source automation will be top of my list for 2020, Terraform consumed a lot of my time as did the other huge collection of other products that HashiCorp have in their portfolio, these guys will continue to rock and make life easier.

Also keep one eye open and focused on NVIDIA, look at what they are doing in the open source space in 2020.

I wonder if we will see a rise in the Linux desktop in 2020, hmmm maybe.

Open Source in 2020: The future looks bright

The year of the cloud – the public one

To my final thought and prediction for 2020. All of the above will also play a huge part in the continued adoption of public cloud services. Security will and has to be the biggest focus from all vendors to ensure the adoption goes well and doesn’t have people retreating because of bad experiences.

Cross cloud management players will rise to the surface in 2020, they will have to also focus on the security aspects but the hyperscaler’s will have to have that focus on their own specific offerings first. This cannot just be a focus on identity and access management.

From a mainstream infrastructure point of view VMware took a very smart move in 2019 when they purchased Carbon Black. VMware will play a huge part in 2020. Taking their familiar customers on a journey into the unknown but with known technology and interfaces they are familiar with.

It is also going to be interesting to see where the other public cloud providers go in 2020, Microsoft Azure and AWS are by far at least in my world the prominent players with a Google Cloud Platform coming in a solid 3^rd moving up the ranks it seems towards the end of 2019. But then we also have IBM, Oracle, Alibaba. What are they going to bring to the party in 2020 my bet is IBM who have a very good offering today but a focus has to be around OpenShift.

My focus for 2020

In the data management space as our customers and prospects take that journey to the public cloud or other SaaS based models. It’s up to us to be able to strategically provide a way to protect and backup their data.

Public Cloud Education

I have already mentioned that Microsoft Azure, AWS and GCP are from what I see and who I speak to the most common targets for customers, personally my education in 2019 has been focused on the first 2 mainly but all three will be a focus on in 2020.

Infrastructure As Code

I have been dabbling in this area for a bit now, by no way am I anywhere near a pro. But having the understanding and ability to use IAC to automate a process or build is the way our customers is also going, as technologists in our group we need to have that understanding and this is where most of our side-line projects will start in 2020.

Kubernetes

This has to be top of the list for me, I started a #SummerProject in 2019 that was focusing on the Public Cloud offerings, Cloud Native workloads and Kubernetes & Containers. It should not have just been a summer project there are so many angles and ways you can do so many things today and not all will win, 2020 will be a big focus on this with the first aspiration to get to Amsterdam at the end of March to the European version of KubeCon.

SaaS Backup

Why wouldn’t our customers remove the stress of having to manage their infrastructure and application stacks and hand that over to someone else that will provide that uptime and availability of service.

2019 was a big year for Veeam in the backup for Microsoft Office 365, fastest growing product ever at Veeam and continues to be of major interest especially if you look at the number of people going there on a monthly basis.

2020 will see more SaaS functions and its one of our jobs to keep a close eye there to see if there is a share responsibility model to think about when it comes to protecting data in those SaaS offerings.

With that, hope that was interesting or useful to people. 2019 has been a very busy year and I don’t expect too much slow down for 2020.

2019 has been an incredibly busy year for me from a travel perspective and events, some milestones and challenges encountered and conquered but overall a good year, I think.

These sorts of posts are actually for myself to look back on, but it also seems that some people do have some level of interest in what I have been doing but I think over the last three years where this role has taken me to many places, put me on many a stage I feel it’s important to document these so that it may help someone or it will give me something to look back on in years to come.

Travel

Let’s start with the travel. I have spent the most amount of time this year of any other years of my life in one of those floating tin cans in the sky. Almost 250,000km done and a stack of other numbers I will show below.

Highlight of the travel, I made it down to Australia. The AWS Summit in Sydney is a monster conference down there and some scheduling conflicts meant that we needed someone from our team down there. I got to visit Sydney and Melbourne in the week I was down there. By far the highlight of the whole year.

Another interesting trip this year came in the form of a team meeting with an overnight train from Zurich to Prague where we were heading to the yearly Veeam Vanguard Summit, that’s a tick in the box for doing it but I will not repeat that experience.

Personally, I don’t mind the travel, the biggest burden is being away from the family. A rule I made this year was to make sure I was home on Friday, which meant leaving on a Thursday night at the latest from the US and when I was travelling east it meant I could leave Friday morning and be home that afternoon. I am going to make another rule which is already going to be broken in the first 3 weeks of 2020 but that is not to travel on the weekend unless it is absolutely necessary.

A sneak peek into my first travel in 2020 is I will be heading out to China for our sales kick off followed by Prague and Atlanta. Really looking forward to China as I have never been. I wonder what else there will be in 2020 to report back on.

Twitter

Last year I shared some stats from 2018 and this year I want to do the same, one thing I will say is that I don’t think I have been as active on twitter, is it losing its power? Are we moving to different platforms are most of the interactions that were once on twitter now being done behind closed doors on Microsoft Teams and Slack? I strongly expect so.

A monthly view of twitter, in a world where most probably people are using a different media now to consume their news and seek advice and help on various subjects. Still the growing amount of impressions and mentions and obviously new followers is growing on years gone.

One thing I took from the above was less tweets from me but a staggering amount of impressions on top of the previous years.

And just a better way of visualising the breakdown over the years I put this together.

vZilla

in comparison to last year I am down around 5-6k views and around 3k visitors. I am not really sure why and to be honest that’s not really what it is about. If some of my posts, all of my posts help just one person then it served its purpose. I earn no money from my blog it just costs me the annual fee and hosting I have no sponsors.

I do this because I used and still use today peoples blogs to understand things and do things, it’s a priceless resource for the community and I want it to continue.

One thing I did better in 2018 was kicked off the year with a replication blog that alone probably makes up for the short fall of visitors and views to be honest. It also gave me a good springboard to get a good number of posts out in 2018. I know I probably have another 4-5 posts to add to that total for 2019 but still a few posts behind 2018.

Another thing in 2018 I was pretty proud of was the fact that all months apart from December had over 1k views, not the case this year.

But as I said this is a hobby and its there to help someone. My target for 2020 though will be to focus more on at least one series, I have just completed a series on Veeam Backup for Office 365 but only publishing in December means the real traffic won’t come now till the new year.

Previous year reviews

2018 – Year in Review

2017 – Year in Review

2016 – Year in Review

2015 – Year in Review

2014 – Year in Review

Closing out the year, some of the major achievements has to be the promotion to Senior Global Technologist just as we were walking out onto mainstage at VeeamON in Miami, which is probably the second biggest highlight of the year I absolutely love the mainstage live demos that we get to highlight in our team. On a personal note I became an uncle pretty recently so I don’t think that has sunk in yet but my little nephew Reggie and my little brother who has become a father this year should know that I am going to be the best uncle I can be.

2017 – Year in Review

2016 – Year in Review

2015 – Year in Review

2014 – Year in Review

I also tend to write some sort of predictions for the year ahead in another post, but I did one at the beginning of this year. This is something I try and keep top of mind throughout the year so that I am achieving my goals.

2018 – The Plan

The opening part of the post was about the travel and I am going to do some comparison between 2017 and 2018 later in this post. But I was right it did reduce a little. A big mention for the IT community as well and that did not disappoint this year. To be involved in so many community programs and have the ability to help shape our own at Veeam it’s great to be involved in our IT communities.

Events wise we kicked things off with a trip to Barcelona for Cisco Live and then we got the VMworld (Both US and EMEA) and then finished the year off with both NetApp Insight events with a lot of other events in the middle but these were my picks at the start of the year, and I expect that to follow into 2019 for me also.

We saw GDPR come into play which was a big focus in my post at the beginning of 2018, I think the content that we created at Veeam and the messaging was some of the best messaging in the industry, as we waited, and we documented what we practiced helping our customers understand what could and should be done.

Finally, lots of great customer interaction and feedback. Absolutely love what I do at Veeam and cannot wait to get started in 2019 with some more of it.

Travel Stats

I use a few different applications to track and monitor my travel the first one being TripIt I also used this last year and this is basically my centralised console for all my travel, plane journey, hotels, trains, car parking are all stored here. This makes my life easier to make sure I have everything in place for a trip but also allows for our team and extended team to see where in the world we are at one time.

I also use App In the Air and Jet it up.

Although JetItUp had some media over the past month, here is the infographic that provides insight into my travel for the year.

Both TripIt and AppInTheAir are very close on the distance travelled so for the purposes of this to highlight the difference between 2018 and 2017 I am going to use TripIt stats only.

Now some people will look at the below numbers for 2018 and think wow that’s a lot… and apparently that’s in the top 1% of travellers. But this was less than 2017 that you will see next. There was a section of October to December where I had 8 weeks of travel back to back and this was the killer for me, the distance is nothing nor is the time on a plane. But back to back weeks away is the pain. A new year’s resolution is not to exceed 5 weeks back to back.

2018 Travel Stats

2017 Travel Stats

At least I did less distance travelled compared to the 2017 and wonder what 2019 will look like. Although 2018 did see an extra 10 or so days away.

vZilla Website traffic

You will see on the previous years that I have linked and shown some steady progression on my blog site and the traffic numbers. I moved over to this WordPress site during 2017.

2018 saw a full year of stats to share.

At the beginning of the year I had a goal of making sure I would get more content out on the site and the first task was a Veeam Replication Series that consisted of 12 or so posts getting deep into the technology.

The number one post for 2018 was also from this series, it just so happened to be the first one of the whole series and the first one of the year.

Veeam Replication 101 and yes it did cover Veeam Replication, but it was covering all forms of replication and why and when you should consider different replication models. For anyone reading this though and want some tips I found that the series writing was by far the most rewarding and watch this space for more things to come from these series.

Some interesting stats come from the native WordPress analytics and where your reader base come from is one of them, not surprising really that the US and UK are number one but some of the other countries I would not have expected that number.

It was May 2017 when I moved over to WordPress judging by this next image. One of things I like from this is the number of views for 2018, I am quite proud to see that every month apart from December and rightly so everyone should be off spending time with their family and friends has had over 1000 views.

Finally, we have the post count. One thing I mentioned already was I wanted to be more consistent in getting content out. Almost one post a week for the year, and in fact as I write this post it will not be included in those numbers, so it is 1 post a week for the year.

I have a long list of content to see 2019 in with a bang, expect to see more series type sections and more technically focused content.

Twitter

Another huge part of the community is twitter for me. Its where I went when I first started in the industry, its where I seeked and found help and assistance and the whole point of blogging was based on giving back to the community.

At a monthly view of twitter, in a world where most probably people are using a different media now to consume their news and seek advice and help on various subjects. Still the growing amount of impressions and mentions and obviously new followers is growing on years gone.

Impressions

The top tweet for 2018 was this one outlining an outage that Azure had in September of 2018.

Top Mention

The highlight of my year and I have clearly used some of my mates twitterati to gain this top mention, this was just before our session at VMworld in Las Vegas. Anthony talks about his year and this session over here.

Top Impressions

The final tweet to point out is the top media tweet of the year. Quite fitting really as we had a year of GDPR and this one highlighted one of the Veeam features that came around location tagging giving you the ability to tag your physical constructs and objects with a location so that you could report on where your data resides.

Now I feel like I have just given out awards to my own tweets that’s a little sad. The only thing left to say is thank you, we all write for a reason and that’s to help each other.

Happy New Year and let’s see what we can achieve in 2019

This post will run through some true stories and scenarios that keep all of you on your toes on a daily basis as well as touch on some of the latest FREE tools from Veeam Software.

Introduction – Praise the sysadmin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_administrator

Downtime

Over the past 12 months we saw some major downtime events lead to lost revenue for several highly recognisable brands and caused a severe knock on effect to their consumer confidence and their brand reputation.

One of the most common causes of outages is unplanned configuration changes to a system, often when an immediate fix for a bug or potential system vulnerability unintentionally creates a much larger problem.

True Stories

BA – https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjnqva0-obVAhVBJVAKHa3PBNgQFggoMAA&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theguardian.com%2Fbusiness%2F2017%2Fmay%2F30%2Fbritish-airways-it-failure-experts-doubt-power-surge-claim&usg=AFQjCNEEPDeqtosSvmM3EUmxAPpQ7gXGjw

AWS – https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=10&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjnqva0-obVAhVBJVAKHa3PBNgQFghdMAk&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.recode.net%2F2017%2F3%2F2%2F14792636%2Famazon-aws-internet-outage-cause-human-error-incorrect-command&usg=AFQjCNF5mqkFb4RJ53IOFnYWaC-ckYbDKQ

https://www.cloudendure.com/blog/7-system-downtime-incidents-of-2017/

But also, it’s always the IT Department – Fix the lights, if it has electric flowing through it then generally the IT team are going to get asked to replace, fix or troubleshoot.

Don’t Annoy the IT Guy – Don’t try this at home y’all

http://www.cracked.com/article_19528_5-true-stories-that-prove-you-shouldnt-piss-off-it-guy.html

1. Omar Ramos-Lopez Remotely Shuts Down 100 Cars
2. Terry Childs Holds San Francisco Hostage
3. Joseph Nolan and Jason Cornish Should Not Be Trusted With Passwords
4. Timothy Lloyd Plants $10 Million Time Bomb

Key Takeaways

Identify what is mission critical

To avoid unexpected interruptions or downtime, System Administrators should tier their services and identify the systems that are mission critical to the business, these applications should include those are directly linked to the success or failure of the business, point of sale, ticketing or billing.

Develop a failover plan for top tier systems

Offering a high level of availability is not something that just happens by chance, careful planning for every aspect of the environment is key. The failover plan should be one that carefully plans for load capacity to handle unexpected spikes.

Monitoring

If you cannot see it, you cannot see it coming. The only way to ensure that you have an active grasp on your IT environment is with visibility into your IT Systems, knowing what has been affected and possibly how to fix that in the least amount of time possible.

Free Stuff

It’s been a while since I took a look at the plethora of FREE stuff available from Veeam and the list has grown quite a bit. These are some of the noticeable products available as free tiers but there are more and I will actually try and put together a post based on these later on in the year.

Veeam Agent for Windows Free Edition – https://www.veeam.com/windows-backup-free-download.html?ad=in-text-link

Veeam Agent for Linux Free Edition – https://www.veeam.com/linux-backup-free-download.html?ad=in-text-link

Veeam Backup Free Edition – https://www.veeam.com/virtual-machine-backup-solution-free-download.html?ad=in-text-link

Veeam ONE Free Edition – https://www.veeam.com/virtual-server-management-one-free-download.html?ad=in-text-link

Free AWS backup from N2W Software – https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B0748HYJSB?ref=_ptnr_web_veeamfreetools

Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 v2 (Community Edition) – https://www.veeam.com/free-backup-microsoft-office-365-download.html?ad=in-text-link

VMworld 2018 – Win a FREE ticket to VMworld – https://www.veeam.com/vmworld/tickets?ad=onpage

Veeam FastSCP for Microsoft Azure – https://www.veeam.com/fastscp-azure-vm-download.html?ad=in-text-link

Veeam Powered Network – https://www.veeam.com/cloud-disaster-recovery-azure-download.html?ad=in-text-link

If you want to find out more about this sacred day for the SysAdmin this looks to be the best place to find out more so for next year you can plan your day, week or month accordingly.

http://sysadminday.com/

More examples of big brand outages. – http://www.csoonline.com/article/3152801/security/tech-outages-of-2016-and-how-to-prevent-them-in-2017.html#slide2

Veeam Vanguards

Firstly, probably a week ago we announced the new class of 2018 Veeam Vanguards, I am very lucky with this group as I get to speak to these people every day and help shape this program, we have a great bunch of guys and gals in the program and looking forward to seeing what they bring in 2018. Congrats to all of them people.

I will update with a link to show the successful people for 2018.

I have said on several occasions that the IT community is special, its certainly allowed me to fully progress in my career and also got me out of some sticky situations when stuck in a data centre at 3am and you just need to speak to someone to stop you falling asleep.

Cisco Champion

I was awarded the Cisco Champion 2018 status just before heading out to Cisco Live 2018 in Barcelona, this is my 4^th status award with Cisco. With most of my interaction being around the data centre space, I really want to get more involved and speaking to those security fellows in 2018 to help me better understand what is happening in their world which will affect mine over the next very compliance focused and data driven year.

vExpert

The one that we were waiting on, came in late last night I was already fast asleep so to wake up to this news was great. As with the Cisco Champion status I have also been in the vExpert club for 4 years and this is really where my conversation in the community really started. The benefits of being in this group is amazing, NFR lab licensing, access to TME and SE resource that have also been awarded vExpert status and the VMware vExpert community and mostly this is down to twitter and the newish slack channel the ability to be speaking or involved in great technical conversations whenever you need is priceless to me. If you are stuck or just need some opinion.

NetApp A Team

It also wouldn’t be right for me not to mention the beloved NetApp A Team, an inaugural member 6 years ago and still going strong. (I think anyway) led by the main champion for the NetApp A Team Mrs Sam Moulton. A great community but also a lot of lifelong friends I have made over the time involved here. I wrote this article last year just before the annual NetApp ETL event. https://vzilla.co.uk/vzilla-blog/netappateam-the-story-so-far

Now I know that’s not all the community groups that exist out there, there are now quite a few that’s for sure. I just wanted to give a shout out to the people that manage these programs, it’s a tough job especially when you have the scale of people to manage and all the swag and communication tasks. Hats off to those administrators of the programs and thank you for allowing us to have such a thing within our community.

I seem to have become a big user of Slack, which the email side of my life has really calmed down the instant messaging, always on nature of Slack has rocketed I think at last count I had 9 Slack teams including the one that I am using for this notification piece.

We all read blogs, and we all consume information from various sources this can be via RSS to maybe an RSS feeder to centrally capture all articles that have just been published, I use Feedly for my daily catch up for all content out there. And that works well, when I get the chance I check in and work me through the many feeds and read the interesting stuff.

But it was another Application and another thing to remember to look at during the day. I also for work have a similar task where I want and need to be more active within the Veeam forums. Because I live in Slack on the side pretty much all day long, phone, laptop or desktop there is Slack installed. for this example, I am using the Veeam forums to capture the new posts via something called Zapier to this custom made slack team I have created with only me in.

Let’s head over to https://zapier.com/ first we need to create a new account. Once you have created this will create you a free plan tier. I would advise the free plan to begin with get the feel of how the platform works and if it works for you and you require more tasks or zaps then obviously you can pay for the pleasure.

The first step in creating this notification engine to Slack is selecting the elements or Apps that we need for the workflow. You will see in this list thousands of Apps and the different things you can do with them. For this to work I needed to find RSS.

Once you find your RSS App you then define what do you want to do with that App and this is where you have another search and you find Slack.

By pairing these together, you are creating something called a Zap. The following screen shows what the Zap will do.

I imagine that some of the other Apps have more options here but all I want my RSS App to do is capture all new posts, comments etc and then send them to my slack team channel.

Next up is adding the RSS URL that you want to capture from, with the Veeam forums there are internal channels so for this I added an additional auth=http which allows me to authenticate to allow me to get those new posts that are in the hidden internal forums.

Add in those forum credentials

Finally, this will give a summary of what it is going to do and run a test against that.

We then want to select some configuration for the Slack channel, we need to define what team channel this is going to and which channel. Pretty sure there are some channels in my Slack list that wouldn’t want this information so to make sure you select the correct one. Within Slack I created a new slack channel named veeam_forum and this channel will only show forum posts.

I think when you first sign up for Zapier it’s a 30-day trial and unlimited tasks and zaps after which that’s when they want you to pay for things. On the 31^st day or maybe even before as I think I exceeded the opening free tier of tasks with other zaps and integrations I created for Reddit and Twitter.

It’s worth a try though if this is where you spend a lot of time during the day.

I am in the process of purchasing our new family home. One thing I didn’t get to look into in our last home was the home automation, to be honest I thought it was interesting but it wasn’t really going to make my life easier or faster. It was a lot about coloured light bulbs and asking Alexa to do certain things and then getting bored with it all and moving back to the “traditional” way of doing things.

I started looking into more and more smart things and how I could use these devices to potentially make my life easier. I was still and still being not convinced by the lighting although I see more use cases. My wife said about having to get up in the night and having to turn a bright light on, this is something that could be solved by some smart lighting solutions.

I am going to run through this post with my purchases so far and some ideas behind it.

Hub

The hub is the first investment anyone should make if they are looking to put some smart home automation in place. There are many types of hub but be sure to check out integrations I found this to be a little daunting but I found that the Samsung SmartThings Hub was probably the easiest and had a lot of mainstream integrations. Oh, and it was cheap on Amazon over the Christmas period so I took the plunge.

At this point you have to have an idea on what you actually want to achieve or have a vision on where this is going. I knew I wanted some sort of camera function from a security perspective. I wanted at first the ability to visually see who was at my door from anywhere in the world and I wanted to make use of smart home automation to power on my lab and other useful appliances in the house.

Blink Cameras

At the same time as the Samsung SmartThings hub was on for a good price on amazon so was the Blink Cameras, I decided to go for the 5 cameras for the new house, this would give us more than enough coverage.

I went for the all-white version but it seems there is also a black version also available.

• MOTION DETECTOR: Built-in motion sensor alarm, when motion detector is triggered, WIFI cameras send an alert to your smartphone and record a short clip of the event to the cloud
• BATTERY POWERED SECURITY SYSTEM: Wireless camera system with 2-year battery life from 2 AA Lithium batteries. Systems consist of everything you need including the Blink Sync Module, Camera(s), Wall Mount(s), Batteries and associated accessories
• SMART HOME SECURITY: Simple self-install home monitoring in minutes; easy control wireless cameras with the included iOS & Android apps or via voice through our Amazon Alexa Skill!
• ADVANCED HOME SURVEILLANCE: Home and pet monitoring in real time with video camera “Live View” streaming mode
• FREE CLOUD STORAGE: Totally wire-free, with no monthly fees or service contract required. (Requires iOS 9.3 or Android 4.4 KitKat or higher)

Also, to add apparently up until the end of December (which may represent why the cost has gone down in the sales) is that the integration with Samsung SmartThings has been dropped! I will have to wait and see how their software and other integration points will work here.

Amazon Alexa

Over the past year I have accumulated several Amazon Alexa capable devices, this includes the Echo, 3 x Amazon Echo Dots and 2 x iLuv devices. I have also added a couple Amazon Fire Sticks which can also be controlled by Alexa.

Ring Pro 2

As I stated in the opening requirements the doorbell was one of the top priorities the ability for me and the family to see who is at the door is a plus but also the ability to have communication with people coming to our door when we are out is a pretty cool feature. I also have a plan to include a smart lock on the doors to allow for deliveries and such to be placed inside the house, the ability to communicate and see the drivers is again a big plus for me.

TP Smart Plug

This one was a gift for me so I am yet to know where it will be used but it did get me thinking about some use cases with the home lab which will live out in the detached garage. So maybe a function there to power everything on and monitor the energy being consumed.

iKettle

Possibly my most audacious purchase on this smart home adventure. The iKettle, it’s a kettle that connects to your Wi-Fi network and allows you to remotely boil the kettle. Ok that’s going to be pretty strange if I am boiling the kettle whilst away on business. But the ability to set schedules for boil as well as geofencing as to when to boil when arriving home. All that with the price point being pretty similar to a high end stainless steel and modern kettle I thought what the heck.

Now hopefully people don’t get into my network and hack my kettle.

My next post on this will either be a continuation of me buying more toys for the new house or some sort of my first installation segment. I can think of at least one major purchase I am looking to make in the next few weeks though which is Wi-Fi related for the new house.

At the back end of the year, our team moved from Global Marketing to Product Strategy, although one of our responsibilities will still be creating technical content. We will have more involvement from a strategic point of view and enablement.

Travel

With the above in mind, this might reduce the amount of travel for me in 2018 well at least out of region. But within reason there are a lot of events that take place in the US and they are bigger than the European events so they are great for education purposes as well as reaching the larger audiences.

Looking forward to

As always, I am looking forward to working within the IT community, more on this later on. I am really excited about the change in role and movement within the company, Veeam is on fire at the moment. Financially hitting records left right and centre and I am so thankful to be at the technical front of stage of this and hopefully in this new role I am able to shape some of the future of the company.

Community & Events

If I had a blank calendar for 2018 and I could choose any event to attend within our industry, off the back of my first ever VMworld in 2017 I would again choose this event in 2018.

I also really look forward to the Cisco and NetApp events where Veeam have a very strong relationship with those vendors but also the community is strong and being part of the advocacy programs they offer it’s great to network and meet up with my fellow peers.

Also, I expect to be able to attend one of the Tech Field Day events as well as TechUnplugged but more details of this to follow. Presenting at one of these is on my list of goals for 2018 that’s for sure.

Thought Leadership

In 2018 and moving forward expect to see even more thought leadership content from me, this will be solution driven based on various vendors and products. Our world is going to change this year with lots of new regulations. But also, the inevitable change that we see every year. I tweeted the following on New Year’s Day.

Some other predictions and I don’t want to make this a prediction post by any means. But we will see Data being king this year. A drive toward security of that data, we saw a taste of things with Ransomware and data breaches last year and this will continue to become more and more advanced moving forward.

Also, Availability of that data is going to become even more required. We saw a lot of major enterprise and major companies have some real disruptive outages last year. This will not be acceptable moving into 2018 and beyond.

The ability to leverage that data will be a big requirement from IT departments and businesses.

Product Strategy

We are now part of the Product Strategy unit at Veeam and as a Global Technologist, it’s going to be my job to get back to those customers and understand their requirements more and more and feed that back into our product management team to help shape the future of Veeam.

I have mentioned technical content, using the findings from our customers and partners and our alliances vendor relationships this is where the technical solution content from our team will be coming from. I already have a long list of these to be getting on with.

I also want to look at some of the features and functionality that we have in the products today that are either underused or just not known. Deep diving on things like the Veeam replication engine and the sandbox feature that we have that couple’s storage snapshots to create test and development environments.

Certifications

Finally, Certifications. I have let a lot of my certifications lapse over the last 18 months. I currently hold the v9 version of the VMCE.

2018 I want to achieve the VMCE-ADO this is the advanced exam from Veeam. By coupling the VMCE and the VMCE-A you become a Veeam certified Architect.

This is the only certification task I am setting myself for this year.

I am sure I have missed lots of things off my plan, we will just have to wait and see how things go, its going to be a really exciting year. Especially at Veeam.