Last week I had the pleasure of attending NetApp Insight in Berlin, having been to this conference in this same city for the past 3 years and also once for a Cisco Live, I knew the lay of the land and my bearings. This however was the third Insight in Berlin and my third different role. This time I was over for the Technical Evangelist role. This gave a different steer to the attendance. I was able to attend a lot of good technical sessions some of which I plan to shake down in another post this week. It was also my debut session speakingRead More →

As I write out this post I am actually on a flight off to Berlin for the fourth time in 3 years, I am heading to the NetApp Insight event which will be the third year of it taking place here. The last time I was here was back in a cold February for Cisco Live, same conference centre so I am hoping for something a little different for this one. Thinking about it this will be the third time at NetApp insight Berlin and once again I am in a different role… the first time I was at Avnet delivering Pre and Post sales,Read More →

Here is the second part of the Living the Veeam Dream post and also the 10th post in the #ProjectTomorrow I hope everyone has found at least one post useful or will do in the time to come. The whole point of the series is really to summarise the last 6-12 months of my home lab and really give some insight on to why I have one and what I use it for on a day to day basis. If you have any burning questions or recommendations please reach out to me on twitter @MichaelCade1 I am always more than happy to have a chatRead More →

We have finally made it to the penultimate post from my HomeLab series #ProjectTomorrow I have split this one title into two parts because really this is the fundamental reason why today I even have a home lab. I have a fully functional demo side of things so I will dive into that and what and where the Veeam components are residing, I also have a test environment which really allows for me to test another instance of Veeam software and this is really there to be spun up and spun down with no real persistence. Obviously the virtualisation piece is key to the flagshipRead More →

Welcome back and today’s post is really talking about one of my favourite features from VMware but also I want to touch on a little how Veeam can use Tags to protect your workloads.  The powerful world of tags and being able to assign this little tag to a virtual machine, datastore or pretty much all objects within the vSphere inventory. You may decide to tag virtual machines based on OS or possibly in order of importance, the old adage of Gold, Silver, Bronze and paper this coupled with other technologies that can consume this tag profiling can really help automate a lot more withinRead More →

Day 9 – Post 9, I wrote this prior to knowing the outcome of the US presidential vote…. I stand by if Donald Trump at the time of publishing this is President then we are going to be in a world of pain as a world not just the US! EDIT – so the above happened and maybe there is a complete post on its own here to reflect on the news I woke up to this morning, but I am not as shocked as I thought I would be. Having spoken throughout my night to a lot of my American friends who seem fineRead More →

Welcome to Post 5, in this post I want to dive a little deeper into the Host Configuration, Physical Build and Networking configuration. The previous post has outlined the simple approach and where I place each of the physical nodes and even slightly touching on the nested hosts for demo purposes. This post also signifies the 7th post of the #VDM30in30 challenge that I am attempting and I am now at the stage where I have the ideas and titles in my head but its now about putting it down on paper and getting constructive useful posts out on the site for all to consume.Read More →

Following on from post 3 of the series I want to now outline the design I went for and some of the reasoning for this, the equipment I have has a lot of direct attached storage, but not a good enough RAID controller if a RAID controller at all. This led me to having individual disks as datastores. This method is clearly not very good for resiliency, if those disks die then I lose the contents… or have to revert to a backup at very least. This is not really an issue as I am running regular backups on the machines I need to haveRead More →

Welcome back and we are now on the 3rd post of my #ProjectTomorrow series and also the 5th post of November meaning I am still there and on par with what I achieved last year in the #VDM30in30 which was a pretty shoddy performance. Happy Guy Fawkes / Fireworks night. Funny Story that Jack Cade was actually friends with Guy Fawkes back in the day, nothing to do with wanting to burn down parliament but went against the king on numerous occasions. A legend in himself and one of the reasons I wanted to call my first son Jack. Maybe another idea for a postRead More →

Following on from the 1st post, I want to touch on what I will be using my lab specifically for  and the reasons why, then later on in the series I will outline how I have achieved certain aspects and I am very much open for feedback over the whole design piece to make the most of this lab equipment. As I mentioned in the first post my lab usage will consist of Testing, Demo and some training. To set the scene here, I have recently started a new role at Veeam Software as a Technical Evanglist, prior to this I was a Systems EngineerRead More →