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 →

  What is Ransomware? What is ransomware? – A type of malicious software (Malware) which restricts access to a computer and/or the files on a computer until a ransom amount is paid. It’s something that is downloaded via email or file from the internet or passed between users much the same as a virus, this can be linked to a virus, malware, Trojan horse these are the same thing but a more evolved version. What is it going to do to a single computer or network? – it’s going enforce restrictions through encryption and prohibit access to certain areas of a machine or an environmentRead More →

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 →

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 →

Introduction to OnDemand Sandbox from Storage Snapshots This new feature from Veeam was released in version 9 on January 12th 2016, probably my favourite feature that came in the new release, simply because it takes a great technology that is rarely used because of the manual steps required and allows for these steps to be automated. Meaning you get this great technology in an automated fashion allowing to perform lots of test and development on production storage and no extra storage cost. Basically with OnDemand Sandbox from Storage Snapshots we are able to take existing storage snapshots, create a segregated, full performance copy of productionRead More →

The reason for this post is to tie in with the last post but give you a step by step guide on how to create the “FlexClone On Steroids” Create backup / Snapshot only job The following steps are required for that scheduled snapshot job that can be ran during business hours this is not a requirement for this however I have found it quite useful in having a scheduled point in time snapshot to then go and create a FlexClone from. Create Application Group The creation of the Application Group only has to be done once and this is really there to determine theRead More →