Category Archives: VMware

Random Short Take #32

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Welcome to Random Short Take #32. Lot of good players have worn 32 in the NBA. I’m a big fan of Magic Johnson, but honourable mentions go to Jimmer Fredette and Blake Griffin. It’s a bit of a weird time around the world at the moment, but let’s get to it.

  • Veeam 10 was finally announced a little while ago and is now available for deployment. I work for a service provider, and we use Veeam, so this article from Anthony was just what I was after. There’s a What’s New article from Veeam you can view here too.
  • I like charts, and I like Apple laptops, so this chart was a real treat. The lack of ports is nice to look at, I guess, but carrying a bag of dongles around with me is a bit of a pain.
  • VMware recently made some big announcements around vSphere 7, amongst other things. Ather Beg did a great job of breaking down the important bits. If you like to watch videos, this series from VMware’s recent presentations at Tech Field Day 21 is extremely informative.
  • Speaking of VMware Cloud Foundation, Cormac Hogan recently wrote a great article on getting started with VCF 4.0. If you’re new to VCF – this is a great resource.
  • Leaseweb Global recently announced the availability of 2nd Generation AMD EPYC powered hosts as part of its offering. I had a chance to speak with Mathijs Heikamph about it a little while ago. One of the most interesting things he said, when I questioned him about the market appetite for dedicated servers, was “[t]here’s no beating a dedicated server when you know the workload”. You can read the press release here.
  • This article is just … ugh. I used to feel a little sorry for businesses being disrupted by new technologies. My sympathy is rapidly diminishing though.
  • There’s a whole bunch of misinformation on the Internet about COVID-19 at the moment, but sometimes a useful nugget pops up. This article from Kieren McCarthy over at El Reg delivers some great tips on working from home – something more and more of us (at least in the tech industry) are doing right now. It’s not all about having a great webcam or killer standup desk.
  • Speaking of things to do when you’re working at home, JB posted a handy note on what he’s doing when it comes to lifting weights and getting in some regular exercise. I’ve been using this opportunity to get back into garage weights, but apparently it’s important to lift stuff more than once a month.

VMware – vExpert 2020

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I’m very happy to have been listed as a vExpert for 2020. This is the eighth time that they’ve forgotten to delete my name from the list (I’m like Rick Astley with that joke). Read about it here, and more news about this year’s programme is coming shortly. Thanks again to Corey Romero and the rest of the VMware Social Media & Community Team for making this kind of thing happen. And thanks also to the vExpert community for being such a great community to be part of. There are now 1730 of us in over 40 countries. I think that’s pretty cool.

Brisbane VMUG – February 2020

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The February edition of the Brisbane VMUG meeting (and first for 2020) will be held on Tuesday 18th February at Fishburners (Level 2, 155 Queen Street) from 4 – 6pm. It’s sponsored by Zerto and promises to be a great afternoon.

Here’s the agenda:

  • VMUG Intro
  • VMware Presentation
  • Zerto Presentation: Leveraging Azure Cloud and VMware with no disruption and fully orchestrated fail-over capabilities with Zerto’s Continuous Data Replication. Also learn about what’s new for Azure here in Australia with the imminent release of incremental snapshots of Azure’s managed disks and what this means for Zerto users.
  • Q&A
  • Refreshments and drinks post-event.

Zerto has gone to great lengths to make sure this will be a fun and informative session and I’m really looking forward to hearing about what’s happening with Continuous Data Replication. You can find out more information and register for the event here. I hope to see you there. Also, if you’re interested in sponsoring one of these events, please get in touch with me and I can help make it happen.

Random Short Take #27

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Welcome to my semi-regular, random news post in a short format. This is #27. You’d think it would be hard to keep naming them after basketball players, and it is. None of my favourite players ever wore 27, but Marvin Barnes did surface as a really interesting story, particularly when it comes to effective communication with colleagues. Happy holidays too, as I’m pretty sure this will be the last one of these posts I do this year. I’ll try and keep it short, as you’ve probably got stuff to do.

  • This story of serious failure on El Reg had me in stitches.
  • I really enjoyed this article by Raj Dutt (over at Cohesity’s blog) on recovery predictability. As an industry we talk an awful lot about speeds and feeds and supportability, but sometimes I think we forget about keeping it simple and making sure we can get our stuff back as we expect.
  • Speaking of data protection, I wrote some articles for Druva about, well, data protection and things of that nature. You can read them here.
  • There have been some pretty important CBT-related patches released by VMware recently. Anthony has provided a handy summary here.
  • Everything’s an opinion until people actually do it, but I thought this research on cloud adoption from Leaseweb USA was interesting. I didn’t expect to see everyone putting their hands up and saying they’re all in on public cloud, but I was also hopeful that we, as an industry, hadn’t made things as unclear as they seem to be. Yay, hybrid!
  • Site sponsor StorONE has partnered with Tech Data Global Computing Components to offer an All-Flash Array as a Service solution.
  • Backblaze has done a nice job of talking about data protection and cloud storage through the lens of Star Wars.
  • This tip on removing particular formatting in Microsoft Word documents really helped me out recently. Yes I know Word is awful.
  • Someone was nice enough to give me an acknowledgement for helping review a non-fiction book once. Now I’ve managed to get a character named after me in one of John Birmingham’s epics. You can read it out of context here. And if you’re into supporting good authors on Patreon – then check out JB’s page here. He’s a good egg, and his literary contributions to the world have been fantastic over the years. I don’t say this just because we live in the same city either.

Random Short Take #26

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Welcome to my semi-regular, random news post in a short format. This is #26. I was going to start naming them after my favourite basketball players. This one could be the Korver edition, for example. I don’t think that’ll last though. We’ll see. I’ll stop rambling now.

Brisbane VMUG – November 2019

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The November 2019 edition of the Brisbane VMUG meeting will be held on Tuesday 26th November at Fishburners from 4pm – 6pm. It’s sponsored by VMware and promises to be a great afternoon.

Here’s the agenda:

  • VMUG Intro
  • VMware Presentation: VMware the network company! A presentation by Francois Prowse
  • Q&A
  • Refreshments and drinks

Join us for an end of year celebration to thank the VMUG community for all their efforts in 2019 as well as hearing from VMware from a different perspective. You can find out more information and register for the event here. I hope to see you there. Also, if you’re interested in sponsoring one of these events, please get in touch with me and I can help make it happen.

Random Short Take #24

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Want some news? In a shorter format? And a little bit random? This listicle might be for you. Welcome to #24 – The Kobe Edition (not a lot of passing, but still entertaining). 8 articles too. Which one was your favourite Kobe? 8 or 24?

  • I wrote an article about how architecture matters years ago. It’s nothing to do with this one from Preston, but he makes some great points about the importance of architecture when looking to protect your public cloud workloads.
  • Commvault GO 2019 was held recently, and Chin-Fah had some thoughts on where Commvault’s at. You can read all about that here. Speaking of Commvault, Keith had some thoughts as well, and you can check them out here.
  • Still on data protection, Alastair posted this article a little while ago about using the Cohesity API for reporting.
  • Cade just posted a great article on using the right transport mode in Veeam Backup & Replication. Goes to show he’s not just a pretty face.
  • VMware vFORUM is coming up in November. I’ll be making the trip down to Sydney to help out with some VMUG stuff. You can find out more here, and register here.
  • Speaking of VMUG, Angelo put together a great 7-part series on VMUG chapter leadership and tips for running successful meetings. You can read part 7 here.
  • This is a great article on managing Rubrik users from the CLI from Frederic Lhoest.
  • Are you into Splunk? And Pure Storage? Vaughn has you covered with an overview of Splunk SmartStore on Pure Storage here.

Random Short Take #23

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Want some news? In a shorter format? And a little bit random? This listicle might be for you.

  • Remember Retrospect? They were acquired by StorCentric recently. I hadn’t thought about them in some time, but they’re still around, and celebrating their 30th anniversary. Read a little more about the history of the brand here.
  • Sometimes size does matter. This article around deduplication and block / segment size from Preston was particularly enlightening.
  • This article from Russ had some great insights into why it’s not wise to entirely rule out doing things the way service providers do just because you’re working in enterprise. I’ve had experience in both SPs and enterprise and I agree that there are things that can be learnt on both sides.
  • This is a great article from Chris Evans about the difficulties associated with managing legacy backup infrastructure.
  • The Pure Storage VM Analytics Collector is now available as an OVA.
  • If you’re thinking of updating your Mac’s operating environment, this is a fairly comprehensive review of what macOS Catalina has to offer, along with some caveats.
  • Anthony has been doing a bunch of cool stuff with Terraform recently, including using variable maps to deploy vSphere VMs. You can read more about that here.
  • Speaking of people who work at Veeam, Hal has put together a great article on orchestrating Veeam recovery activities to Azure.
  • Finally, the Brisbane VMUG meeting originally planned for Tuesday 8th has been moved to the 15th. Details here.

Brisbane VMUG – October 2019

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*Update – This meeting has now been moved to the 15th October. 

The October 2019 edition of the Brisbane VMUG meeting will be held on Tuesday 8th October at Fishburners (Level 2, 155 Queen St, Brisbane) from 4pm – 6pm. It’s sponsored by Rubrik and promises to be a great afternoon.

Here’s the agenda:

  • VMUG Intro
  • VMware Presentation
  • Rubrik Presentation: Automating VM Protection in Rubrik with vSphere Tags (and other cool stuff….)
  • Q&A
  • Refreshments and drinks post-event.

Rubrik have gone to great lengths to make sure this will be a fun and informative session and I’m really looking forward to hearing about their solution. After the VMUG wraps up at 6pm, feel free to come along to Brewbrik at The Pool Terrace & Bar on Level 4 at Next Hotel, Queen Street Mall (just down the road from Fishburners). Brewbrik is an informal get together of Rubrik customers, partners, prospects and general hangers-on. Rubrik will be shouting drinks and food. You can find out more information and register for the event here. I hope to see you there. Also, if you’re interested in sponsoring one of these events, please get in touch with me and I can help make it happen.

Random Short Take #22

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Oh look, another semi-regular listicle of random news items that might be of some interest.

  • I was at Pure Storage’s //Accelerate conference last week, and heard a lot of interesting news. This piece from Chris M. Evans on FlashArray//C was particularly insightful.
  • Storage Field Day 18 was a little while ago, but that doesn’t mean that the things that were presented there are no longer of interest. Stephen Foskett wrote a great piece on IBM’s approach to data protection with Spectrum Protect Plus that’s worth read.
  • Speaking of data protection, it’s not just for big computers. Preston wrote a great article on the iOS recovery process that you can read here. As someone who had to recently recover my phone, I agree entirely with the idea that re-downloading apps from the app store is not a recovery process.
  • NetApp were recently named a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Primary Storage. Say what you will about the MQ, a lot of folks are still reading this report and using it to help drive their decision-making activities. You can grab a copy of the report from NetApp here. Speaking of NetApp, I’m happy to announce that I’m now a member of the NetApp A-Team. I’m looking forward to doing a lot more with NetApp in terms of both my day job and the blog.
  • Tom has been on a roll lately, and this article on IT hero culture, and this one on celebrity keynote speakers, both made for great reading.
  • VMworld US was a little while ago, but Anthony‘s wrap-up post had some great content, particularly if you’re working a lot with Veeam.
  • WekaIO have just announced some work their doing Aiden Lab at the Baylor College of Medicine that looks pretty cool.
  • Speaking of analyst firms, this article from Justin over at Forbes brought up some good points about these reports and how some of them are delivered.