Posts on koolaid.info

Hello World

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 12:00:00 -0500

The WordPress era is over. This site now runs on Hugo with the Blowfish theme, deployed via Cloudflare Pages.

More posts coming soon.

Ok, now that the AI generated content is out of the way let’s talk about the fact that this is site is once again on the move, this time to the Hugo platform. This is a fairly popular move right now and for me it was inspired by finding the excellent work of Matt Broberg as he continues his public learning and living. Along the way there’s been a lot of discussion with others and in part Tim Smith and I have worked our way through this in very similar ways. You can read more about his journey from WordPress to Hugo and probably see a lot of similarities to what you see here.

Rationalizing AI With Your IT Career

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Note: This post originally appeared on the 11:11 Systems blog. To read the company published version please see https://1111systems.com/blog/navigating-ai-in-it-balancing-innovation-privacy-and-expertise/.

Let’s be honest: if you work in IT right now, your feed is basically 50% AI hype, 40% AI fear, and 10% confused memes about both. Depending on who you ask, AI is either coming for your job, coming for everyone’s job, or going to “free you up to do more strategic work” (which somehow always looks a lot like “do the same work, just faster, with fewer people”).

Offline October: Going Dark on Social Media

Wed, 01 Oct 2025 08:07:33 +0000

As a modern social media based society we’ve found it very easy to do movements, experiments, and concepts in marketing-approved monthly form. No shave November. Blogtober. Hacktoberfest. So on and so on. Here of late I’ve noticed that I am leaning way too hard into the the whole brain rot of it all and thought I’d roll my own version of this concept; Offline October, where I delete all the social media apps from my devices and stop doom scrolling as a way to pass the time.

What To Expect When You Are Expecting VBR v13

Wed, 03 Sep 2025 08:58:08 +0000

As we head into September 2025 I look back and find that August has been quite the “Veeamy” month for me; I’ve put out a number of Veeam related posts (here, here, here, and here), had a number of Veeam 100 briefings and last week was able to register for this year’s Veeam 100 Summit. While August seemed for the community side of Veeam to be big the rest of year appears ready to be heavy on the software side of things with the ~~upcoming~~ v13 release(s) of their flagship product, Veeam Backup and Replication.

Fun with AWS S3 Logging: S3 Inventory

Thu, 28 Aug 2025 14:31:25 +0000

In my last post I started going down the rabbit hole of creating analytic data about, well, my data, specifically that data that’s located in AWS S3. In that post I discussed the hows and whys of enabling Access Logging for S3 buckets which is exceptionally important from a security perspective. In many cases when it comes to object storage generally and AWS S3 in particular it is also important to know what the demographics of your data looks like as well and this is where AWS Storage Lens and S3 Inventory comes in.

Fun with AWS S3 Logging: Access Logging

Thu, 28 Aug 2025 07:19:06 +0000

In case you’ve missed it I’ve been doing lots of fun things with object storage and specifically AWS S3 for the past couple of years. While using S3 for backup and data protection needs is essentially a super power it also brings its own challenges and complications due to its general Internet connectivity, concept of classful storage types, performance, and data locality.

When I talk to people who are really using object storage at scale (think hundreds of terabytes to petabytes to get in the door) there are often concerns around ensuring that their buckets are only being accessed by the servers that they control, regardless of the application. This leads to a need to capture information access logging and be able to use it to notify when anomalies occur. In this post we’ll explore how to setup S3 access logging for your buckets and briefly cover how to integrate that information into SIEM infrastructure such as Wazuh to monitor buckets within an account.

Setting up PGBouncer for Veeam Backup for Microsoft365 v8

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 08:07:01 +0000

Veeam has begun advising VB365 administrators in large scale environments to use a project called PGBouncer with the required PosgreSQL server. PGBouncer is essentially a proxy that sits in front of your PSQL server and will allow connection attempts to be managed to keep load on the database server at a manageable level by pooling incoming connections and operating a buffer.

So why is this needed?
#

VB365 v8 drastically changes many things about it’s infrastructure, especially as it relates to object storage backed repositories. In the past VB365 operated on a 1:many relationship between a proxy and a series of repositories. Each object storage repository had a jetDB based metadata cache that was stored locally on the proxy it was attached to. For many reasons this was inefficient and actually detrimental when providing the service at scale as is done by service providers and large enterprises.

Setting up Object Storage Gateways For Data Migration to AWS S3

Mon, 18 Aug 2025 04:00:00 +0000

As you may have noticed I’ve been talking quite a bit here recently about object storage migration, especially as it relates to Veeam based workloads. While you would think that using 3rd party tools such as rclone, AWS DataSync, and Azure’s AZCopy would be the best for doing these kinds of migrations they often leave a lot to be desired when working with backup data. This is largely because they don’t have a good mechanism to write object versioning information but in the end as a general rule backup vendors want to be the only thing that touches the data they write.

Simplify VBR Direct Repository Migration with VeeaMover

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 09:04:02 +0000

Migrating backup data between Veeam Backup & Replication (VBR) object storage repositories is a critical step for organizations looking for portability in our hybrid cloud world. These transitions can seem overwhelming, especially when data integrity and uptime are on the line. That’s where VeeaMover comes into play. It’s a built-in VBR tool that takes the complexity out of direct repository migrations, while helping you maintain business continuity.

In this post, I’ll focus on how to use VeeaMover to migrate a job from one VBR direct object storage repository to another, highlighting best practices and outlining a clear step-by-step process for a smooth migration.

Recovering Entra ID Items from Veeam Backup & Replication Backups

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 08:31:51 +0000

In my last post here we covered the whys and the hows of protecting Microsoft Entra ID data with Veeam Backup & Replication. While it’s great to have good, encrypted backups of our data those backups mean less if you can’t recover them when needed. In this post we’ll walk through doing just that.

If you’ll remember there are a number of object types within Entra ID that can be protected at this time.

Configuring Veeam Backup & Replication EntraID Protection

Wed, 13 Aug 2025 08:14:38 +0000

If you are not familiar with Entra I will forever and always think of this as “the artist formerly known as Azure Active Directory.” While functioning as a cloud Active Directory is it’s roots Entra was renamed for a reason, it’s so much more than just AD. We often have customers who are leveraging Microsoft365 or other Microsoft Azure functions which are reliant on the Entra platform and just as you’d never consider leaving your Active Directory infrastructure excluded from backups you should consider protecting your the Entra ID that is the underlying authentication mechanism of many of your SaaS applications.

11:11 Systems Object Storage in Veeam Data Platform 12.3

Mon, 03 Mar 2025 09:38:18 +0000

*Note: This is a modified version of a post I’ve written for the 11:11 Systems Innovation Blog. This post includes more nerdy bits so please choose your own adventure. The original blog can be viewed at https://1111systems.com/blog/1111-systems-object-storage-in-veeam-data-platform-12-3/.

With the 12.3 release of the Veeam Data Platform 11:11 Systems low cost and Veeam optimized Cloud Object Storage product directly integrated into the Veeam UIs for both the Backup & Replication and Veeam ONE products. With this integration you get the power and efficiency of 11:11 Systems’ relationship with the AWS S3 with a streamlined implementation model that can be monitored separately from other AWS based storage that you may have.

Configuring Cohesity CloudArchive v2 with AWS S3 Buckets

Tue, 10 Dec 2024 11:20:09 +0000

With the latest update to CohesityOS, 7.1.2u2, they are finally supporting object lock and immutability with both iterations of their CloudArchive feature, Incremental with Periodic Full (v1) and Incremental Forever (v2). What this means is that you can add an AWS S3 bucket as an external target then make it part of your protection policy to either send a copy of backups (backup copy for those who speak other vendor) with a different retention policy and/or to allow your full retention needs to be met in object storage rather than the more costly appliance based storage while maintaining immutability throughout the lifetime of the retention policy.

PostgreSQL 16 on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS for VB365 v8

Mon, 09 Dec 2024 14:34:15 +0000

In case you haven’t noticed I’ve been putting out a little bit of content lately regarding Veeam Backup for Microsoft365 v8. So far we’ve covered how to deploy NATS.io in a scale out manner, how to deploy Linux proxies on Ubuntu 22.04 and now I’m going to do an update to a post from earlier in the year regarding deploying PostgreSQL to round out our scalable VB365 deployment.

In my previous post regarding PSQL I walked through the deployment for VBR on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS. Updates to the native PostgreSQL repository in 24.04 LTS as well as the VB365 installer has made this far simpler so I thought it was worth a revisit. While Veeam has been standardizing on PSQL 15.1 utilizing the latest version is supported so I would recommend doing that.

Prepare Ubuntu 22.04 for Veeam Backup for M365 v8 Proxy Use

Thu, 05 Dec 2024 19:42:49 +0000

With the latest release of Veeam’s Backup for Microsoft365, version 8, they have started to support both proxy pools and for those proxies to be able to run on Linux. This is important for a number of reasons, not the least of which is cost when it comes to a fully scaled out infrastructure for the product. In short when you have tens if not hundreds of proxies within an environment those Windows Server licenses can really rack up. Further there is a case to be made for the easy of automated deployment and management that is a hallmark of a distributed system.

Deploying NATS.io for VB365 with Podman

Tue, 03 Dec 2024 08:31:06 +0000

With the release of Veeam’s Backup for Microsoft365 version 8 Veeam has begun the move to a more distributed and cloud native approach to supporting the product. The end result is the capability known as proxy pools, where you can create a pool of worker VMs, or proxies, that jobs can have many object storage backed repositories assigned to it and then jobs can load balance across the entire pool for processing. This is different from the previous architecture in that the relationship was both job>repository and repository>proxy, greatly effecting the scale out nature. To make this end result happen Veeam has looked to open source solutions such as nats.io and PostgreSQL to make it happen. By default this all is installed on the VBO server itself.

Automating Let’s Encrypt Lifecycle with Posh-Acme and Cloudflare

Fri, 15 Nov 2024 13:04:00 +0000

I find I often want to create real certificates for either internal or testing use cases. While I could either use self-signed certificates (eww) or spin up my own certificate management system (ain’t nobody got time for that) the fine folks at Let’s Encrypt and the Posh-ACME Powershell module/ ACME client have created a mechanism where through integrated DNS plugin providers Let’s Encrypt certificates can be generated when they don’t track back to a publicly facing DNS record. In this post we’ll walk through how to create the certificates and semi-automatically manage the lifecycle of the certificate.

Synology DS923+: Immutable Microsoft365 Protection

Thu, 24 Oct 2024 14:52:49 +0000

In continuing my look at the latest generation Synology DS devices, in this case a DS923+, one aspect that I’m continually impressed with is DSM’s simple to use ActiveBackup capabilities for cloud services Microsoft365 and Google Workspaces. For many organizations a small, low cost solution coupled with an offsite copy is sufficient for practical data protection as well as compliance needs.

While Synology does not have a capability to have immutable first write storage volumes it does have a capability to create immutable snapshots. Further when coupled with CloudSync feature you can offload a copy of these backups to immutable object storage, albeit without the capability to actively write the immutability, instead needing to leverage the provider’s native bucket policy capabilities.

Two Simple Ways To Immutability With Synology

Thu, 24 Oct 2024 13:42:36 +0000

In today’s data protection world the ability to write data with periodic immutability is the golden ring that everybody reaches for. This is because we are long past the days where the biggest threat to our data as it lives in production is physical disaster, today’s disaster is ransomware, malware, deletion or any other form of data security. If you are unfamiliar with the term immutability in the sense of data storage means that once data is written that through some means it is virtually impossible to change or remove it until a defined period of time elapses.

VMware Edge Cloud Orchestrator: VMware For The Very Small Masses

Sat, 05 Oct 2024 08:43:47 +0000

Not everybody who needs on-premises virtualization and wants to use VMware vSphere needs full blown VCF. ~Me

That leading quote is just as jump off the page as VMware’s presenters, Alan Renouf and Chris Taylor, ask that we forget everything we know about Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware. This was done during their presentation at Edge Field Day 3 about their product, VMware Edge Cloud Orchestrator (VECO). The reason being that Cloud Edge Orchestrator does not work, either in technology or licensing, like it’s much more publicized sister product VMware Cloud Foundation.

What Problems Are Modern Edge Computing Solving For?

Tue, 01 Oct 2024 09:23:15 +0000

I was recently honored to be selected as a delegate at the Futurum Group’s Edge Field Day 3 event in Santa Clara, California. There we heard from companies about their solutions and products that pertain to this smaller but ever growing segment of the enterprise IT landscape.

In the next few posts I’ll cover those companies visions specifically but before we get to that I think it is worth discussing the common issues that they are all trying to solve. While each of these companies are differentiated in their solution to the needs of computing in remote places there are many commonalities that came through as to what is seen as the challenges before them.

Maintaining Recoverability in Veeam Capacity Tier Migrations

Wed, 25 Sep 2024 07:48:14 +0000

Veeam Backup and Replication Administrators often want to be able to transition cloud object storage providers in today’s era of backup systems management. This can be due to several factors including, cost, availability, geo-location, and cloud preference.

Historically the way to address object storage in VBR is through a Scale Out Backup Repository, or SOBR, where you have one or more block based primary repositories on-premises in the performance tier and then a single object storage bucket with a Cloud Service Provider (CSP) in the capacity tier. The capacity tier can be used in one of two ways:

Veeam Backup for Microsoft365 v8 Release Thoughts

Tue, 03 Sep 2024 09:48:30 +0000

Today Veeam released the long awaited version 8 of their Microsoft365 Backup product commonly referred to as VB365. I’ve had the opportunity to be somewhat involved in some of the new capabilities of this release and I’m excited to see it released. This version will not only have the normal complement of new features and capabilities but also some significant architectural changes that should make it more usable for the large enterprise and service provider customer bases.

Synology DS923+: Overcoming the HCL

Wed, 22 May 2024 09:00:00 +0000

As I mentioned in my last post one of the things that most vexes me with Synology’s line of storage arrays is that it has a Hardware Compatibility List that skews heavily toward their own branded HDDs, SSDs, and M.2 NVMe drives. In the case of Hard Disk Drives there is a legitimate reprieve with drives from some of the major vendors available, even if hidden under a “3rd Party” drop down, but there don’t appear to be any non-Synology branded SSDs or NVMe drives supported. With a 400 GB Synology M.2 NVMe going for about the same price as a 2 TB option from Crucial, Samsung or Western Digital it would be nice with no discernible differences once you get to NAS grade devices it’s a challenge.

First Impressions with the Synology DS923+

Mon, 20 May 2024 09:00:00 +0000

Disclaimer: The posts in this series have been in part made possible by hardware and other services provided by Synology. In exploring the topics involving the Synology DS923+ array I was provided 1 DS923+ unit, 1 400 GB Synology nVME drive and 2 4 TB Synology hard disk drives.

For those of us who come from a SMB background and/or have ever done homelabbing Synology is a brand that we are well acquainted with. My first at home storage array was a 414 Slim that performed admirably for many years. As time has progressed these nice little storage systems have become quite powerful in regards to storage yes, but also data protection and actual virtualization.

PostgreSQL on Ubuntu 2022.4 Installation & Configuration for Veeam Purposes

Thu, 14 Mar 2024 15:57:12 +0000

For no reasons whatsoever I find myself working quite a bit with the recent integrations of Veeam products with PostgreSQL, letting it function as the underlying database server for 1 (or more) Veeam products. Postgres as well as the Linux aspect are interesting for highly scaled environments both because it’s powerful but also, frankly, because it’s cheap.

In this post I’ll quickly walk through my golden set of instructions for deploying, configuring and optimizing a PostgreSQL 16 server (latest version) for use with Veeam Backup & Replication.

Spinning Disk Use Cases Are Getting Smaller

Mon, 08 Jan 2024 14:32:58 +0000

As I’ve previously mentioned I was fortunate enough to recently attend the joint SNIA’s Storage Developer 2023 Conference and Gestalt Storage Field Day 26 Event. At these events we both heard directly from companies in *FD style but also dove deep into the storage realm with an excellent collection of breakout sessions.

One thing you did not hear much about at either event was traditional spinning hard disks. For all the new hotness such as AI/ML model building it just simply isn’t fast enough without throwing literal racks of it at the problem to keep up with the ingress. For edge use cases such as the super cool keynote about the Spaceborne Compute systems from HPE in the International Space Station or anything manufacturing related there is an idea that any kind of storage medium that moves will quickly become damaged because of environmental reasons.

Commvault Shift: Backups are InfoSec and InfoSec is Backups

Mon, 20 Nov 2023 10:58:06 +0000

In twenty plus years in the Information Technology field Information Security has always been a function of the job, albeit one with differing levels. Since the beginning of the pandemic the need for security capabilities to be overlaid on all facets of cloud infrastructure has become an absolute one, mostly driven by the big business that modern ransomware has evolved into.

The Backup and Disaster Recovery segments of that industry are no exception. That task once delegated to the junior sysadmin has now become a major tool in providing a layered defense of our organizations’ data and resources. As mentioned in my last post, Veeam’s upcoming release is very security focused, providing new ways to look at data to help identify and recover from attacks while beefing up their capability to protect backups from attacks against them.

Veeam 100 Summit 2023

Tue, 14 Nov 2023 08:57:54 +0000

As I sit here sipping my coffee, finally over the jet lag of the past couple of weeks, I find myself reflecting on the recent Veeam 100 Summit in Prague, Czech Republic. As always the event is an interesting and wonderful mix of community, technology and culture. This year the attendee list grew to an impressive 161 attendees between Veeam Vanguards, Legends, MVPs and other staff from their product management teams leading to insight into how decisions are made and lively discussion regarding their products.

Thinking About… Storage in 2023

Wed, 25 Oct 2023 20:25:38 +0000

I was recently invited to attend Gestalt IT’s Storage Field Day 26 event in conjunction with SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference in Fremont, CA. Through the SFD26 event we heard from

ctera, talking about their distributed object to block filer gateway and caching system and their new security focused capabilities that overlay it
Solidigm (the artist formerly known as Intel SSD by way of SK Hynix), who was talking about their high density, low(er) cost QLC SSDs
And SNIA (now a word, not an acronym), who highlighted their view of the state of the industry and put forth some of their new research projects.

Storage Field Day 26 Delegates at SDC2023

I’ll be honest, I’m not exactly a storage systems subject matter expert but I am a long time consumer of storage systems. Of late would definitely consider myself “storage adjacent” as my work has largely revolved around backups and data protection. I say that to say that going to an event like this was very much so a kick into the deep end of the pool. There were things that blew my mind (CXL and [DNA based storage media](https://gestaltit.com/tech-field-day/sulagna/preserving-data-through-centuries-without-hard-drives-meet-dna-data-storage/)) but also things which were completely in my lane such as the session advocating for S3 to become a standards based protocol.

In this series of posts I’ll be covering the event and the presenting organizations starting with some take aways that I had from SNIA’s Storage Developer Conference.

Thinking About… Hybrid Cloud

Thu, 06 Jul 2023 13:08:43 +0000

Recently I’ve found myself thinking deep thoughts about a variety of subjects. Like any normal person glutton for punishment I find that writing these thoughts down helps me to process and further I’ve decided that if I’m going to write it down why not put these thoughts out for to world see! It’s worth noting that these are not going to be the most polished posts you see in this space as it’s more like long form notes, but on the flip side I truly plan on coming back and revising content here regularly as well as these thoughts evolve and flesh themselves out more.

AWS:ReInforce 2023: Keynote… notes

Wed, 21 Jun 2023 13:25:00 +0000

Hi all! I recently attended the AWS:ReInforce conference in Anaheim, CA. The show itself was my first AWS event and I greatly enjoyed it. This was due to yes, the quality of content, but more the inclusiveness of the AWS community. Many thanks specifically to Chris Williams for making so many introductions but also to those that I met there and have given me the privilege of a launchpad for starting my AWS journey.

It’s Time for VeeamON 2023!

Mon, 22 May 2023 09:00:13 +0000

Today’s the day, the beginning of Veeam Software’s annual conference, VeeamON for 2023! Just like the Blues Brothers sang before me I’m Goin’ Down to Miami to learn, connect, and this year speak at the Fountainebleau in Miami, Florida and I can’t be more excited. This year Veeam has made a marked return to the community focus of the event with a significant number of the nearly 50 in-person sessions having at least one community speaker.

Veeam Backup for AWS and Service Provider Console: BaaS that AWS Up!\u00a0

Fri, 28 Apr 2023 13:01:38 +0000

As we continue our journey into exploring new products and features that Veeam has released for 2023 it’s well worth the time to look at what Veeam Backup for AWS (VBA) is looking like these days. If you haven’t been using this software yet with this version 6 release it has deepened its relationships with other Veeam products, namely Veeam Cloud Connect powered by Backup and Replication (VBR) and Veeam Service Provider Console (VSPC). This allows VCSPs to supply a true managed BaaS service without the customer needing their own VBR and/or VBA components.

VB365 and Microsoft Teams Graph Export API: The Saga Continues

Tue, 04 Apr 2023 13:19:49 +0000

I feel like I could write, produce, direct and star in a saga based in a galaxy far, far away with the amount of time I have spent talking about the combination of Microsoft365, backup applications that support it such as Veeam Backup for Microsoft365, and the recent Microsoft Teams Graph Export API. Yet here I am again because Microsoft has decided to change course with how this capability will be handled without telling anyone.

V12 Preview: Appropriate Direct to Object Storage Use Cases

Wed, 22 Feb 2023 09:00:00 +0000

I’ve just completed watching the Veeam v12 Data Platform Launch Event keynote and one theme I feel is getting a lot of chatter is the new “Direct to object storage” capabilities of the release. What this means is that as I create backups of my production data the first copy that is made is written to object storage. I’ve written quite a bit about v12 and object storage before, both in how to setup and consume it in the performance tier of Scale Out Backup Repositories as well as comparing copy mode object storage and Veeam Cloud Connect Backup, but this is not that. Direct to object storage is the idea that you write your first backup copy of production data to object storage, rather than as a secondary copy.

v12 Preview: Ding, Dong, Veeam Cloud Connect’s Not Dead

Tue, 21 Feb 2023 09:00:00 +0000

With the upcoming version 12 release of Veeam Backup & Replication the platform will start to support object storage as a primary location for backups. This is not a new idea, it feels like we’ve been talking about this forever, but it is a radical shift for the company and frankly one that for reasons many in the Veeam Certified Service Provider community have been dreading. While I believe object storage has its place, even within a VCSP, it should not in general practice be a replacement for Veeam Cloud Connect as VCC-B and VCC-R offer capabilities and enhancements that object storage services all by themselves will never be able to replicate.

Multi-Bucket Performance Tier Scale Out Backup Repositories in Veeam VBR v12

Tue, 14 Feb 2023 09:00:00 +0000

As we come upon the end of the year, we are also getting closer and closer to Veeam’s latest release of their flagship product, Veeam Backup & Replication v12. Here at 11:11 Systems we have been testing quite a bit with the beta code as it has been released because there are quite a few features to really be excited about here. For me personally the biggest is being able to use object storage as a first hit repository and to be able to scale them out.

Veeam v12: MFA All The Things (part 1)

Tue, 14 Feb 2023 09:00:00 +0000

In the time of ransomware and and cybersecurity attacks being in the news almost daily things like our disaster recovery applications have to start taking those protections very seriously. Often the easiest rung to reach in terms of good application security is having Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) required for logins. For most MFA is old hat but for those unfamiliar modern MFA can take various forms including:

SMS One Time Passcode (OTP): codes that are pushed from the website to you via SMS text messages. Better than nothing but easily spoofable.
OTP Apps: apps such as Google Authenticator, Authy or 1password that provide the codes based on scanning a QR code typically to setup then using your mobile device to generate the code
Push MFA: apps such as Duo or Gmail that when you authenticate it triggers a push notification to a particular instance of a mobile app that is also authenticated

With Veeam’s upcoming v12 release of Veeam Backup and Replication they are now supporting OTP App MFA in their console application. This takes a little bit of setup and in my particular case is a little quirky to setup but it does definitely work. Let’s walk through how to put this in effect.

VB365 v7: SaaSy Immutability

Thu, 09 Feb 2023 09:00:00 +0000

In the past few years Immutability, the concept of making data unable to be deleted or modified, has been a core tenant of disaster recovery design and has driven the rise of Object Storage for backup purposes. To this point in the Veeam ecosphere immutability has been contained to traditional Infrastructure backups, virtual machines, and cloud native instances, but there has been a great appetite for this capability to apply to SaaS backups as well.

Enabling Modern Authentication for iland Microsoft365 Services

Wed, 10 Aug 2022 14:42:18 +0000

Unless you’ve had your head stuck in the sand you probably have heard at this point that Microsoft has been trying numerous times to kill the Basic Authentication method for application integration into M365. While they tried and then delayed quite a few times the latest date of October 1, 2022 seems to be sticking so you do need to prepare for this.

As someone who fortunately/unfortunately has to think far too much about data protection of things like M365 this is something that has been a big part of my day to day conversations as I tend to work a good deal with this in regards to Veeam’s Backup for Microsoft365 product.

Setup Rocky Linux 9 for VMware Templates

Tue, 19 Jul 2022 14:22:18 +0000

For those that haven’t been playing in the RHEL/CentOS/Fedora space for a while Red Hat finally got around to making CentOS a more “productized” Linux Distribution and replaced it with CentOS Stream. That then spawned a few forked distributions to fill the gap, most notably Rocky Linux which recently released their version 9 to track the current cycle of RHEL.

Aside from the name pretty much everything in Rocky looks and feels the same as what you are used to with CentOS at this point, but because it is such a newly named Operating System VMware hasn’t really known how to deal with it until the 7.0u3c release. As you may be aware the 7.0u3 releases have had a bit of troubling history so many organizations have chosen to stay on the 7.0u2 for now so upgrading to get named release isn’t really going to work. This is quite the problem for those of us who are used to using the combination of VMware templates and Custom Specifications to rapidly deploy virtual machine instances.

Upcoming Changes to Microsoft Graph API For Teams Chat Backup

Tue, 21 Jun 2022 15:51:49 +0000

Microsoft has recently created documentation about changes coming to the Microsoft Graph API relating to Teams chat. In short the current method of backing up Teams chat will be decommissioned and it will be replaced by what is called the Teams Export API. This API will have fees associated with its use and those fees will be assessed directly by Microsoft against the M365 account in a burst method.

In response to that Veeam has released guidance as to how this will be handled with their Veeam Backup for Microsoft365 product on which our Secure Backup for Microsoft365 product is based. This will take effect on the Veeam side from version 6a forward. It is anticipated that 6a will be released July/August 2022 time frame. It is unknown at this time when iland will be installing this to our VB365 environments.

It’s Time for VeeamON 2022!

Fri, 13 May 2022 08:35:06 +0000

So yeah, I’m heading to an in-person tech conference next week. Not just any tech conference but arguably my favorite, VeeamON. The event is being held at the Aria Resort in Las Vegas May 16-19 for the in person aspect but like so many of conferences in the post-COVID era it will be a hybrid event with a free of charge, online aspect as well. If you have not registered for either in person or online there is still plenty of time to get involved.

Configure Veeam Backup & Replication for Immutable Object Storage

Fri, 11 Feb 2022 09:00:00 +0000

In my last post, Configuring Veeam Backup & Replication SOBR for Non-immutable Object Storage, I covered the basics of how to consume object storage in Veeam Backup & Replication (VBR). In general this is done through the concept of Scale-out Backup Repositories (SOBR). In this post we are going to build upon that land layer in object storage’s object-lock features which is commonly referred to in Veeam speak as Immutability.

First, let’s define immutability. What the backup/disaster recovery world thinks of as immutability is much like the old Write Once, Read Many (WORM) technology of the early 00’s, you can write to it but until it ages out it cannot be deleted or modified in any way. Veeam and other backup vendors definitely treat it this way but object-lock under the covers actually leverages the idea of versioning to make this happen. I can still delete an object through another client but the net effect is that a new version of that object is created with a delete marker attached to it. This means that if that were to occur you could simply restore to the previous version and it’s like it never happened.

Configuring Veeam Backup & Replication SOBR for Non-immutable Object Storage

Thu, 10 Feb 2022 09:32:12 +0000

Veeam Backup & Replication (VBR) currently makes use of object storage through the concept of Scale-Out Backup Repositories, SOBR. A SOBR in VBR version 11 can contain any number of extents as the performance tier (made up of traditional repositories) and a single bucket for the capacity tier (object storage). The purpose of a SOBR from Veeam’s point of view is to allow for multiple on-premises repositories to be combined into a single logical repository to allow for large jobs to be supported and then be extended with cloud based object storage for further scalability and retention.

Configuring Veeam Backup for Microsoft365 with Encrypted Object Storage

Mon, 07 Feb 2022 13:19:43 +0000

In my last post I worked through quite a few things I’ve learned recently about interacting with S3 Compatible storage via the CLI. Now that we know how to do all that fun stuff it’s time to put it into action with a significant Service Provider/Disaster Recovery slant. Starting with this post I’m going to highlight how to get started with some common use cases of object storage in Backup/DR scenarios. In this we’re going to look at a fairly mature use case, with it backing Veeam Backup for Office (now Microsoft) 365.

Getting Started With S3 Compatible Object Storage

Wed, 02 Feb 2022 11:21:59 +0000

Recently a good portion of my day job has been focused on learning and providing support for s3 compatible object storage? What is s3 compatible you say? So while Amazon’s AWS may have created the s3 platform at its root today is an open framework of API calls and commands known as s3. While AWS s3 and its many iterations are the 5000 pound gorilla in the room many other organizations have created either competing cloud services or storage systems that can let you leverage the technology in your own environments.

2021 Cisco IT Blog Awards Finalist!

Mon, 10 Jan 2022 14:09:24 +0000

I am honored to have been chosen as a finalist for the 2021 IT Blog Awards selected by Cisco Systems. This is my first time with such and needless to say I’m a little excited about it. As a finalist koolaid.info will be put onto the ballot for all those who wish to vote (Vote Here!), with separate categories for blogs and podcasts. If you wish to vote you may do so now until voting closes on Friday, February 18th.

CFD12: MemVerge Launches Big Memory Cloud

Tue, 23 Nov 2021 08:33:01 +0000

I recently attended Cloud Field Day 12 put on by Gesalt IT. While there were many great presentations and some really exciting technology discussed I’d like to highlight what I considered the highlight of the week, the Big Memory Cloud announcement by MemVerge.

MemVerge has some very big ideas around taking the “software defined” concept to memory, allowing advanced optimizations and flexibility of instance memory usage. In the past the company has launched Memory Machine products related to making the most of Intel Optane memory capabilities, but the new Big Memory Cloud product set is built all around allowing you to move stateful applications between clouds and instances.

Cloud Field Day 12 Coming Next Week!

Fri, 29 Oct 2021 12:47:07 +0000

I have been fortunate to be selected as a delegate for Cloud Field Day 12 next week, November 3-5, 2021. This will be the first Tech Field Day event being done with in person attendees since the beginning of the pandemic and I’m happy to say I am on my way to San Jose, CA to be in attendance. While I am definitely excited about being able to travel about this I am most excited about the exciting slate of vendors that will be presenting on all things Cloudy. Thus far the delegate panel appears to be very well attended and includes a number of friends and acquaintances such as Nico Stein and Nathan Bennett.

Achievement Unlocked: Veeam Certified Architect 2022

Wed, 27 Oct 2021 17:45:34 +0000

I recently had a successful attempt at the latest version of the Veeam Certified Architect (VMCA) certification exam and I’m happy to have that one done. I found this newest version of the exam to be much more approachable than the rap on the last (and first) version of the exam. I wanted to take a minute to give some thoughts about the credential and pointers about how I prepared.

Training Requirements
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Unfortunately one thing that still survives in the latest version of the Veeam certification programs, the VMCE and VMCA, is a hard course requirement for each level of certification. This means that if you want or need to achieve both levels of certification you are going to need to take 2 courses and 2 exams. Further, each are now “year versioned” exams, with versioning done on an annual basis. When it comes to renewal each exam will need to be independently renewed. As long as you pass each every year you will not be required to retake the class to upgrade but if you miss a year you will need to retake the course.

Veeam VMCE 2021 Fast Track Now Available

Sat, 16 Oct 2021 08:02:00 +0000

I received an email yesterday that the fast track program for VMCE 2021 is available now through December 21, 2021. So what is this? According to the e-mail and discussion with Rasmus Haslund of Veeam Fast Track is designed to be a self service resource to allow existing VMCEs v9, 2020 or people who took the v10 course to upgrade the certification to the latest version with access to study materials and a test voucher all for just a bit more than the voucher itself.

Veeam Backup for Office365 v5: Purging Organization Data and Licenses

Mon, 04 Oct 2021 14:12:36 +0000

If there is any part of being an IT professional that I actively dislike it is the need to know the intricacies of how various vendors license their software products. As bad as it was when I was a “Geek of Many Hats” back when I used to work in the SMB space, believe me or not its even worse in the Service Provider space. This is because when I typically have to get involved with licensing questions or tasks it’s because something has gone sideways for a customer organization or they are wanting to do “creative” things with their licensing dollars. I get it, I really do, I used to be there and you have to get as much out of every budget dollar you possibly can because with “Enterprise IT” at any scale those licensing spends usually equate to efficiencies or compliance check boxes, not products sold on a linear line like it is in other scenarios.

Veeam v11: Automate Installation of Linux Transport Services

Fri, 24 Sep 2021 08:34:57 +0000

Veeam’s Backup and Replication version 11 has brought a number of enhancements to it’s support of Linux-based Infrastructure components as has been covered quite well In Anthony Spiteri’s posts on the subject. In my mind and experience one of the biggest upgrades here that is flying well below the service is the addition of a legitimate Transport service for Linux repositories. While we are used to this type of setup for Windows servers in our VBR Infrastructure, where a service is installed on the repository and it handles the communication path between other components (proxies and cloud gateways) to the repository on Linux servers this has been handled by per-connection SSH tunnels. So for a heavily loaded repository in a Service Provider environment it was not uncommon to have hundreds if not thousands of concurrent SSH sessions between the cloud gateways and the repositories through which the veeamagent utility would actually be doing the work.

Updating Microsoft 365 Permissions for Veeam Backup for Office 365 v5

Thu, 20 May 2021 15:15:50 +0000

Dealing with Microsoft API permissions has long been one of the hard parts of working extensively with Veeam Backup for Office 365. They tend to change fairly often and with little notice, leaving Veeam and other backup service providers for Microsoft365 in the enviable spot of needing to chase these permissions with their applications.

Veeam recently released version 5 of their M365 backup product and while the requirements are mostly the same permissions wise as they were in version 4 I’ve found there are a couple that potentially v4 was able to work without having in place due to other legacy setups that now don’t work in v5. My specific issue results in any Exchange Online jobs returning with the following error:

Veeam v11 Proxy Feature Comparison

Thu, 08 Apr 2021 08:30:53 +0000

I recently had the opportunity to read through Anthony Spiteri’s excellent post on the enhancements to the Linux Proxy in the most recent release of it’s flagship Backup and Replication product. In the course of reading it I wondered how close to feature parity the Linux variant is to the Windows version and while the gap is rapidly closing I found that we aren’t quite there yet. Thanks to Rick Vanover and Michael Cade for coming through with some answers I’ve created the following table.

Heart Attacks and Other Gifts From The Year 2020

Tue, 15 Dec 2020 14:22:37 +0000

Let me start by saying I’m fine.

Ok, I’ll be fine, sooner than later.

Last week I had what the doctors are calling a non-stemi Heart Attack. Essentially what that means is that while none of the arteries in my body are clogged (they look pretty great actually according to the doctor) I had a couple of vessels in the heart that are narrowed which caused the event. The treatment of such things is just medicinal and lifestyle. In total this was essentially my warning shot, that as a middle aged man it’s time to push back against all of the lifestyle choices that both the work from home lifestyle and this life that 2020 is provided led me to believe was acceptable.

This Week! Cloud Field Day 8

Mon, 13 Jul 2020 10:42:04 +0000

I have been in the Information Technology field for about 20 years at this point but there was a very distinct inflection point in 2013 when the social side of my career began. In a very quick series of events (at the same time actually) I attended my first technical conference (CiscoLive US), setup my twitter account, and met many of the people I now consider the thought leaders I turn to when it comes to deciding what new technologies are coming to be and how important they are going to be to me and my organization’s needs.

VMworld 2017 vBrownBag: Influencer Programs: it’s Not Just Free Licenses

Sun, 17 May 2020 06:40:47 +0000

Slides
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In this vBrownBag/VMTN session I was joined by Matt Crape and Jim Millard to discuss the realities of joining a influencer program such as vExpert or Veeam Vanguard.

VMworld 2017 vBrownBag: Living Rural & Tech Community (It Really Is Possible)

Sun, 17 May 2020 06:32:41 +0000

Slides
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In 2017 I was allowed not one but two slots at for vBrownBag at VMworld 2017 which was a big deal to me. The first of these was a solo presentation by me about how to be an active member of the vCommunity while living in a rural area without easy access to things like VMUGs and such.

VeeamON 2015: Design, Manage and Test Your Data Protection with Veeam Availability Suite

Sun, 17 May 2020 06:16:26 +0000

Slides
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I was honored to be selected to present at VeeamON again in 2015 with the same general concept of session but really highlighting some of the work I’d been doing with Windows Server deduplication and Veeam SureBackup. This was a much nice crowd, with 50 or so people, and I felt it went much better. Again there is no video this time around but as an aside watching the replay at the time this is when I first realized just how much of an accent I have, literally had never realized it before.

VeeamON 2014: Protecting the Data of Small Government Organizations with Veeam Availability Suite

Sun, 17 May 2020 06:08:01 +0000

Slides
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So this was immediately following the vBrownBag session. Again, now second shot at “public speaking” but this time I’m in a room for 200, in the hangover slot at a tech conference (8 am the morning after the party), there were a total of 3 people in the session. Probably not the worst thing but one thing I’ve found over the years is that crowds are good, they loosen you up. Just goes to show that we definitely all start somewhere.

VeeamON 2014 vBrownBag: Physical Backup Strategies

Sun, 17 May 2020 05:53:59 +0000

Slides
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This was actually my first public speaking presentation ever. Supposed to be a 15 minute time slot I believe I finished in under 8 minutes. What aided to my discomfort was that the whole purpose of this was to show a method I was using to backup physical servers in a Veeam world, something there was no answer to at the time. That morning it leaked that Veeam was announcing what is now known as Veeam Agent for Windows and my friend Rick Vanover was following me on the same stage to announce it. Talk about your topic becoming irrelevant in record time…

Build Your VBR v10 Environment: Basic Customer Tenant

Tue, 18 Feb 2020 12:26:41 +0000

In this post we are going to continue on our journey of building your own, full featured, Veeam Backup and Replication v10 environment. As a reminder of how this series is going here’s the list:

Episode 1: Intro and Common components
Episode 2: On-Prem Windows Components (VBR, Windows Proxy, Windows Repo)
Episode 3: On-Prem Linux Components (Proxy, Repo), Create Local Jobs
Episode 4: Build Service Provider pod
Episode 5: Create cloud jobs to both Service Provider and Copy Mode to S3
Episode 6: Veeam Availability Console
Episode 7: Veeam Backup for Office 365

[video ] In this installment we are going to focus on building out the Microsoft Windows side of your customer environment, the one that is deployed on-premises to the customer data. We will begin by deploying a Veeam Backup and Replication server followed by setting up a Window Proxy server and a Repository based on ReFS.

Build Your VBR v10 Environment: SQL Server

Fri, 14 Feb 2020 09:14:31 +0000

[video width=“1892” height=“924” mp4=“VBRv10-Installing-SQL.mp4”][/video] I was recently honored to be a guest on Vince Wood’s IT Reality Podcast for episodes 7 and 8. In the episodes a couple of the things that came up is that while for small environments Veeam will work right out of the box for most end customers of the software there is a requirement to scale the components out correctly. One of the advantages to Veeam Backup and Replication is that it is hardware and operating system agnostic for many of its components but with choice comes complexity. One of the other things that came up was the fact that for most Veeam Cloud Connect customers, myself included up to 5 months ago when I began working for a Service Provider, the way that side is setup is a mystery. While I won’t exactly be giving up the special sauce here I was struck with the thought that a series of posts that show you how correctly set up a Veeam Backup and Replication v10 environment both on premises and for the Cloud Connect environment would be pretty educational. Each of these will have video walk throughs of the actual installations so you can follow along as well if you like. I total we’ll be covering the following topics:

VBR v10 Powershell What’s New

Mon, 10 Feb 2020 09:44:45 +0000

[

](pwsh-2.-measure-object.png)So one of the things that I always find interesting with each new Veeam Backup & Replication release is the additions to the PowerShell cmdlets list. PowerShell was first introduced to the VBR universe with version 7 and with each release we have got more and more commands to play with. It still hurts me to this day that they haven’t converted their Snap-In to a module yet but to quote my daughter’s teacher, you get what you get and you don’t throw a fit. In the spirt of this curiosity I decided to do a little differential fun with 9.5 update 4 and the soon to be GA version 10 Snap-Ins. I’m not going to bore you with all the commands and stuff that led us to here but if you want to reproduce any of this consider my work shown: ``` asnp VeeamPSSnapin

Upgrade Your Veeam Backup & Replication Server to v10

Fri, 07 Feb 2020 09:00:39 +0000

As we rapidly approach release day for Veeam Backup and Replication v10 (February 18!) Many of you are going to want to do upgrades on that day or shortly after. Personally for production level servers I advocate for waiting for patch 1 to come out, usually 2 weeks to 1 month after GA if history bears out. This is especially true if you utilize any Cloud Service Providers for offsite copies as this is what Veeam refers to as a “breaking” release. That means that if the cloud side VBR you are connecting to is not also on version 10 then you will see errors both during installation and then once you open the console and your backups WILL fail. That said if you have a testing environment or a lab GA is a great day to get at it. This post, now with video, will outline the steps necessary to do an in-place upgrade. One important thing to note before going down this road is upgrade to the RTM/GA is limited to 9.5 update 3 or later. If you happen to be running an older version you will need to upgrade to this first. [video width=“1892” height=“924” mp4=“Upgrading-to-VBR-v10.mp4”][/video] Prerequisites:

VBR v10: A Few of My Favorite Things Part 2

Wed, 05 Feb 2020 09:00:45 +0000

If you have been around the Veeam world for very long, you know they don’t do small releases; each new version comes with literally hundreds of enhancements and bug fixes. While my last post covers many of the headliners there is still a lot of great things left to see. In this post, I’m going to discuss some of the “little things” that aren’t so little that are going to make this a great release.

VBR v10: A Few of My Favorite Things Part 1

Tue, 04 Feb 2020 11:37:37 +0000

Veeam Backup and Replication v10‘s release is now imminent after a loooooong wait. In fact, as of yesterday we now have a tentative release date: February 18, 2020. For the past few weeks, I’ve been able to work with the first Release Candidate in the lab, and I’ve found quite a few things to love in this release that I’d like to share here.

Linux, Linux, Linux!
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Veeam Backup & Replication has long been a Windows first solution and everything else a far distant second. That worked and continues to work really well, but in 2020 the needs of larger customers require automation and management workload shrinkage that Linux-based components lends to. With this release, we now have Linux-based proxies as an option. These are not deployable appliances. You deploy them in the same way as you would a Windows Proxy: deploy the VM, add it to your backup infrastructure, then add it as a proxy, which installs the necessary software. While many of you may have the same “what, no appliance?” reaction I did, this actually makes sense as it lets organizations develop their own templates based on their own requirements and security policies. Then they can use their automation method of choice to deploy. This will be a big hit for the VSAN crowd, which should have a proxy per host to be in line with best practices. Further, while we have long had the ability for Linux-based proxies (especially for those wishing to mount NFS datastores as backup repositories), they were never the first-class citizen Windows or appliance-based repos were. With this release we get experimental support for fast cloning with XFS and BRFS. From what I’m hearing they are far more confident in the former. In my own tests writes to this are potentially faster than to ReFS and without the memory requirements ReFS repos need. Finally, for the Veeam Agent for Linux crowd, there is now support for doing Application Aware Processing for Postgres and MySQL on Linux – the same as we’ve seen for Microsoft SQL in VBR. As we now live in the Veeam Universal Licensing world – even if you have some of these VMs in your environment – you can make the choice to back them up with a managed VAL install instead to a normal backup job to take advantage of this feature, all the while using the same licensing from the same VBR server. #### NFS All the Things

Vanguard Summit 2019: The Awesome

Wed, 30 Oct 2019 06:58:43 +0000

This year I was honored with the ability to attend Veeam Software’s Vanguard Summit. Summit comprises a meeting of 60-70 of world’s best Veeam Engineers, Architects, and Partners along with their own Product Strategy and Management groups in Prague, Czech Republic. Often in talking about a subject we’ll float the old cliché of the good, the bad and ugly of it and frankly there is nothing negative I can say about this event. Because of that in this series of posts I’m going to cover the good (the event itself), the awesome (the people and content), the beautiful (the city of Prague itself), and as a bonus, the technical. This post will be the second in the series, covering the awesome people and content that comprise Vanguard Summit. Community There are many vendor community programs out there, most of which are much bigger than the Vanguards, and while they may have some nice intrinsic benefits such as licenses or hoodies, nobody does it better than Rick Vanover and his team. This is my 5th year in the program but due to the rules of my previous employer I’ve never been able to participate in person. The addition of being able to interact with seventy of the smartest people was invigorating and enjoyable. While I was happy to meet and spend time with everyone it was great to get to catch up with community stalwarts and friends such as Matt Crape, Craig Dalrymple, Brad Jervis, Dean Lewis and Al Rasheed. There is nothing like being in a room with your peers, most of which leave me in awe with their abilities, hearing about what comes next from a company and have your feedback and thoughts sought out. In the process the attendees start collaborating on ideas that end up shaping things for years to come. I’ve said this before, but if you think the value of any program like this is measured monetarily, you are doing it wrong. The true value is the information that not only passes from the vendor to the program members but between the members itself and this group is in my mind the best of the best. Content I remember back when I began as a Veeam customer there was the free FastSCP product and Veeam Backup & Replication. After nine years it is amazing to see how the product line has grown and this week made that very apparent, with 2.5 days jam packed with content on current and future products. In a later post I’m going to be covering a lot of what’s coming in v10 of Veeam Backup & Replication but we were also treated to updates on Backup for O365, VeeamONE, Veeam Agents for Windows and Linux, as well as Veeam Availability Orchestrator. This doesn’t include the things we aren’t allowed to discuss but frankly are pretty exciting. One of the ways that this content is vastly different from other vendor briefings you may have attended or seen maybe at a TechFieldDay (who Veeam will once again be attending for TFD #20) event or the like, besides the great Product Strategy staff many of these sessions were led or included the product management team for all of their products. The highlight to me of this even is the final session on Tuesday where we had Anton Gostev, Alec King, and others from the product management/development team in an “Ask Me Anything” style session where we were given the opportunity to ask all we wanted and as best I could tell were given no “BS” answers. In short the content was pretty amazingly done and consisted of far more access to information than I’ve seen from any other vendor. Conclusion Much like my last post rather than bore you with more of my opinions I’ll leave you with some pictures from the event. [gallery type=“slideshow” size=“medium” ids=“900,902,903,904,905”]

Vanguard Summit 2019: The Good

Tue, 22 Oct 2019 08:09:40 +0000

Movin’ Right Along…

Sun, 25 Aug 2019 08:51:11 +0000

Almost ten years ago I interviewed with this guy named Mike Murphy for a Senior Network Admin job at the West Virginia Housing Development Fund. I’d been laid off from my previous employer due to plant closure and had been on unemployment for a while. What was supposed to be a 1 hour interview took almost 2 hours and we hit it off pretty well. He has been one of the best managers I’ve ever had and more importantly, a friend. For the past ten years under Mike’s leadership I’ve been allowed to do some very cool things in my role there; learn about things like VMware vSphere, Veeam Backup and Replication, and cloud computing while making the computing infrastructure for The Fund the best I could make it. I also got to get into this thing called the “tech community” and it has truly changed my career trajectory. I’ve been extremely lucky to be included in things like vExpert and the Veeam Vanguards, learning to engage and give back as much as possible to those communities with my own viewpoints and knowledge. For what I’ve given it will never match what I’ve got back; the range of ideas, the challenges of my own beliefs, and frankly the friendships. In short it has given me the opportunity to be a better version of myself. Thanks in a very large part to that tech community after almost ten years it is finally time for me to be moving on. [

DR Scenarios For You and Your Business: Getting Cloudy With It

Wed, 17 Apr 2019 08:15:15 +0000

In the last post we talked about the more traditional models of architecting a disaster recovery plan. In those we covered icky things like tape, dark sites and split datacenters. If you’d like to catch up you can read it here. All absolutely worthwhile ways to protect your data but all of those are slow and limit you and your organizations agility in the case of a disaster. By now we have all heard about the cloud so much we’ve either gone completely cloud native, dabbled a little or just completely loathe the word. Another great use for “somebody else’s computer” is to power your disaster recovery plans. By leveraging cloud resources we can effectively get out of the managing hardware business in regards to DR and have borderline limitless resources if needed. Let’s look at a few ways this can happen.

DR Scenarios For You and Your Business Part 1: The Old Guard

Tue, 16 Apr 2019 13:14:07 +0000

It is Disaster Recovery review season again here at This Old Datacenter and reviewing our plans sparked the idea to outline some of the modern strategies for those who are new to the game or looking to modernize. I’m continually amazed by the number of people who I talk to that are using modern compute methodologies (virtualization on premises, partner IaaS, public cloud) but are still using the same backup systems they were using in the 2000s. In this post I’m going to talk about some basic strategies using Veeam Backup and Replication because that is primarily what I use, but all of these are capable with any of the current data backup vendors with varying levels of advantages and disadvantages per vendor. The important part is to understand the different ways about protecting your data to start with and then pick a vendor that fits your needs. One constant that you will see here is the idea of each strategy consisting of 2 parts. A local backup first to handle basic things like a failing VM, file restore, and other things that aren’t responding to all systems down. Secondly then archiving that backup to somewhere outside of your primary location and datacenter to deal with that systems down or virus consideration. You will often hear this referred to as the 3-2-1 rule:

The Basics of Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 4 Licensing

Thu, 07 Feb 2019 10:03:20 +0000

Veeam has recently released the long-awaited Update 4 to their Backup and Replication 9.5 product and with it has come some changes to how they deal with licensing. As workloads that need to be protected/backed up/made available have moved from being 100% on-premises and inside our vSphere or Hyper-V environments to mixes of on-prem, off-prem, on physical, public cloud, etc. my guess is their customers have asked for a way to make that protection and licensing portable.In Veeam’s move they have decided this can be solved by creating per instance licensing, which is similar to how you consume many other cloud based services. This rides along with the established perpetual licensing we still have for VBR and Veeam Availability Suite. I will be honest and say that the upgrade was not as smooth as I would have hoped. Now that I’ve got to the bottom of my own licensing issues I’ll post here what I’ve learned to hopefully keep you from experiencing the same headaches. It’s worth noting that there is a FAQ on this but the content is varying quite a bit as this gets rolled out.

Dude, Where’s My Managed Service Accounts?

Wed, 23 Jan 2019 14:22:36 +0000

So I am probably way late to the game but today’s opportunities to learn have included ADFS and with that the concept of Managed Service Accounts.

What’s a Managed Service Account you ask? So we’ve all installed applications and either set the service to run with the local system account or with a standard Active Directory account. Since the release of Windows Server 2008 R2 this feature has been available (and with Windows Server 2012 greatly enhanced,) gMSA lets you create a special type of account to be used for services where Active Directory itself manages the security of the account, keeping you secure while not having to update passwords regularly.

Reboot-VSS Script for Veeam Backup Job Pre-Thaw Processing

Thu, 01 Nov 2018 09:50:28 +0000

One of the issues that Veeam Backup & Replication users, actually those of any application aware backup solution, is that the various VSS writers are typically very finicky to say the least. Often you will get warnings about the services only to do a “vssadmin list writers” and see either writers in a failed state or not there at all. In most of these cases a reboot of either the service or the target system itself is an easy quick fix. But do you really want to rely on yourself to remember to do this every day? I know I don’t and going with the mantra of “When in doubt, automate” here’s a script that will help out. The Reboot-VSS.ps1 script assumes that you are using vSphere tags to dynamically identify VMs to be included in backup jobs, looks at the services in the given services array and if they are present on the VM will restart them.

Reinstalling the Veeam Backup & Replication Powershell SnapIn

Tue, 05 Jun 2018 12:47:21 +0000

As somebody who lives by the old mantra of “Eat your own dog food” when it comes to the laptops I use both personally and professionally I tend to be on the early edge of installs. So while I am not at all ready to start deploying Windows 10 1803 to the end users I’ve recently upgraded my Surface Pro to it. In doing so I’ve found that doing so broke access to the Veeam Powershell SnapIn on my laptop when trying to run a script. After some Googling I found a very helpful post on the Veeam Forums that I thought I’d condense the commands to run here for us all. Let me start with a hat tip to James McGuire for finding this solution to the problem. For the those that aren’t familiar with VBR’s Powershell capabilities, the SnapIn is installed either when you run the full installer on your VBR server or, as is my case when you install the Remote Console component on another Windows system. Don’t let me get started about the fact that Veeam is still using a SnapIn to provide PowerShell access, that’s a whole different post, but this is where we are. The sign that this has occurred is when you get the “Get-PSSnapin : No Windows PowerShell snap-ins matching the pattern ‘VeeamPSSnapin’ were found.” error when trying to get access to the SnapIn. In order to fix this, you need to use the installutil.exe utility in your latest .Net installation. So in my example, this would be C:\windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\InstallUtil.ex e. If you’ve already installed the VBR Remote console The SnapIn’s DLL should be at C:\Program Files\Veeam\Backup and Replication\Console\Veeam.Backup.PowerShell.dll. So to get the installation fixed and re-added to being available to Powershell you just need to do the following from an elevated PoSH prompt:

Fixing the SSL Certificate with Project Honolulu

Fri, 09 Mar 2018 10:26:19 +0000

So if you haven’t heard of it yet Microsoft is doing some pretty cool stuff in terms of Local Server management in what they are calling Project Honolulu. The latest version, 1802, was released March 1, 2018, so it is as good a time as any to get off the ground with it if you haven’t yet. If you’ve worked with Server Manager in versions newer than Windows Server 2008 R2 then the web interface should be comfortable enough that you can feel your way around so this post won’t be yet another “cool look at Project Honolulu!” but rather it will help you with a hiccup in getting it up and running well. I was frankly a bit amazed that this is evidently a web service from Microsoft not built upon IIS. As such your only GUI based opportunity to get the certificate right is during installation, and that is based on the thumbprint at that, so still not exactly user-friendly. In this post, I’m going to talk about how to find that thumbprint in a manner that copies well (as opposed to opening the certificate) and then replacing the certificate on an already up and running Honolulu installation. Giving props where they do this post was heavily inspired by How to Change the Thumbprint of a Certificate in Microsoft Project Honolulu by Charbel Nemnom. Step 0: Obtain a certificate: A good place to start would be to obtain or import a certificate to the server where you’ve installed Project Honolulu. If you want to do a public one, fine, but more likely you’ll have a certificate authority available to you internally. I’m not going to walk you through this again, my friend Luca Dell’Oca has a good write up on it here. Just do steps 1-3. [caption id=“attachment_724” align=“alignright” width=“150”][

Cisco Live US 2018: CAE Location and Keynotes Announced!

Tue, 06 Mar 2018 11:28:30 +0000

Pictured here is the entrance, five years ago, to the Customer Appreciation Event on the last night of Cisco Live US 2013. This was my first CiscoLive and first tech conference at all. I was exhausted from all I’d learned and excited by all the new people I’d met. The conference was in Orlando, FL that year and the CAE was held in a portion of Universal Studios theme park. This all comes full circle because this year

Veeam Vanguard 2018

Tue, 06 Mar 2018 08:27:46 +0000

Here in the US Thanksgiving Day traditionally falls on the fourth Thursday of November. While it is one of my favorite holidays today is a day of thankfulness for me as I’ve been honored to be named a Veeam Vanguard for 2018. I’ve been fortunate enough to have been a part of the group since its inception and it is one of my highest honors. Thanks as always to Rick, Kirsten, Dmitry, Andrew, Niels, Anthony, Michael, Melissa and Danny for keeping the Vanguards the best of its kind around. To those who have also been renewed into the program please accept a heartfelt congratulations as you’ve earned it through your involvement and I look forward to trolling right along with you for another year. While the e-mails have just been sent so there aren’t any statistics yet I see quite a few new members who are quite deserving popping up on twitter. Some I know already and other I look forward to getting to know. One of the really nice thing about the Vannies is we are a small group so everybody pretty much gets to know everybody. If you are looking for success in this group please don’t be shy, come be social and share the knowledge you have. Are you just learning about the program or didn’t make the cut this year? If you are active with Veeam join the conversation in the forums, on Twitter, on Reddit, any of the various Slack communities, or your own blog and it will come. It doesn’t matter where you join, it just matters that you do. Finally to dear, sweet Vanny Vanguard. We all miss you, please come home. ;)

Why I Blog

Wed, 28 Feb 2018 15:31:27 +0000

If you haven’t noticed the new content on this site has got a little scarce for the past few months. To be very honest my life seems to have been a bit crazy, both professionally and personally, and writing, unfortunately, has been back-burnered. On my drive home yesterday I was listening to Paul Woodward’s excellent ExploreVM podcast episode with Melissa Palmer where she was speaking about the process of writing her excellent book “IT Architect Series: The Journey”. This served to remind me that I really should get back to writing as I’ve got a few topics I really need to blog about. So as these things often happen in my head this led me this morning to think about why I blog in the first place. There are a number of reasons I do this and I thought for those that are passionate about any topic but in this case about technology maybe a little bit of the why would be the thing to get you started yourself. 1. So I can remember how I did something. Way back in the olden days (2004ish?) when my blog was called tastyyellowsnow.com this was the main reason I created the blog. I was 3 jobs into my career and all of my notes for how to do anything were saved in Outlook notes that I move from a work account to PST to work account to PST to work account. I was tired of doing it that way so I thought I’d try putting it out there. That hawtness ran on some asp based package with an Access database on the backend (I still have it!), and while some of the content was absolutely horrible the reason behind it is still my primary driver, to make sure if I figured out how to do something a certain way I could remember how to do it when I invariably had to do it again. Looking through some of those titles some like “Changing the Music On Hold Volume in Cisco CallManager” and “Recovering from a Bad Domain Controller Demotion” are still actually relevant. It’s nice to know where to find those things. [

From Zero to PowerCLI: CentOS Edition

Wed, 28 Feb 2018 13:28:07 +0000

Hi all, just a quicky to get everybody off the ground out there that are looking to use both PowerShell and PowerCLI from things that don’t run Windows. Today VMware released version 10 of PowerCLI with support for installation on both Linux and MacOS. This was made possible by the also recently released Powershell Core 6.0 which allows PowerShell to be installed on *nix variants. While the ability to run it on a Mac really doesn’t do anything for me I do like to use my iPad with a keyboard case as a quick and easy jump box and its frustrated me for a while that I needed to do an RDP session and then run a Powershell session from within that. With these releases I’m now an SSH session away from the vast majority of my scripting needs with normal sized text and everything. In this post I’ll cover getting both Powershell Core and PowerCLI installed on a CentOS VM. To be honest, installing both on any other variant is pretty trivial but the basic framework of the difference can be found in Microsoft Docs.

VVOLs vs. the Expired Certificate

Fri, 12 Jan 2018 15:54:47 +0000

Hi all, I’m writing this to document a fix to an interesting challenge that has pretty much been my life for the last 24 hours or so. Through a comedy of errors and other things happening, we had a situation where the upstream CA from our VMware Certificate Authority (and other things) became very unavailable and the certificate authorizing it to manage certificates expired. Over the course of the last couple of days I’ve had to reissue certificates for just about everything including my Nimble Storage array and as far as vSphere goes we’ve had to revert all the certificate infrastructure to essentially the same as the out of the box self-signed guys and then reconfigure the VMCA as a subordinate again under the Root CA. Even after all that I continued to have an issue where my Production VVOLs storage was inaccessible to the hosts. That’s not to say they weren’t working, amazingly and as a testament to the design of how VVOLs works my VMs on it ran throughout the process, but I was very limited in terms of the management of those VMs. Snapshots didn’t work, backups didn’t work, for a time even host migrations didn’t work until we reverted to the self-signed certs. Thanks for a great deal of support and help from both VMware support and Nimble Storage Support we were finally able to come up with a runbook in dealing with a VVOL situation where major certificate changes occurred on the vSphere side. There is an assumption to this process that by the time you’ve got here all of your certificates both throughout vSphere as well as with the Nimble arrays are good and valid.

Making Managing Printers Manageable With Security Groups and Group Policy

Tue, 31 Oct 2017 12:18:53 +0000

I don’t know about the rest of you but printing has long been the bane of my existence as an IT professional. Frankly, I hate it and believe the world should be 100% paperless by this point. That said, throughout my career, my users have done a wonderful job of showing me that I am truly in the minority on this matter so I have to do my part in making sure they are available. As any Windows SysAdmin knows installing the actual print driver and setting up a TCP/IP port aren’t even half the battle. From there you got to get them shared and have the users actually connect to them so that they can use them. It’d be awesome if they would all just sit down say “I have no printers, let me go to Active Directory and find some” but I’ve yet to have more than a handful of users who see this as a solution; they just want the damned things there and ready to rock and roll. In the past, I’ve always managed this with a series of old VBS scripts, which still works but requires tweaks from time to time. It’s possible to do this kind of stuff with Powershell these days as well as long as your user has the Active Directory module imported (Hint: they probably don’t). There are also any number of other 3rd party and really expensive Microsoft systems (Hi SCCM!) that will do this as well. But luckily we’ve had a little thing called Group Policy Preferences around for a while now too and it will do everything we need to make this really manageable, with a nice pretty GUI that you can even teach the Help Desk Intern how to manage.

Creating Staff Notification Mail Contacts in Exchange

Fri, 27 Oct 2017 14:23:05 +0000

Just a quick post with a script I’ve just written. Living in WV we from time to time have to let staff know that the offices will be closed for various reasons, from heavy snow to chemical companies dumping large quantities of chemicals into the area’s water supply. For this reason, we maintain a basic emergency staff notification process that requires an authorized person to send an e-mail to a certain address and that will carpet bomb staff who chose to opt-in to receive text messages and e-mails to their personal (as opposed to business) e-mail addresses. This is all powered by using creating hidden mail contacts on our Exchange server for the personal address as well as the e-mail address that corresponds to the users’ mobile provider. These addresses are all then dynamically added to a distribution list that is restricted by who can send to it. To be honest the system is mostly automatic with the exception of needing to makes sure new contacts get put in and old contacts get taken out. Taking them out by GUI is pretty simple, just right click delete but it seems to be lots of steps to add them in. So in the script below I’ve automated the process of interrogating the Admin entering them and then using that information to automatically create the contacts and then hide them from the Global Address List.

Thoughts on Leadership As Told to a 5 Year Old

Tue, 24 Oct 2017 12:08:22 +0000

I am lucky enough to be a father to a wonderful 5-year-old daughter, fresh into her Kindergarten year of school. Recently she came home with the dramatic cry of a 5-year-old, upset that her class has a Leader of the Month award and she didn’t win it. Once the sobbing subsided she got around to asking me how to be a leader, one of those basics of life type questions that all parents know and yet always get thrown by. How do I boil down the essence of leadership to something she not only can understand but can apply herself? Thanks to the reoccurring themes of Special Agent Oso I got the idea to try to condense leadership to 3 simple steps. Simplistic I know, but the more I thought about it the more I realized that not only would it get her on the right track but that, to be honest, there are a great number of adults in leadership positions that experience differing levels of success with them. So thanks to my daughter and our good friend Oso I present Jim’s 3 simple steps to being a good leader.

VMworld 2017 US: T -2

Sun, 27 Aug 2017 15:40:54 +0000

I write this while traveling to sunny and amazingly hot Las Vegas for the 2017 edition of VMworld US. I hope to provide feedback and news throughout the conference, highlighting not only the excellent content and programs but also the best the virtualization community has to offer.

Today will be a travel day as well as a day to meet up with friends, new and old. Tomorrow, the Sunday before the conference, is when the real fun begins with things like Opening Acts for me, TAM and partner content for others as well as a number of social events.

Notes on Migrating from an All in One Veeam Backup & Replication Server to a Distributed System

Fri, 25 Aug 2017 10:43:44 +0000

One of the biggest headaches I not only have and have heard about from other Veeam Backup & Replication administrators have is backup server migrations. In the past I have always gone the “All-in-One” approach, have one beefy physical server with Veeam directly installed and housing all the roles. This is great! It runs fast and it’s a fairly simple system to manage, but the problem is every time you need more space or your upgrading an old server you have to migrate all the parts and all the data. With my latest backup repository upgrade I’ve decided to go to a bit more of a distributed architecture, moving the command and control part out to a VM with an integrated SQL server and then letting the physical box handle the repository and proxy functions producing a best of both worlds setup, the speed and simplicity of all the data mover and VM access happening from the single physical server while the setup and brains of the operation reside in a movable, upgradable VM.

A VMworld US 2017 To Do List

Tue, 22 Aug 2017 08:50:52 +0000

If you work in the virtualization or datacenter field (are they really different anymore?) you probably know that VMworld US 2017 is next week, August 27-31. While VMware may not be the only option out there when it comes to virtualization anymore VMworld is still the defacto event for people in the field. This conference’s definition of community is unrivaled in scope with just as much if not more going on outside of the conference agenda as in it. As with all things worth doing conference attendance probably needs a checklist. Have you done yours? If not here are the high points of mine. I’m not going to bore you with “Jim will be attending session so and so”; well except for VMTN6699U and VMTN6700U you should totally join me at those sessions, but these are pretty general things I try to do each time.

Tech Conferences in Las Vegas for Newbies

Wed, 14 Jun 2017 13:50:54 +0000

As June is here we are deep into tech conference season already so I find myself behind the curve somewhat with this post, but here we are. I am extremely fortunate to have an employer who understands the value of attending Tech Conferences for IT Professionals and I’ve been able to attend at least one each year since 2014; going back and forth between CiscoLive and VMworld with a sprinkling of VeeamON and more local events such as vBrisket and VMUGs for good measure. As a “Hyper-Converged Admin” my choice of which “biggie” conference is done each year by looking at where my projects land; last year was CiscoLive due to a lot of Voice and Security Projects, this year VMworld due to lots of updates coming down the pike there and a potential VDI project. The problem when you have a conference with north of 25,000 attendees is that you are limited in where you put these on. While Cisco does tend to move around some, VMworld has typically either been in San Francisco or Las Vegas. With the Moscone Center closed again this year for renovation we find pretty much all of the big guys are back in Las Vegas, with both CiscoLive and VMworld at Mandalay Bay once again as well as AWS re:Invent and Dell/EMC World in town this year as well. If you haven’t been to one of these Tech Conferences before or to Las Vegas both can be both exciting and overwhelming, but with a little help from others and some decent tips neither are that big of a deal.

Cisco Voice Servers Version 11.5 Could Not Load modules.dep

Tue, 13 Jun 2017 10:20:14 +0000

About 6 months ago we updated 3/4 of our Cisco Telephony environment from 8.5 to 11.5. The only reason we didn’t do it all is because UCCX 11.5 wasn’t out yet so it went to 11. While there were a few bumps in the road; resizing VMs, some COP files, etc. the update went well. Unfortunately once it was done we starting having a glorious issue where after a reboot the servers sometimes failed to boot, presenting “FATAL: Could not load /lib/modules/2.6.32-573.18.1.el6.x86_64/modules.dep: No such file or directory”. Any way you put it, this sucked. The first time this happened I call TAC and while they had seen it, they had no good answer except for rebuild the VM, restore from backup. Finally after the 3rd time (approximately 3 months after install) the bug had been officially documented and (yay) it included a work around. The good news is that the underlying issue at this point has been fixed in 11.5(1.11900.5) and forward so if you are already there, no problems. The issue lies with the fact that the locked down build of RHEL 6 that any of the Cisco Voice server platforms are built on don’t handle VMware Tools updates well. It’s all good when you perform a manual update from their CLI and use their “utils vmtools refresh” utility, but many organizations, mine included, choose to make life easier and enable vCenter Update Manager to automatically upgrade the VMware tools each time a new version is available and the VM is rebooted. So how do you fix it? While the bug ID has the fix in it, if you aren’t a VMware regular they’ve left out a few steps and it may not be the easiest thing to follow. So here I’m going to run down the entire process and get you (and chances are, myself when this happens in the future) back up and running.

Learning To Pick The Right Tech Conference at vBrisket- TOMORROW!

Thu, 23 Feb 2017 12:25:54 +0000

Hey all, just a quick post to mention that the fine folks at vBrisket will be having a get together February 24th at 2 PM at Grist House Craft Brewery in Pittsburgh. If you work in the virtualization industry and haven’t heard of vBrisket yet you should get to know them because they have a great thing going. vBrisket takes the typical User Group back to its vendor independence roots, allowing you to focus more on your general virtualization career and less on the path of any particular vendor. At the same time it gives Clint, Gabe, Jaison, and John a great reason to bring out the smokers and prepare enough meat to feed a brewery full of techies. I’m honored to have been invited to join the panel discussion this time. The topic is “Tech Conferences – What are the right ones for you?” This will be moderated by the vBrisket team and includes myself, John White, Mike Muto, and Justin Paul. As I see my attendance at various conferences as a big driver in the success of my career and my growth as a technology worker I’m excited to be included. Of course this meeting wouldn’t be possible without the sponsorship from Zerto. At the meeting they’ll be talking I’m sure about their new conference, ZertoCON in Boston May 22-24th. So if you are in the Pittsburgh area tomorrow and would like to attend just be there at 2, I look forward to meeting up!

Windows Server Deduplication, Veeam Repositories, and You!

Tue, 31 Jan 2017 11:12:59 +0000

Backup, among other things, is very good at creating multiple copies of giant buckets of data that don’t change much and tend to sit for long periods of time. Since we are in modern times, we have a number of technologies to deal with this problem, one of which is called deduplication with quite a few implementations of it. Microsoft has had server-based storage versions since Windows 2008 R2 that has gotten better with each release, but as any technology still has its pitfalls to be mindful of. In this post I’m going to look a very specific use case of Windows server deduplication, using it as the storage beneath your Veeam Backup and Replication repositories, covering some basic tips to keep your data healthy and performance optimized.

Veeam Vanguard Again in 2017

Tue, 31 Jan 2017 08:30:44 +0000

It has been a great day here because today I learned that I have once again been awarded acceptance into the excellent Veeam Vanguard program, my third time. This program, above any others that I am or have been involved with takes a more personal approach to creating a group of awardees who not only deserve anything good they get out of it but give back just as much to the community itself. In only its 3rd year the group has grown; from 31 the first year, 50(ish) the second, to a total of 62 this year. There are 21 new awardees in that 62 number so there really isn’t a rubber stamp to stay included, it is legitimately awarded each year. The group has grown each year but as you can see not by the leaps and bounds others have, and for good reason. There is no way this experience could be had with a giant community. At this point in the post I would typically tell you a bit about what the Vanguard program is and isn’t but honestly, Veeam’s own Dmitry Kniazev really put it best in a couple recent posts, “Veeam Vanguard Part 1: WTH Is This?” and “Veeam Vanguard Part 2: What It’s Not.” What I will add is that as nice as some of the perks are, as DK says in the Part 1 post the true perk is the intangibles; a vibrant community full of some of the smartest, most passionate people in the industry and in many cases access right to the people approving and disapproving changes to their software. These are the thing that made me sweat approval time. Once again I would give a giant thank you to Veeam Software and especially the whole Vanguard crew. This includes Rick Vanover, Clint Wyckoff, Michael White, Michael Cade, Anthony Spiteri, Kirsten Stoner, Dmitry Kniazev, Andrew Zhelezko and finally Doug Hazelman. Without these people it wouldn’t be nearly as nice.

Why Is My Nimble Storage Firmware Update Not Available

Tue, 20 Dec 2016 09:54:43 +0000

Today, like everyday as a technology professional, I got the opportunity to learn something new. After seeing posts on social media and articles that Nimble Storage with their NimbleOS version 3.6 supports the shiny new features of VMware’s vSphere 6.5 release including VVOLs 2.0 and VASA 3.0. After reading through the release notes and not seeing anything to really stress me out in the known issues I went to begin the download for an update in the off hours. To my early adopter horror I saw there was no download available! Had I misread the releases, did I imagine that the release notes really were for 3.6? No, those were real and it should be there. After asking around I learned that Nimble in a notable effort to save us from ourselves will from time to time blacklist you from receiving updates due to things they observe through their excellent InfoSight analytics system. The problem with this is they don’t really make easily apparent that you are blacklisted from anywhere close to the download screen. In order to see if you are blacklisted you have to switch over from the array management screen to InfoSight, go to Manage > Assets > Click on the Array, and then at the top where it says “Version: ….” click on the version link. There finally you will either see the new version in black if you are good to upgrade or as shown in my image, in red if blacklisted. Even with this it still doesn’t tell you why you are blacklisted, you have to call support to learn that. [caption id=“attachment_583” align=“aligncenter” width=“300”][

Fixing Domain Controller Boot in Veeam SureBackup Labs

Mon, 19 Dec 2016 16:10:07 +0000

We’ve been dealing with an issue for past few runs of our monthly SureBackup jobs where the Domain Controller boots into Safe Mode and stays there. This is no good because without the DC booting normally you have no DNS, no Global Catalog or any of the other Domain Controller goodness for the rest of your servers launching behind it in the lab. All of this seems to have come from a change in how domain controller recover is done in Veeam Backup and Replication 9.0, Update 2 as discussed in a post on the Veeam Forums. Further I can verify that if you call Veeam Support you get the same answer as outlined here but there is no public KB about the issue. There are a couple of ways to deal with this, either each time or permanently, and I’ll outline both in this post. The booting into Safe Mode is totally expected, as a recovered Domain Controller object should boot into Directory Services Restore mode the first time. What is missing though is that as long as you have the Domain Controller box checked for the VM in your application group setup then once booted Veeam should modify the boot setup and reboot the system before presenting it to you as a successful launch. This in part explains why when you check the Domain Controller box it lengthens the boot time allowed from 600 seconds to 1800 seconds by default.

The Most Magical Time of Year: Influencer Program Selection Season!

Thu, 10 Nov 2016 15:44:49 +0000

Each year many of the major companies in the tech industry allow people to be nominated, by themselves or by others, to be recognized for the contributions to the community that surrounds that company’s products. These people are typically active on social media, in both online and in person forums and user groups and often will write blogs about their experiences with the products. In return for what is essentially free, grass-roots type marketing the companies will provide awardees any number of benefits; access to licenses for products for homelabbing as well as sometimes access to engineers, preferred experiences at conferences, NDA level information, etc but in some cases the biggest benefit is the recognition itself. As of today (November 10, 2016) two of the bigger and in my opinion one of the best programs are all open for nominations.

Installing .Net 3.5 on Server 2012/ Windows 8 and above

Thu, 10 Nov 2016 10:06:05 +0000

Hi all, just a quick post to serve as both a reminder to me and hopefully something helpful for you. For some reason Microsoft has decided to make installing .Net 3.5 on anything after Windows Server 2012 (or Windows 8 on the client side) harder than it has to be. While it is included in the regular Windows Features GUI it is not included in the on-disk sources for features to be installed automatically. In a perfect world you just choose to source from Windows Update and go about your day, but in my experience this is a hit or miss solution as many times for whatever reason it errors out when attempting to access. The fix is to install via the Deployment Image Servicing and Management tool better known as DISM and provide a local source for the file. .Net 3.5 is included in every modern Windows CD/ISO under the sources\sxs directory. When I do this installation I typically use the following command set from an elevated privilege command line or PowerShell window:

Setting Up External Access To A Veeam SureBackup Virtual Lab

Fri, 04 Nov 2016 13:54:38 +0000

Hey y’all, happy Friday! One of the things that seems to still really fly under the radar in regards to Veeam Backup & Replication is its SureBackup feature. This feature is designed to allow for automated testing via scripts of groups of your backups. An example would be if you have a critical web application. You can create an application group that includes both the database server and the web server and when the SureBackup job is run Veeam will connect a section of its backup repository to a specified ESXi host as a datastore and, start the VMs within a NAT protected segment of your vSphere infrastructure, run either the role based scripts included or custom ones you specify to ensure that the VMs are connecting to the applications correctly, and then when done shut the lab down and fire off an e-mail. That workflow is great an all but it only touches on the edge of the power of what SureBackup can do for you. In our environment not only do we have a mandate to provide backup tests that allow for end-user interaction, but we also use SureBackup for test bed type applications such as patch tests. An example of the latter here is when I was looking to upgrade our internal Windows-based CA to Server 2012 R2. I was able to launch the server in the lab, perform the upgrade and ensure that it behaved as expected WITHOUT ANY IMPACT ON PRODUCTION first and then tear down the lab and it was like it never happened. Allowing the VMs to stay up and running after the job starts requires nothing more than checking a box in your job setup. By default access to a running lab is fairly limited. When you launch a lab from your Veeam server a route to the NAT’d network is injected to the Veeam server itself to allow access, but that doesn’t help you all that much if you are wanting others to be able to interact; we need to expand that access outwards. This post is going to walk you through the networking setup for a Virtual Lab that can be accessed from whatever level of access you are looking for, in my case from anywhere within my production network. Setting Up the Virtual Lab The first step if you haven’t setup SureBackup in your environment at all is to set up your Virtual Lab. The first of two parts here that are critical to this task is setting up the Proxy IP, which is the equivalent to your outside NAT address if you’ve ever worked on a firewall. This IP is going to essentially be the production network side of the Lab VM that is created when you setup a Veeam Virtual Lab. [

Upgrading Cisco Agent Desktop on Windows 10

Thu, 03 Nov 2016 10:56:53 +0000

So we recently had the joys of upgrading our Cisco Voice setup to version 11, including our Unified Contact Center Express (UCCX) system. In the process of our upgrade we had to do a quick upgrade of UCCX to 9.02 from 9.01 to be eligible to go the rest of the way up to 11, allowing us to run into a nice issue I’m thinking many others are running into. As far as 11 is concerned the big difference is it is the first version where the Cisco Agent Desktop (CAD) is not an option as it has been replaced by the new web-based Finesse client for Agents and Supervisors. For this reason many Voice Admins are choosing to take the leap this year to 10.5 instead as it gives you the option of Cisco Agent Desktop/Cisco Supervisor Desktop (CSD) or Finesse. The problem? These MSI installed client applications are not Windows 10 compatible. In our case it wasn’t a big deal as the applications were already installed when we did an in place upgrade of many of our agent’s desktops to Windows 10, but attempting to do an installation would error out saying you were running an unsupported operating system. *DISCLAIMER: While for us this worked just fine I’m sure it is unsupported and may lead to TAC giving you issues on support calls. Use at your own discretion. Fixing the MSI with Orca Luckily there is a way around this to allow the installers to run even allow for automated installation. Orca is one of the tools available within the Windows SDK Components download and it allows you to modify the parameters for Windows MSI packages and either include those changes directly into the MSI or to create a transform file (MST) so that the changes can be saved out-of-band to the install file so that it can be applied to different versions as needed. As my needs here are temporary I’m simply going to just modify the in place MSI and not bother with the MST, which would require additional parameters to be passed for remote installation. Once you have the SDK Components downloaded you can install Orca by running the Orca.msi within and then just run it like any other application. The first step is to open the program and go to File>Open and open the MSI package. In this case we are looking for CiscoAgentDesktop.msi [

Fun with the vNIC Shuffle with Cisco UCS

Wed, 02 Nov 2016 08:30:54 +0000

Here at This Old Datacenter we’ve recently made the migration to using Cisco UCS for our production compute resources. UCS offers a great number of opportunity for system administrators, both in deployment as well as on going maintenance, making updating the physical as manageable as we virtualization admins are getting used to with the virtualized layer of the DC. Of course like any other deployment there is always going to be that one “oh yeah, that” moment. In my case after I had my servers up I realized I needed another virtual NIC, or vNIC in UCS world. This shouldn’t be a big deal because a big part of what UCS does for you is it abstracts the hardware configuration away from the actual hardware. For those more familiar with standard server infrastructure, instead of having any number of physical NIC in the back of the host for specific uses (iSCSI, VM traffic, specialized networking, etc) you have a smaller number of connections as part of the Fabric Interconnect to the blade chassis that are logically split to provide networking to the individual blades. These Fabric Interconnects (FI) not only have multiple very high-speed connections (10 or 40 GbE) but each chassis typically will have multiple FI to provide redundancy throughout the design. All this being said, here’s a very basic design utilizing a UCS Mini setup with Nexus 3000 switches and a copper connected storage array: [

Getting the Ball Rolling with #vDM30in30

Tue, 01 Nov 2016 08:30:34 +0000

Ahh, that time of year when geeks pull that long forgotten blog site out of the closet, dust it of and make promises of love and content: #vDM30in30. If you aren’t familiar with the idea, vDM30in30 is short for Virtual Design Master 30 blog posts in 30 days, an idea championed by Eric Wright of discoposse fame to get bloggers out there to work their way through regular generation of content. As you can see from this site new content is pretty rare so something like this is a welcome excuse to focus and get some stuff out there. vDM30in30 runs through the month of November and the best way to follow along with the content is to track the hashtag on twitter. So What’s the Plan? I’m a planner by nature so if I don’t at least have a general idea this isn’t going to work at all. The good news is I’ve got quite a few posts that I’ve been meaning to work on for some time so I’m going to be cleaning out my closet this week and get those out there. So the full schedule is going to look like this:

Lots of new stuff coming from Veeam

Tue, 23 Aug 2016 12:18:20 +0000

Veeam had what they called “THEIR BIGGEST EVENT EVER” and while it at times did seem to be really heavy on the sales for the sake of sales pitch, there was a lot of stuff to legitimately be excited about for those of us who use their products. From the features coming in Veeam Backup & Replication in version 9.5 in a couple of months through the first new feature of next year’s version 10 all in total there were 5 major announcements here today that those of us using the product can make use of. In this post I’m going to run briefly through these and in the coming months will provide some deeper insights when possible. Veeam Backup & Replication / Veeam ONE 9.5 (October 2016)

VMware Tools Security Bug and Finding which VMware Tools components are installed on all VMs

Fri, 05 Aug 2016 10:43:29 +0000

Just a quick post related to today’s VMware security advisories. VMware released a pair of advisories today, CVE-2016-5330 and CVE-2016-5331 and while both are nasty their scopes are somewhat limited. The 5331 issue is only applicable if you are running vCenter or ESXi 6.0 or 6.0U1, Update 2 patches the bug. The 5330 is limited to Windows VMs, running VMware Tools, and have the option HGFS component installed. To find out if you are vulnerable here’s a Power-CLI script to get all your VMs and list the installed components. Props to Jason Shiplett for giving me some assistance on the code.

The Unofficial Official CiscoLive! US Gatherings Page

Thu, 07 Jul 2016 15:28:47 +0000

Here’s the list of all the outside of business hours events that I and others know of at CiscoLive 2016. If you know of others please DM or tweet me @k00laidIT and I’ll get them added. Saturday 7/9/2016Adventure to National Atomic Testing Museum

2 PM
755 E Flamingo Rd, Las Vegas, NV 89119 (Map)
#clatomic

Sunday 7/10/2016#CLUS Sunday Tweetup - 5:30 PM

Social Media Central, Bayside Foyer, Mandalay Bay

Monday 7/11/2016Veeam & Nimble Integration party at Cisco Live! - 7-9 PM

The Basics of Network Troubleshooting

Wed, 08 Jun 2016 09:35:57 +0000

The following post is something I wrote as an in-house primer for our help desk staff. While it a bit down level from a lot of the content here I find more and more the picking and reliably going with a troubleshooting methodology is somewhat of a lost art. If you are just getting started in networking or are troubleshooting connectivity issues at your home or SMB this would be a great place to start.

Vegas Baby! Heading to CiscoLive! 2016

Wed, 13 Apr 2016 09:03:48 +0000

As 2016 moves into April we find ourselves ready to go into the conference season once again. For the past couple of years I’ve been to VMworld because that is where my work has had me focused, but for the same reason I will be heading the Cisco Live in Las Vegas, NV this year. The event will be held at the Mandalay Bay Resort July 10-14. Yes it will be hot, but let’s be honest you are going to be inside most of the time. This is the 2nd time I’ve attended Cisco Live US (you may see it referred to as #CLUS quite a bit) and if this is anything like the last time it’s going to be great. I have been particularly impressed with the content they make available and the community that has grown around it. What to do The first and foremost thing you should check out at Cisco Live is the always excellent sessions throughout the conference. If you are new to conferences this is actually something to consider sooner than later; the session catalog is currently up and the scheduler will open on May 3. I recommend that if you have any particular sessions or focus you are looking at with this trip go ahead and have a list done early and then be ready on the 5/3, many popular sessions will fill up quickly and nobody wants to wait in the overflow line. ;) To be honest if you just look at the scope of topics covered in the session list it is a bit overwhelming. While I’m no grizzled veteran of conferences by any means what I’ve found best is to pick a focus or two and then start there. For example this year we have a big focus on upgrading our edge security and our production datacenter to include Cisco UCS solutions. What sessions I pick will almost entirely be from either the Security and Datacenter & Virtualization tracks to support those goals. Keep in mind all of these sessions will be available to you online after the fact so keep in mind the people giving them as well. [

Quieting the LogPartitionLowWaterMarkExceeded Beast in Cisco IPT 9.0.x Products

Wed, 30 Mar 2016 09:40:55 +0000

As a SysAdmin I’m used to waking up, grabbing my phone and seeing the 20 or so e-mails that the various systems and such have sent me over night, gives me an idea of how the day will go and what I need start with. Every so often though you get that morning where the 20 becomes 200 and you just want to roll over and go back to bed. This morning I had about 200, the vast majority of which was from my Cisco Unified Contact Center Express server with the subject “LogPartitionLowWaterMarkExceeded.” Luckily I’ve had this before and know what to do with it but on the chance you are getting it too here’s what it means and how to deal with it in an efficient manner. WTF Is This?!? Or at least that was my response the first time I ran into this. If you are a good little voice administrator one of the first things you do when installing your phone system or taking one over due to job change is setup the automatic alerting capability in the Cisco Unified Real Time Monitoring Tool (or RTMT, you did install that, right?) so that when things go awry you know in theory before the users do. One of the downsides to this system is it is an either on or off alerting system meaning what ever log events are saved within the system are automatically e-mailed at the same frequency. This particular error message is the by-product of a bug (CSCul18667) in the 9.0.x releases of all the Cisco IP Telephony products in which the JMX logs produced by the at the time new Unified Intelligence Center didn’t get automatically deleted to maintain space on the log partition. While this has long since been fixed phone systems are one of those things that don’t get updated as regularly as they should and such it is still and issue. The resulting effect is that when you reach the “warning” level of partition usage (Low Water Mark) it starts logging ever 5 minutes that the level has been reached. Just Make the Screaming Stop Now that we know what the issue is how do we fix it?

Updating the Photo Attributes in Active Directory with Powershell

Tue, 01 Mar 2016 16:25:53 +0000

Today I got to have the joys of needed to once again get caught up on importing employee photos into the Active Directory photo attributes, thumbnailPhoto and jpegPhoto. While this isn’t exactly the most necessary thing on Earth it does make working in a Windows environment “pretty” as these images are used by things such as Outlook, Lync and Cisco Jabber among other. In the past the only way I’ve only ever known how to do this is by using the AD Photo Edit Free utility, which while nice tends to be a bit buggy and it requires lots of repetitive action as you manually update each user for each attribute. This year I’ve given myself the goal of 1) finally learning Powershell/PowerCLI to at least the level of mild proficiency and 2) automating as many tasks like this as possible. While I’ve been dutifully working my way through a playlist of great PluralSight courses on the subject, I’ve had to live dangerously a few times to accomplish tasks like this along the way. So long story short with some help along the way from Googling things I’ve managed to put together a script to do the following.

A how-to on cold calling from the customer perspective

Fri, 06 Nov 2015 17:10:46 +0000

Now that I’m back from my second tech conference in less than two months I am fully into the cold call season and I am once again reminded why I keep meaning to buy a burner phone and setup a Gmail account before I register next year. It seems every time I get back I am destined to months of “I am so glad you expressed deep interest in our product and I’d love to tell you more about it” when the reality is “I am calling you because you weren’t nimble enough to lunge away from our team of booth people who are paid or retained based on as many scans they can get. Most often when I get these calls or e-mails I’ll give each company a courteous thanks but no thanks and after that the iDivert button gets worn out. The genesis of this post is two-fold. First a cold call this morning that was actually destined for my boss but when informed he wasn’t here went into telling how glad the person was that I had personally expressed interest in their product, WTF? This first event reminded me of a second, where a few months ago I was at a mixer preceding a vendor supplied training when I was approached by a bevy of 20 something Inside Sales Engineers and asked “what can I do to actually get you to listen?” From this I thought that just in case a young Padawan Sales Rep/Engineer happens to come across this, here are those ways to make your job more efficient and to stop alienating your potential customers. Google Voice is the Devil I guess the first step for anybody on the calling end of a cold call scenario is to get me to answer the phone. My biggest gripe in this regard and the quickest way to earn the hang up achievement is the currently practice of many of startups out there to use Google Voice as their business phone system. In case you don’t know with Google Voice they do local exchange drop offs when you call outside of your local calling area, meaning that when you call my desk I get a call with no name and a local area code, leaving me with the quandary of “is this a customer needing support or is this a cold call?” I get very few of the former but on the off-chance it is I will almost always answer leaving me hearing your happy voices. I HAVE AN END CALL BUTTON AND I AM NOT AFRAID TO USE IT, GOOD DAY TO YOU SIR/MADAM! You want to know how to do this better? First don’t just call me. You’ve got all my contact info so let’s start with being a little more passive and send me an e-mail introducing yourself and asking if I have time to talk to you. Many companies do this already because it brings with it a good deal of benefits; I’ve now captured your contact info, we’re not really wasting a lot of time on each other if there is zero interest, I don’t have to drop what I am dealing to get your pitch. If this idea just absolutely flies in the face of all that your company holds dear and you really must cold call me then don’t hide behind an anonymous number, call me from your corporate (or even better your personal DID) with your company’s name plastered on the Caller ID screen so at least I have the option to decide if it’s a call I need to deal with. A Trade Show Badge Scan List Does Not Mean I am (or anybody else is) Buying I once again had an awesome time at VMworld this year but got to have an experience that I’m sure many other attendees have had variants of. There I was, happily walking my way through the show floor through a throng of people, when out of my peripheral vision a booth person for a vendor not to be named literally stepped through one person and was simultaneously reaching to scan my badge while asking “Hi, do you mind if I scan you?” Yes, Mr./Ms. Inside Sales person, this is the type of quality customer interaction that happened that resulted on me being put on your list. It really doesn’t signify that I have a true interest in your product so please see item one above regarding how to approach the cold call better. I understand there is an entire industry built around having people capture attendee information as sales leads but this just doesn’t seem like a very effective way to do it. My likelihood of talking to you more about your product is much higher if someone with working knowledge of your product, say an SE, talks to me about your product either in the booth or at a social event and then the communication starts there. Once everybody is back home and doing their thing that’s the call I’m going to take. Know Your Product Better Than I Do That leads me to the next item, if by chance you’ve managed to cold call me, get me to pick up and finally manage to keep me on the line long enough to actually talk about your product, ACTUALLY KNOW YOUR PRODUCT. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve received calls after a show and the person on the other end of the line is so blatantly doing the fake it until you make it thing it isn’t funny. Keep in mind you are in the tech industry, cold calling people who most likely are fairly tech savvy and capable of logical thought, so that isn’t going to work so well for you. Frankly, my time is a very, very finite resource and even if I am interested in your product, which is why I took your call, if I’m correcting the caller that is an instant turn off. I get that the people manning the phones aren’t going to be Senior Solutions Architects for your organization but try this on for size; if you’ve got me talking to you and you get asked something you don’t know, don’t be afraid to say you don’t know. This is your opportunity to bump me up the chain or to loop in a more technical person to the call to get the discussion back on the right track. I will respect that far more than if you try to throw out a BS answer. Meanwhile get as much education as you can on what you’re selling. I don’t care if you are a natural sales person, you aren’t going to be able to sell me my own pen in this market. Employees != Resources So you’ve got yourself all the way through the gauntlet and you’ve got me talking and you know your product, please don’t tell me how you can get some resources arranged to help me with designing my quote so the deal can more forward. I was actually in a face to face meeting once where the sales person did this, referring to the technical people within the organization as resources and I think my internal response to this can best be summed up in GIF form: [

Veeam Backup Repository Best Practices Session Notes

Thu, 05 Nov 2015 17:44:45 +0000

After a couple days off I’m back to some promised VeeamON content. A nice problem that VeeamON had this year is the session choices were much more diverse and there were a lot more of them. Unfortunately this led to some overlap of some really great sessions. A friend of mine, Jaison Bailey of vBrisket fame and fortune, got tied up in another session and was unable to attend what I considered one of the best breakout sessions all week, Anton Gostev’s Backup Repository Best Practices so he asked me to post my notes. For those not too familiar with Veeam repos they can essentially be any manner of addressable disk space, whether local, DAS, NAS, SAN or even cloud, but when you start taking performance into account you have to get much more specific. Gostev, who is the Product Manager for Backup & Replication, lines out the way to do it right. Anyway, here’s the notes including links to information when possible. Any notations I have are in bold and italicized. Don’t underestimate the importance of Performance

Getting Started with rConfig on CentOS 7

Wed, 04 Nov 2015 11:16:56 +0000

I’ve been a long time user of RANCID for change management on network devices but frankly it’s always left me feeling a little bit of a pain to use and not particularly modern. I recently decided it was time for my OpenNMS/RANCID server to be rebuilt, moving OpenNMS up to a CentOS 7 installation and in doing so thought it was time to start looking around for an network device configuration management alternative. As is many times the way in the SMB space, this isn’t a task that actual budgetary dollars are going to go towards so off to Open Source land I went! rConfig immediately caught my eye, looking to me like RANCID’s hipper, younger brother what with its built in web GUI (through which you can actually add your devices), scheduled tasks that don’t require you to manually edit cron, etc. The fact that rConfig specifically targets CentOS as its underlaying OS was just a whole other layer of awesomesauce on top of everything else. While rConfig’s website has a couple of really nice guides once you create a site login and use it, much to my dismay I found that they hadn’t been updated for CentOS 7 and while working through them I found that there are actually some pretty significant differences that effect the setup of rConfig. Some difference of minor (no more iptables, it’s firewalld) but it seems httpd has had a bit of an overhaul. Luckily I was not walking the virgin trail and through some trial, error and most importantly google I’ve now got my system up and running. In this post I’m going to walk through the process of setting up rConfig on a CentOS minimal install with network connectivity with hopes that 1) it may help you, the two reader’s I’ve got, and 2) when I inevitably have to do this again I’ll have documentation at hand. Before we get into it I will say there are few artistic licenses I’ve taken with rConfig’s basic setup.

Community and the Rural IT Professional

Tue, 03 Nov 2015 22:20:38 +0000

I was born and raised in a small area between Charleston and Huntington, WV. While I recognized my hometown, Scott Depot, was a small town growing up I thought of both those cities as just that, proper cities with all the benefits and drawbacks that go with them. As I grew older and my worldly view wider I came to realize that what I considered the big city was to many a minor suburb, but never the less it was and still is my home. This lack of size and economic opportunity has never stood out more than when I began my career in Information Technology. After graduating from Marshall University with what I still believe to be a very respectable skill set many of my fellow graduates flocked to bigger areas such as Columbus, OH, RTP and Atlanta. I chose for a variety of reasons to stick around here and make a career of it and all in all while not always the most stable it has been fairly successful. There are very few large datacenters here with most datacenters being composed of a handful of racks. Some go to work for various service providers, others enter the VAR space and I found my niche in what I like to call the Hyper Converged Administrator role. The HCA tends to wear most if not all of the hats; virtualization, storage, networking, server administration, etc. I consider myself somewhat blessed that I’ve managed to avoid the actual desktop admin stuff for most of my career, but still some of that too. In the past couple of years I’ve got more and more active within the social IT community by way of conference attendance, social media and blogging and while it hasn’t necessarily changed the direction my career is going it has radically changed it in that I have found great opportunities for growing my personal knowledge. This growth in some cases has been very strictly technology related by way of pushing me to explore new facets of IT systems management I didn’t previously consider as well as access to very knowledgeable people who are usually very eager to point you in the right direction when asked. In other ways this knowledge while IT related is more oblique in that I feel like I now have a much better understanding of what life is like on the other side of the various fences (vendors, VARs, datacenter admins, etc) than I ever did before. This latter knowledge base has greatly changed how I approach some of the more political parts of IT such as vendor management and internal project pitches. While the global Internet community is great I find that the missing piece is still facetime. The richness of communication when I’m at conferences is more personal than anything that is done online and I find myself somewhat jealous of those in areas large enough to support user groups of any kind of size. In the past year I’ve got to know VMware User Group (VMUG) leaders from Louisville, Kansas City, Phoenix and Portland as well as the guys behind the excellent career oriented community vBrisket and enjoying hearing tales of what’s involved in getting their regular meetings together and wish I could do the same here. Personally my goal for the coming year is to do a bit of travel and attend the meetings of some of the User Groups listed above. If you are local here in the WV IT community reach out and let’s figure out how to do something here. There may not be a lot of us here but that’s an even better reason to get to know each other and share the knowledge.

Presenting at VeeamON 2015: Design, Manage and Test Your Data Protection with Veeam Availabilty Suite

Mon, 02 Nov 2015 15:16:49 +0000

Last week I was presented with the honor of being invited to speak at Veeam Software’s annual user conference, VeeamON. While this was not my first time doing so I was very happy with the end result this year, with 30-40 attendees and positive feedback both from people I knew beforehand as well as new acquaintances who attended. My session is what I like to think of as the 1-1000 MPH with Veeam, specifically targeting the SMB space but with lots of general guidelines for how to get your DR system up and running fast and as error-free as possible. Some of the things I do with Veeam buck the Best Practices guide but we have been able to maintain high levels of protection over many years without much interruption. The session starts with the basics of designing your DR plan, then designing your Veeam infrastructure components to suit your needs, followed by tips for the actual implementation and other tricks and gotchas I’ve run into over the years. Anyway due to the amount of information that was covered I promised attendee’s that I would put my slide deck out here for reference so here it is. If anybody has comments, questions or anything in between please feel free to reach out to me either through the comments here or on twitter. For attendees please keep an eye on your e-mail and the #VeeamON hashtag as the videos of all presentations should be made available in the coming weeks. This is an embedded Microsoft Office presentation, powered by Office Online.

Let’s See How This Goes: Getting Started with vDM30in30

Sun, 01 Nov 2015 23:16:35 +0000

For those of you that don’t know the idea of #vDM30in30 (virtual Design Master: 30 articles in 30 days) started last year by the same fine folks that bring you vDM with the stated goal of getting people to write more and become better writers. You can learn more about the basic rules in Eric Wright’s (aka discoposse) post announcing this year’s event. I caught up to the idea a little late in the game to make any kind of effort at it, but this year due to my writer’s funk of late I’ve decided to give it a go. So what do I expect to write about? Since I’m freshly back from Veeam Software’s annual VeeamON conference expect quite a bit of content related to that. Also I’ve had a few ideas regarding career and community here lately so there will be quite a bit of that as well. Past that? I guess we’ll just have to see what happens. If you are interested in participating yourself really the only two things you need to remember is to write/create content anywhere (go setup a blogger.com account if you don’t have a site yet) and then post to social media with the #vDM30in30 hashtag, that’s it! If you don’t feel like you are ready for that kind of commitment, trust me, I get you, then you can still follow along and learn from everybody else using the same hashtag. For those of you who are participating good job and I look forward to learning from you!

Quick How To: A restart from a previous installation or update is pending.

Mon, 19 Oct 2015 10:33:39 +0000

Just a quickie from an issue I ran into today trying to upgrade vCenter 5.5 to Update 3, or at least the SSO component of it. Immediately after running the installer I was presented with an MSI error “A restart from a previous installation or update is pending. Please restart your system before you run vCenter Single Sign-On installer.” Trying to be a good little SysAdmin I dutifully rebooted, repeatedly, each having no effect on the issue. I’ve seen different versions of this error in the past so I had an idea of where to go but it seems to require googling each time. This is caused by there being data present in the “PendingFileRenameOperations” value of the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager key. Simply checking this key and clearing out any data within will remove the flag and allow the installation to proceed. In this case I had an HP print driver doing what they do best and gumming up the works. I’d love to say this is the first time I’ve been done in by a print driver but you all would know I’m lying. :)

VMworld 2015: What We Know So Far

Mon, 31 Aug 2015 14:28:34 +0000

As the first general keynote is wrapping up here in San Francisco I’ve been trying to keep track of what’s been announced this morning both in the keynote but also by way of the blogsphere. Long story short my take is there isn’t any thing new for the traditional vSphere customer, but if you are ready to start moving some of those workloads to the cloud there is going to be plenty of new things to enable what VMware is calling the hybrid cloud (repeatedly); the ability to support both your legacy apps (you know what we’re actually using) as well the new, shiny cloud native apps your developers are deploying at the speed of light. Please forgive the notes based format found below, but I wanted to get the information out there. Announcements so far:

Where In The VMworld Is Jim?

Mon, 17 Aug 2015 14:23:58 +0000

Two weeks from today the official start to VMworld 2015 begins and to say I am excited to head out is a bit of an understatement. VMworld is a great place to learn more about a different branch of virtualization, see the bleeding edge of this technology and meet new people or renew conversations with some of the brightest minds in the industry. I myself will be focusing on VDI, specifically in the case of Disaster Recovery, and looking at Hyper-Converged systems this year along with all the other fun stuff. While this is only my second year going I’ve found that one of the biggest challenges to VMworld is schedule management; if you are interested in the social/community side of things you can very well go 20 hours a day Sunday through Thursday. Even with that you are going to be challenged to hit all the things you want because there is a great deal of overlap. With a paid conference attendance you (or VMUG Advantage membership) you will be able to view the vast majority of sessions online after the fact, but that doesn’t help with the get out and meet people stuff. Since by nature I am a schedule driven kind of guy I took some time this weekend to kind of map out the whats and the wheres to what I want to do and in hopes of getting to meet up with the 5 people who may read this blog I’ll throw a copy of it out here. The sessions are still in flux because there a few that are full that I still hope to make it into, especially a couple of the Expert Led HOL Workshops, but I think I’ve got the rest of it worked out. Hope to see you there! Sessions (So Far:)

Proud to be a Veeam Vanguard

Wed, 29 Jul 2015 11:20:08 +0000

On July 27th Rick Vanover over on the Veeam Blog announced the inaugural class of what is known as the Veeam Vanguard of which I am honored to have been selected as a member. What the heck is a Veeam Vanguard? While best described in Rick’s announcement blog post, my take is that this group is composed of members of the IT and virtualization global community who are Veeam users and go above and beyond in sharing their knowledge of the ins and outs of the various Veeam products. Frankly I am flabbergasted to be named and wish to thank them for the nomination. Without getting too gushy or fanboyish, I have found over the years that Veeam’s products tend to solve problems we all deal with in a virtualized world. Backup & Replication especially had made my day in, day out life easier because I know my data is nice and protected and I can test just about anything I want to do without effecting the production environment. In closing I just want to say congrats to all of the other nominees and that I look forward to seeing what you have to share. To say the group is geographically diverse is an understatement as Veeam was ever so nice to include the nationalities of all members, it’s very cool to see so many flags represented. Many included I’ve followed on twitter and the blogspace for quite some time, while are others are new to me but in the end I’m sure there will be some great knowledge shared and I look forward to getting to know you.

So You’re Heading to VMworld 2015

Thu, 02 Jul 2015 21:54:37 +0000

Congrats on getting to go! Let’s start with that. VMworld 2015 along with the other major tech conferences are a very cool thing for the geek inclined in that they provide you, the geek, the necessary environment to mix business, pleasure and the absolute cutting edge of our chosen field. Last year was my first VMworld and I have to say what I find very compelling about it is the element of community that seems to be everywhere surrounding the conference. It is not at all unusual to start your day at the conference in the morning and end it in the early hours of the next morning after a full night of community events and shindigs, many of which contain content just as valuable as what you get at the actual conference. If you are a first timer then this post is for you as I’d like to pass on what I learned last year to save you some pain points and give you a heads up as to what I found valuable. If you are a veteran then maybe you’ll find something new here too, but in any case it’s always worth sharing information. Geography 101 (Click for full map): First off understand where you are staying and where you are going. Last year was my first time in San Francisco and while I found it a beautiful city the information provided on the VMworld hotel options list isn’t the fullest, frankly it needs to be topographical. If you are lucky enough this year to get a hotel that is south of Market Street, congrats! you are a rare breed. If not, and you are north of Market know that everything from Market to the north and west is impressively vertical. Downhill in the mornings, uphill in the evenings. While there are shuttles, I never saw a single one last year. If you’ve been looking for a reason to buy or use a step tracker such as a Fitbit or simply using your iPhone this is it. Even with a close hotel expect anywhere from 15-20,000 steps a day. This Is Training, Right?: Next let’s talk about session scheduling. The Schedule Builder opened up two days ago meaning that if you haven’t already got in many of the sessions you may want already show as full. By all means do not be afraid to add yourself to the waitlist or click the “Add to Interests” star icon as VMware will move sessions to bigger rooms or even add additional sessions to meet need. The flip side of the sessions argument is also don’t freak out if you don’t get what you are wanting, but because included in your conference pass is the ability to watch all the sessions online after the fact. These will generally be available online a couple of weeks after the conference. What this leads to is my personal philosophy this year. I am planning to only do a couple of sessions a day this year, with the priority being doing the group discussions where you have the ability to interact and the Expert Led Hands-On Workshops, a new feature this year. The former allows you to bang questions off of subject matter experts and start a dialog that you may be able to expand on later in the week on topics that you are really needing help with. The latter takes the concept of the Hands On Labs and puts it more into a classroom setting where instead of here’s a lab and go freeform , everybody works through a task together. While my interests will be larger than what I actually sit in, it’s easier to find time to watch the videos the other 51 weeks of the year. So what will I be doing with the rest of my time? Well… VMworld Is All About Community: One of the things that I find VMworld really gets right is that for every valuable thing directly related to the conference itself (sessions, the show floor, certification, etc.) there are a great many community-led things surrounding it. Last year brought us the inaugural VMunderground/vBrownBag Opening Acts as a precursor to the VMunderground gathering and it had some great technical content in a smaller setting, allowing for great interaction. There will be vendor events galore throughout the week, if you have a particular company or set of companies you are wanting to evaluate for a solution reach out to them and see if they are doing anything special for the conference, most likely they’ll give you an invite. Are you wanting to get certified? There are even community led certification workshops going on through the week. The Social Media Lounge is a great place to head when your brain gets fried from the sessions and even check out some sessions yourself. To start with you’ll find there is never enough room in the main auditorium for the major keynotes so I find it better to head over to the lounge, grab a table and watch on the big screen. Go early for that as well because it will fill up too. Also there if you can’t handle another 1.5 hour session, the vBrownBag (follow #vBrownBag) guys have a dedicated area with a full plate of 15-20 minute sessions on just about any topic you can think of. Want to talk about something yourself? Be sure to reach out to the guys and they may be able to accommodate you. To find all of the above be sure to follow the various VMworld social media methods. Adding a #VMworld column in TweetDeck is probably the first place to start, these things are being announced all the time. At some point in the near future the Gatherings page will come back and that will be a pretty full listing as well. The key, especially for us locked in the dungeon SysAdmin types, is to not be afraid to be social. You are going to be at a gathering of some of the smartest thought leaders in your chosen profession, don’t be afraid to reach out and say hi as they are generally pretty nice people. Well, that will just about do it for me. If you are going and you see me, please do say hi. In any event enjoy yourself and be ready, it’s a great week!

Setting Up Endpoint Backup Access to Backup & Replication 8 Update 2 Repositories

Fri, 01 May 2015 08:45:44 +0000

A part of the Veeam Backup & Replication 8 Update 2 Release is the ability to allow users to target repositories specified in your Backup Infrastructure as targets for Endpoint Backup. While this is just one of many, many fixes and upgrades (hello vSphere 6!) in Update 2 this one is important for those looking to use Endpoint Backup in the enterprise as it allows for centralized storage and management and equally important is you also get e-mail notifications on these jobs. Once the update is installed you’ll have to decide what repository or repositories will be available to Endpoint Backup and provide permissions for users to access them. By default every Backup Repository Denies Endpoint Backup access to everyone. To change this for one or more repositories you’ll need to:

Getting Started with Veeam Endpoint Backup

Fri, 01 May 2015 08:45:15 +0000

This week Veeam Software officially released their new Endpoint Backup Free product introduced at VeeamON last October after a few months of beta testing. The target for this product is to allow image based backup of individual physical machines, namely workstations, allowing for Change Block Tracking much like users of their more mature Backup & Replication product have been used to in virtualized environments. Further Veeam has made a commitment that in the product is and should always be freely available making it possible for anybody to perform what is frankly enterprise level backup of their own computers with no cost other than possibly a external USB drive to store the backup data. I’ve been using the product throughout the beta process and in this post I’ll outline some of the options and features and review how to get started with the product. Also released this month by Veeam is the related Update 2 for Backup & Replication 8. This update in this case allows a Backup Repository to be selected as a target for your Endpoint Backup job after some configuration as shown here. Keep in mind if you are wanting to backup to local USB or a network share this isn’t necessary but if you are already a B&R user this will make managing these backups much better. Getting Started with Installation [

Support Adobe Digital ID Signing with Automated Microsoft CA User Certificate Generation

Fri, 10 Apr 2015 15:37:00 +0000

Just a quick how to, wanting to document a task I have recently had need of. This process has a perquisite of you having a Microsoft Certificate Authority already available in your environment.

Start > Run >mmc
1. Add Remove Snap-ins and choose the following - Certificate Authority (when prompted add the name of your CA) - Certificate Templates - Group Policy Management
In Certificate Templatesright click on “User” and choose “Duplicate Template”
1. Set compatibility settings as needed. If you have a 2008 R2 pure Active Directory environment make it match. In terms of Certificate Recipient make it match the oldest OS you have in use.
2. Under General Change the Name to something meaningful as you’ll be referencing it later.
3. Under the Security Tab set Domain Users to have both Enroll and Autoenroll permissions
In Certificate Authorityright click on the “Certificate Templates"subfolder and choose New> “Certificate Template to Issue”
1. Choose your newly created Certificate Template
In Group Policy Management we are going to do a couple of things; setup your domain for certificate auto enrollmentand also define registry settings for Adobe Acrobat and Acrobat Reader.
1. In any GPO that will hit the users you wish to have certificates (Default Domain Policy for example) choose to edit.
2. Navigate to User Configuration> Windows Settings> Security Settings> Public Key Policies
3. Double click on Certificate Services Client- Auto-Enrollment and set - Configuration Model: Enabled - Check Renew expired certificates… - Check Update certificates that use certificate templates - Hit OK
[

](preferences.jpg)By default Adobe Acrobat and Reader only recognize certificates that are signed by the usual public authorities as trusted, so you have to tell it to look at what is available in the local Windows Certificate Store. In Adobe Acrobat or Acrobat Reader you can do this in Preferences, under Signatures>Verification and enable ‘Validating Signatures’ under Windows Integration. This can be cumbersome across the enterprise but luckily this data is saved in a registry key, which means that through Group Policy Preferences we can manage this setting. The fix below will work for all Acrobat or Acrobat Reader versions 7 or later 1. Select the GPO of your choice to edit (again, I recommend the Default Domain Policy) and navigate to User Configuration> Preferences> Registry 2. Right click in the window New> Registry Item 3. You will need to create an entry with the following attributes: - Hive: HKEY_CURRENT_USER - Key Path: Software\Adobe\product\versionnumber\Security\cASPKI\cMSCAPI_DirectoryProvider * (Example for Acrobat Pro 11: Software\Adobe\Adobe Acrobat\11.0\Security\cASPKI\cMSCAPI_DirectoryProvider) - Value name: iMSStoreTrusted - Value type: REG_DWORD - Value data: 60 (hexidecimal) - Hit OK 4. [

Quick Config: Install ClamAV & configure a daily scan on CentOS 6

Tue, 03 Mar 2015 11:52:04 +0000

I’m pretty well versed in the ways of Anti-Virus in Windows but I’ve wanted to get an AV engine installed on my Linux boxes for a while now. In looking around I’ve found a tried and true option in ClamAV and after a few stops and starts was able to get something usable. I’d still like to figure out how to have it send me a report by e-mail if it finds something but that’s for another day; I don’t have enough Linux in my environment to necessitate me putting the time in for that. So with that here’s how to quickly get started. Step 0: If not already there, install the EPEL repository

Top New Features in Veeam Backup & Replication v8

Mon, 02 Mar 2015 11:30:07 +0000

We are now a couple of months out from the release of version 8 of Veeam Software’s flagship product Backup & Replication. Since then we’ve seen the first patch release a couple of weeks after, almost a Veeam tradition, and I’ve had it deployed and running for a while now. In that time I’ve found a lot to really like in the new version. End to End EncryptionBackup & Replication now has the ability to encrypt your backup data from the moment it leaves your production storage system, through the LAN and WAN traffic and once it is at rest, either on disk or tape. This encryption is protected by password stored both with humans as well as within the Enterprise Manager database keeping you from losing backups. Finally the encryption does not change ratios for either compression or deduplication of the backup data. Resource Conservation ImprovementsQuite a few of the new Backup & Replication features are geared towards keeping your RPO goals from getting in the way of production efficiency. First and foremost is the availability of Backup I/O Control, a feature that will monitor the latency of your production storage system and if measured metrics climb above a user defined level will throttle backup operations to return systems to acceptable levels. On the networking side if you have redundant or other none production WAN links you now have the ability to specify preferred networks for backup data, with failover to production if it isn’t available. Further the WAN Accelerator for site to site backup copy and replication has been improved to allow for up to 3x what was seen in v7. Cloud ConnectBoth of the above features make this one possible. With this new version brings a new partnership opportunity where VARs and other cloud storage service providers have the ability to directly act as a repository for your backup data. These providers can then allow you to spin these backups up as part of a second offering or as part of a package. With this the need to own, manage and maintain the hardware for a DR site becomes much lighter and I personally believe this will be a big deal for many in the SMB space. New Veeam Explorers for RecoveryVeeam has been phasing out the use of the U-AIR wizards for item level restore for a while but with v8 we now have the release of the Explorers for Active Directory, Microsoft SQL Server and Exchange. The Active Directory one is particularly of note because it not only allows you to restore a deleted AD item but do so with the password intact. Transaction log backup for SQL servers is also now supported allowing for point in time restore. The Exchange option has a few new features but I especially like the option of recovering hard-deleted items. These are frankly just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the new features. For more on what’s new I recommend you checkout the What’s New documents for both Backup & Replication as well as for VeeamONE, Veeam’s virtualization infrastructure monitoring package.

vExpert 2015

Thu, 05 Feb 2015 18:46:28 +0000

The 2015 vExpert List was released today and I am honored to be on the list for the second year in a row. The vExpert program was developed to recognize those who active discuss and help others with VMware’s virtualization products in a number of ways, but notably through blogging and social media. To other vExperts that may be reading this please accept my hearty congratulations on your inclusion, whether it’s your first or your fifth time around. While it isn’t really the point, there are a number of benefits to being a vExpert with most of them compiled and listed by Romain Decker on his website. This can include anything from swag to free or heavily discounted training to NFR licenses for your home lab from many companies in the virtualization industry. In truth what I’ve found to be the biggest benefit is getting to know, at least virtually, some exceptionally bright people in our field. If for some reason you either didn’t apply and or didn’t make the cut this time around and would like to be considered for inclusion there will be another round of applications this year but it hasn’t been announce yet. A best bet to be notified of when this opens would be to either follow the VMTN blog feed or the @vExpert twitter account.

What’s New in vSphere 6: Licensing

Mon, 02 Feb 2015 18:45:13 +0000

Today’s release of vSphere 6 brings about quite a few new technologies worth getting excited for. This includes things such as Virtual Volumes (VVOLs), Open Stack Integration, global content library and long distance vMotion. Now for many of us, especially in the SMB space, the question is can we afford to play with them. As usual VMware very quietly released the licensing level breakout of these and other new features and I have to say my first take is this is another case of the rich getting richer.

Managing your vSphere 6 Environment

Mon, 02 Feb 2015 16:00:52 +0000

VMware released their long awaited version 6 of its vSphere 6 products today and as I’m sure you’ll be running out tomorrow to go update all your production environments…. Ok now that we’re done laughing what you probably are going to want to get into is getting your lab updated or built so you can work out the changes yourself, possibly using your EvalExperience licenses you got with VMUG Advantage? Once you get it up and running you’ll notice that a few things have changed from the administration point of view. In this post I’m going to take a quick look at the Management features of vSphere 6. Platform Services Controller One thing you’ll find right off is that many of the underlying vCenter services have now been lumped together into what they are calling the Platform Services Controller. These services include Single Sign-On, licensing and certificate management. At installation you are given two options on how to deploy the PSC, either embedded, where the PSC always rides along with vCenter, or External where the PSC is installed on its own VM and each vCenter talks back to the central services controller. There are a couple of design requirements here if you chose to go the embedded route. You can have a maximum of 8 embedded or external PSCs per Single Sign-On site, and if you choose to go the embedded route it will increase the minimum RAM required to 8 GB. vSphere Web Client As has been the trend VMware has spent some serious time improving the Web Client, this time focusing on loading time, login time and a more streamlined component layout. It is still Flash based, but still a bit better. Time will tell with this one. vSphere Host Client Is the death of the installable VI client we’ve been hearing about for years here? ~~Yes but it’s been replaced with a new version that is to be used only for connecting to the hosts directly or Update Manager~~. No, the new C# client for vSphere 6 will function much in the same way as the 5.5 client, you will be able to manage your infrastructure fully with it, but in terms of editing virtual hardware you will only be able to do so fully on VMs version 5-8.* The good part about it is the new C# client is not version based, rather it can be used to manage hosts running hardware versions 8-11. Multi-Site Content Library This one is probably what I am most excited about. Instead of having to update the ISO datastore in each of your locations, as well as building or copying your base templates for each vCenter, with the Content Library you can create a repository for all of your ISOs, templates, vApps and scripts and that repository will automatically be synchronized across all sites and vCenter Servers. Virtual Datacenters and Policy Based Management These two are the ones that I frankly still need to dive deeper into. The concept is that you create virtual datacenters, spanning multiple locations (both local and cloud service) and then use policy to define what resources are available and where when spinning up a VM. Certificate Lifecycle Management Finally on the management side a new command line interface has been added for managing both the VMware and third-party certificates. I recently used fellow vExpert Derek Seaman’s excellent tool and blog series to use Microsoft Certificate Services certs in my vSphere infrastructure, I have to believe this will make that process easier. As the documentation gets finalized I’ll provide a link to the docs for this here. All in all it should be an exciting time for us virtualized folks, with lots of new toys and technology to try out. *After the big Feb. 6 announcement VMware saw fit to let everybody know that there are major changes between what was there in the betas and what will be there in the GA build, this being one of them.

3 steps to really reset a Cisco 7900 Phone

Thu, 29 Jan 2015 15:57:45 +0000

Recently had some issues with one of our phones at the office and you know how it goes, reboot it. What you may not know is that there are different levels of “reboot” for the 7900 series phones, each of which are a little more pervasive. In this post I’ll outline how to go about performing these 3 ways to reset your desk phone to cure what may or may not be ailing you.

VMware’s Big February 2nd Announcement

Tue, 27 Jan 2015 09:47:25 +0000

VMware will be having a big announcement event next week, most likely regarding the public release of their vSphere 6 suite of products. Version 6 has been in a “private” beta that anyone can join for the past 5 months or so and looks to include various features to move the product along. The beta program is still open for enrollment with the latest version being an RC build, you can sign up here to gain access to the bits themselves but also various documents and recorded webinars regarding the new features. Just going by what was discussed at VMworld 2014 what is included in this version includes

VMUG Advantage Eval Experience

Thu, 15 Jan 2015 22:16:59 +0000

Do you find yourself longing for the good old days of the VMware Technical Network (VMTN)? Do you have a home lab you are wanting to use to learn more about the VMware ecosphere. Well good news, the fine folks at VMUG today announced the addition of a service called Eval Experience to their already excellent service VMUG Advantage. Eval Experience will provide 365 day evaluation licenses for a variety of VMware’s products including

Configuring Networking for Nimble-vSphere iSCSI

Tue, 06 Jan 2015 07:08:25 +0000

One of my last tasks for 2014 was integrating a new Nimble Storage array into our environment. As this is the first of these I’ve encountered and I haven’t been able to take the free one day Nimble Installation and Operation Professional (NIOP) course they provide I was left to feeling my way through it with great help from their documentation and only ended up calling support to resolve a bug related to upgrading from 2.14 of the Nimble OS. On the network side our datacenter is powered by Cisco Nexus 3000 series switches, also a new addition for us recently. These allowed us to use our existing Cat6 copper infrastructure while increasing our bandwidth to 10 GbE. In this post I’m going to document some of the setup required to meet the best practices outlined in Nimble’s Networking Best Practices Guide when setting up your system with redundant NX-OS switches.

WordPress Here We Come!

Thu, 06 Nov 2014 21:01:41 +0000

It seems like just last year I posted that I had redone my website in Drupal and had gotten back into blogging, ok, gotten back into blogging somewhat. I am a pretty big fan of Drupal, I love their community driven method, the flexibility, the do it yourself of it all. As time went by though I found myself with less and less time available to deal with the community driven method of website development, lots of flexibility and the do it yourself of it all at the personal blog site level. Further I was especially stymied by the almost nonexistent support for blogging from mobile platforms. I tried various methods of dealing with this, but none of them felt as easy as anything on an iPad should feel and what was there seemed to rely on either hosting through Drupal Gardens or on running an outdated version of the Blog API module. So for all those reasons and more this week I’m pretty happy to say that I’ve now ported this site over to essentially the anti-Drupal, WordPress. WordPress comes in both community and commercial flavors, but while I don’t think in 4 years of working with Drupal I saw a single paid module or theme that wasn’t custom work almost everyone I’ve found so far has at least some relationship with a commercial product in the same ecosphere. Even with that so far I’ve found it to be an economically viable option as long as free isn’t your ceiling. In this post I’m going to outline some of the things I’m finding helpful and some of the challenges and differences between the two I’ve had to work my way through.

Unsupported Configuration when using VUM for a Major Upgrade

Thu, 06 Nov 2014 00:00:05 +0000

I’ve recently been working on getting my environment upgraded from vSphere 5.1 to 5.5. Last week I replaced one vCenter server with a clean install and upgraded another, in process implementing home brewed certificates thanks in no small part to Derek Seaman’s excellent SSL toolkit and tutorials. With that done and nice and clean this week I turned towards getting the ESX hosts updated. Like all right thinking folks, I typically like to use vSphere Update Manager for this task in a vCenter supported environment. The first host went very well and was up and patched without issue. After that the wheels fell off for the other two. I was continuously getting “Unsupported configuration” when I would try to scan the host, if I tried to push through and Remediate it would fail with “Software or system configuration of host <hostnamehere> is incompatible. Check scan results for details.” Nice error messages right? I tried a few things, reinstalling the management agents via VMware KB 1031919, rebooting the host, etc. After no luck there I logged a case with VMware where we began trying to find more information in the vua.log and verifying the correct fdm agent is installed via the esxcli software vib list | grep fdm command. In the end we were able to find my issue but I’ll be honest the documentation and logging in this scenario is pretty bad. When Veeam Backup & Replication creates a vPowerNFS share, mounting your backup datastore as an addressable datastore to your host that is added in at least one way as a series of lines in the /etc/vmware/esx.conf file as shown below:

VeeamON 2014: Conference Season Veeam Style

Sun, 05 Oct 2014 19:37:48 +0000

I write this aboard about the coolest painted plane I’ve had the pleasure of flying on, en route to Las Vegas, NV to attend and speak at the inaugural VeeamON conference being held at the Cosmopolitan. The conference is being held by Veeam Software, one of the leaders in virtualization backup, known best for its Veeam Backup & Replication product. The conference itself represents a pretty big milestone for a global company who in my opinion has done a very solid job of getting social right from the corporate standpoint. It is also going to time well due to the pending version 8 release of Backup & Replication. I have been working with Veeam’s Backup & Replication software for a little over four years now and find it to be both powerful as well as easy to use, a nice combination when talking about the product responsible for the safety of your data. I will be speaking about my experiences with this software package from the small government organization standpoint and how it helps us deal with some of the particular challenges that come from being in that segment. My session will be on Wednesday at 8:30 AM. This will be my first time speaking in this type of setting so we’ll see how it goes, but there will be no shortage of seasoned veterans providing sessions. Others speaking include a great deal of the staff from Veeam including Anton Gostev, Doug Hazelman, Rick Vanover, & Ben Milligan and those are just the ones that I’m personally familiar with. Further the virtualization industry will also be well represented by the likes of Chris Wahl, Symon Perriman, and Joep Piscaer. Finally Alexis Ohanian of Reddit will serve as the celebrity speaker. All in all for a first time event they seem to have brought some very strong speakers to the event, we’ll see if I can hold up my part. What To Look For One of the things that I really like about this conference is the variety of options they are providing attendees to make the most of their time. Monday is Partner day, open only to their partners, but at the same time they will be having a variety of community driven Veeam User Group sessions for the rest of us attending. Also from the community side of things there will be a few vBrownbag sessions sprinkled through Tuesday and Wednesday. These are generally much shorter, 15-20 minutes and are great for people to share little tips and tricks of the industry. I myself will be providing a session on Physical Backup Strategies on Tuesday at 8:20 talking about how we use the open source software product Areca Backup to handle the role of backing up the few physical machines I have left in my environment. One of the biggest draws and one that will be of great importance to both me and my employer is the ability to take the Veeam Certified Engineer (VMCE) course while attending. This course, a prerequisite to being able to sit the VMCE exam, is typically $3000 US and last 5 days. At the conference they will be condensing it into 2.5 days and conference attendees are able to take the course for only $650. Also going on as an aside to the sessions are the Lab Warz game and offsite tour of a Modern Datacenter. Registrants for Lab Warz will compete against each other to create the ultimate data protection scenario for cash and prizes. The offsite tour will take a group of attendees to the Cobalt Cheyenne datacenter to see how datacenter is done on the large scale. Keynotes Even f you are unable to attend yourself the Keynotes on both Tuesday and Wednesday will be streamed live. The big news most likely will be the announcement of the general release of version 8 of Veeam’s Availability Suite which includes the Backup & Replication product as well at the Veeam ONE virtualization infrastructure monitoring package. Both of these products have been in beta for the past few months and from my own personal experiences with them Veeam has done a very good job of making great software better. I wouldn’t be surprised if there weren’t a few surprises announcements there as well. It’s not everyday you get to host your own inaugural global event, might as well take advantage Conclusion I’m going to go ahead and sign out here for now. Be sure to check back later as I plan to update frequently through the week with news and information.

VMworld 2014 Rollup

Thu, 18 Sep 2014 14:47:27 +0000

Ok, so yes, it’s been more than a month since VMworld 2014 ended here in the US. I realize I’m a little late to the game in trying to get these thoughts down, but still necessary if for no other reason than for my own memory’s sake. In the mean time since getting back I’ve been a little busy; rolling out a whole new Veeam Backup infrastructure, completing my presentation for the inaugural VeeamON conference (more on that in a post later this week), and just this past weekend completing the rollout of 10 GbE for my lil’ datacenter. All in all September has been a very busy month, but back to the matter at hand. There have been a bunch really great write ups about what happened at VMworld 2014 such as Dan Barber’s full series and Tom Hollingsworth’s post on why Moscone just might be outgrown (it is). Because of this I’m not going to completely go down the road of covering things, but with this being my first time attending I’m going to talk about some of my key takeaways about what interested me and my impressions of the conference.

VMworld 2014, Day 1

Tue, 26 Aug 2014 12:12:10 +0000

This morning was the opening Keynote with Pat Gelsinger and the gang and while there were some announcements (more on that later) the key take away is that the time is upon us IT folk to be brave. It is a time to cast aside concerns about cloud and your job as it currently is done because your role will be automated and start giving all your money for VMWare. No need to concern yourself with hardware, that can all be white boxed, but only think about things such as networking and storage as just small components of the greater Hyper-Converged compute nodes regardless of location. I tended to look upon this with great skepticism as I don’t think we’re quite ready or should be ready to put the network guys out to pasture, replaced with new shiny Virtualization Admins who know what an IP address is and most of the time understand what a VLAN does for you. [

VMWorld 2014, Day 0

Mon, 25 Aug 2014 11:26:32 +0000

I arrived here at VMWorld 2014 in San Francisco yesterday (Saturday) and the conference doesn’t actually start until tomorrow (Monday) so for the sake of organization I’m going to refer to the events of the past couple of days as Day 0. Yesterday after arriving and getting checked into the hotel I found myself right on time for registration to open up so I walked down. One of the nice thing about the conference being here in SFO is that most hotels are within a 1/2 mile walk to the Moscone. I was very surprised when I got there in that I believed myself to be coming very early and found a pretty significant line. It seems everybody comes early for this one. After that Jet Lag for the most part won and the rest of the day was given to getting past that with the notable exceptions of checking out both the vBeers and Community Kickoff events. Neither of these were sponsored events but well worth the time for the conversation. So today evidently started with a Bucket List for many that in true Jim form I slept through. At approximately 3:20 AM Sunday a magnitude 6.0 earthquake shook the Bay Area, the largest since 1989. I’m not sure if my sleeping through it is a measure of how tired I was or how comfy Marriott beds are, but nonetheless I missed it entirely and learned about it as friends back home started checking on me. Once up is when the schedule got crazy and I will use today to illustrate just how busy these things are.

VMWorld 2014 Expectations

Sun, 17 Aug 2014 22:29:27 +0000

A little over one week from now I will be hopping a flight to San Francisco for VMWare’s VMworld Conference, my first, held at the ever popular Moscone Center. Last year I had the privilege of attending Cisco Systems’ Cisco Live but from everything I’ve seen, read and heard as well as my experience in getting even to this point VMWorld seems to be a bit of a different animal. In this post I’ll cover some of my impressions so far and things I’m looking forward to as well as a list of the sessions that I’m (at least at this point) scheduled to attend. Costs In terms of the price of the conference and directly related matters (outside educational events, community shindigs) VMWorld is pretty reasonable with a standard cost of $1995 knocked down to $1695 if you register early. There also a variety of ways to even get discounts under that. In my case I was supposed to be eligible for another $100 off either because I am a VCP or from my VMUG Advantage subscription, but because of a computer system flub on their part they showed me as an Alumni of VMWorld giving me another $100, making the final $1495. I offered it up as a mistake and they said to let it go. Further I opted for the $55 5k fun run Sunday morning which isn’t bad as well as the vBrownBag/ VMUnderground Opening Acts panel educational series Sunday afternoon at the great value of free. I highly recommend these as the line up looks great, filled with a who’s who of the virtualization social world riffing on a variety of topics. Past that the costs get a little nuts when compared to my experience last year for Cisco in Orlando, FL. You really couldn’t even get in the door of the conference hotels for less than $270 a night and even then many of the available options filled up within the first two weeks of registration being open. Compare that to the $139 a night I paid for the Courtyard 2 blocks from the venue in Orlando. Further I’ve been told to expect higher than normal costs for food (the conference food is evidently atrocious and I shouldn’t really consider that an option) as well as flight cost for going across country and it really starts to add up. Community Focus/ Party Party Party To truly condense what I think I know about VMWorld in comparing to CLUS so far is while there is a healthy dose of outside get togethers available at CLUS VMWorld vendors seem to take the sponsored events to a whole other level. Every single night, including Saturday when I get in there is multiple vendor or community sponsored events going on, almost all of which start with a “v,” vBreakfast, vStogies, vBeers, vFlipCup vOdgeball, etc. They even go so far as to provide a iCalendar with nothing but theSocial Events. Further one of the nice things that I’m not personally going to be able to utilize this year is a regular’s wife organizes a variety of sponsored activities for the spouses who decide to travel as well called, aptly, Spousetivities. All of this lends itself to the basic idea that one of the things that VMWare has fostered very well is the sense of community; that while the conference itself provides a trove of education through its sessions and such the true value of the conference is the uniting of a community that is already integrated through social media. Last year I dutifully attended a large number of sessions at CiscoLive where I truly learned a great deal, but it was the time just casually discussing things in the Social Media Hub where I truly felt enriched by the experience. VMWare seems to understand this as well. Where in the World is Jim As I sat down to write this and dumped the list of sessions which I’ve scheduled to do so I realized that I’ve scheduled more than I thought I had. Another thing that I learned last year is that sessions that seemed like a great idea before hand don’t seem that great when you are in the middle of a conversation regarding a topic you are very much so interested in with people you consider far smarter than yourself. I had this thought a number of times with people such as Chris Wahl, Jody Lemoine, Amy Arnold, and Jake Snyder. So for that reason I don’t think I’m going to find myself shy this year to hop on the VMWorld app and dump myself out of sessions if the timing isn’t right. The beauty of these major conferences is that all the sessions are recorded and later access is included in the cost of attendance. Anyway, for now this is what I’m looking forward to seeing:

Thoughts on the vSphere 6 Open Beta

Wed, 13 Aug 2014 08:47:15 +0000

Ahead of its annual Vmworld conference (which I will be attending this year, yay!) VMware has announced the version 6.0 of its vSphere line of products including ESXi, vCenter and just about every other VMware related topic I’ve written about here. The company has chosen to mix it up a little bit this year in that they have made the beta program itself public, but in joining the actual program you are required to sign a NDA keeping anything you learn private. To me I take this to mean that while the wire structure is there this is still very much a work in progress, with the community at large having the opportunity to greatly influence what we are going to be seeing in the final product. As I cannot directly talk about anything I’m learning from the beta itself I highly recommend anybody with a little space to lab go sign up for the beta, start providing feedback and try it out for yourself. Instead what I’m going to discuss here is my wish list for things to be included when 6.0 finally hits gold as well as the basics of the long discussed Virtual Volumes product that was released into beta along with vSphere. Wish List As I mentioned above, the beta for vSphere 6 requires a non-disclosure agreement, even if it is open to the public. To learn what is actually coming in vSphere 6 I urge you to go join the beta for yourself as there is a great deal of information in there for those who wish to really learn and understand the product(s). Below is a list of things that generically myself and a great many others very much so wish to see as this release comes to be.

Updating the Code of a ipbase Licensed Cisco Catalyst 3750X Switch Stack

Tue, 03 Jun 2014 09:49:52 +0000

Here in the office the Access Layer of our switching infrastructure is handled completely with a 7 unit stack of Cisco 3750X switches. There is no need for these to do any routing other than intervlan so when purchased 3 years ago we just ordered the IP Base licensing level. Well from what I can tell there is a universal code base and a licensed feature level of each code revision. The universal naming convention looks like c3750e-universalk9-mz.122-55.SE1 while the ipbase looks like c3750e-ipbasek9-mz.150-2.SE6. What I found is that I do not have the ability to download the universal code of later releases due to my licensing level and possibly the lack of SmartNet I keep on these, but I do have access to the ipbase code. When attempting to update the code on this stack I was presented with the error

Increase Max Attachment Size in Outlook 2007 SP2 and Above

Tue, 20 May 2014 10:05:29 +0000

Let me start by saying I feel very dirty for even writing this. My basic rule in life is if the file is bigger than 2 MB, it isn’t to be sent as an attachment to an e-mail. That said, many do not share my opinion on that and here at the office we recently had an occasion where a 200 MB file absolutely had to be e-mailed, it could be sent no other way. A couple of years ago I wrote a post on 4sysops about how to change this in Exchange, so I thought that was an easy fix. Instead the user continued to see this: [

Fully Install VMware Tools Via Yum in CentOS

Thu, 16 Jan 2014 14:45:17 +0000

I’ll be the first to admit that I know far less about Linux than is necessary to be good at it and more than necessary to be dangerous at it. That said, if nothing else, I do try to learn more about it. I find that in general I’ve basically committed to CentOS as my flavor of choice with it being the underpinnings of every non-appliance installation I’ve got. Alot of this has to do with the fact that my first experiences were with RedHat and the subsequent RHEL, so with CentOS being the server side, open source derivative of RHEL it makes sense that that’s where I’d go. In the vSphere world as you get further down the rabbit hold of monitor systems for your infrastructure you’ll find that for most things to even begin to operate effectively you’ve got to have VMware tools installed. While there are various instruction sets out there floating around for how to get these on both, through the “Install VMware Tools” GUI and via yum (the RHEL package installation system) I’ve found that your mileage may vary greatly. Below is a list of commands that I’ve finally got happy with to get these installed and allow for complete control over the VM much like you do with your Windows VMs via the VI client. With the exception of a couple of modifications regarding your revisions of vSphere and CentOS you can pretty much copy and paste this into your elevated prompt (root) on your linux box and get all the information and monitoring you need. 1. Add the VMware GPG keys rpm --import http://packages.vmware.com/tools/keys/VMWARE-PACKAGING-GPG-DSA-KEY.pubrpm --import http://packages.vmware.com/tools/keys/VMWARE-PACKAGING-GPG-RSA-KEY.pub 2. Copy the following to create a yum repository with all of the relevant information. You will need to change the ESXi version (red) and CentOS base (blue) to match what you run: echo "[vmware-tools]" >> /etc/yum.repos.d/vmware-tools.repoecho "name=VMware Tools" >> /etc/yum.repos.d/vmware-tools.repoecho "baseurl=http://packages.vmware.com/tools/esx/5.0/rhel6/$basearch" >> /etc/yum.repos.d/vmware-tools.repoecho "enabled=1" >> /etc/yum.repos.d/vmware-tools.repoecho "gpgcheck=1" >> /etc/yum.repos.d/vmware-tools.repo 3. Install all portions of the VMware Tools: yum -y install vmware-tools* And that’s pretty much it. Once done you’ll probably immediately notice that it shows as you are running a 3rd Party version of the tools, but now you’ll see the IP address of the box in the VM summary screen. Further you’ll now be able to monitor heartbeat and view performance data for your VMs, which is very nice to have. In my environment I immediately began getting issue notifications via Veeam ONE letting me know about issues I didn’t even know I had. A lot of the other guides on how to do this have you use the command yum install vmware-tools-core, but I find that to be pretty incomplete as there are various plugins that allow for greater management and utilities such as auto update abilities. You can see a whole list of what’s possible and cherry pick if you like by running the command yum search vmware-tools* once you’ve added your repository (step 2).

Blogging in the New Year

Wed, 01 Jan 2014 08:56:49 +0000

Happy New Year’s Everybody! While it most definitely had its high points 2013 over all was a bit challenging for me. So with that said and a liberal dose of optimism I have to say that I am looking forward to what 2014 will put before us. While I’m sure the employer will have me start outlining some goals to work towards there, I’d like to share some personal goals I’ve thought of for 2014. Enhance my scripting skills. Namely this means powershell, python, and esxcli with the end goal being to start performing greater automation throughout the enterprise. For years I’ve got by with some decent use of vbscript to do the basics on the Windows side of the shop because that’s where most of the need was. As our needs have started shifting towards the virtualization side and with the coming wave of Software Defined Networking (SDN) it’s about time I start learning something new. Become VCP5 certified. Last year ended up being a pretty Cisco centric year for me from an educational standpoint with me reupping my CCNA and adding a CCNA Voice to the mix, not to mention attending Cisco Live. This year I want to build upon the VCA-Datacenter I gained recently and finally get around to doing the VCP 5 Datacenter exam. I’m still not a big fan of Vmware’s enforced class policy for certfication, but as I’ve already taken the Install, Configure and Manage vSphere 4 class this means all I have to take is the What’s New in vSphere 5.5 course. Blog More on the Macro. One good thing about 2013 is I did what for me was a lot of blogging, mostly at 4sysops.com. I think in total I posted about 15-20 times last year and in the process I managed to start blogging for myself again, something I haven’t done in years. This year while I’ll still do some of the straight how to pieces that I did quite a bit of last year I want to use this medium to help myself find new ways of thinking and get out of my comfort zone, so expect to see more posts like this in the new year. Attend a major IT conference again. Last year I had the great experience of attending Cisco Live in Orlando, Florida. It is always a good thing to be able to immerse yourself in situations where you can expand your knowledge and this was that ability on a grand scale. While I don’t know if it will be Cisco Live again this year, most likely it will be Vmworld, I definitely want to make this a yearly thing rather than an outlier. Refocus on health (start running again!) For the past couple of years I’ve done what I consider to be a great job of focusing on my health and I have seen some pretty darn good outcomes, with any measure I can think of showing positive trends. For the past 6 months or so I’ve seen this focus wan as other things in life have done an excellent job of getting in the way, but this is something I want/need to change. I’m going to get back in the habit or running 3 or 4 times a week. Further look for a post in the near future regarding some of the mobile technologies I’ve found to be really helpful in managing your weight and overall health. Provide greater training to fellow coworkers. This would be mostly to get more utilization out of already in place systems and greater efficiency out of staff. From our perspective this would mean less call IT, more doing. There are many ways you can describe my employer, but the way I tend to think of it is as a smaller medium size business with an enterprise point of view when it comes to technology. Over the course of the last few years we’ve made some great strides in putting new technology in place to increase the ability of our staff to collaborate and some have really caught on, others not so much. In a lot of these cases I think the lack of use comes from a general lack of understanding of how it works and I hope to rectify that this year. Well that seems like plenty of list as it is so I’m going to go ahead and stop there. How about you? What goals do you have for this year? Let me know either in the comments below or on twitter @k00laidIT.

Jim’s Healthy Chili

Thu, 12 Dec 2013 15:59:50 +0000

Healthy food doesn’t always have to mean no taste. As I’ve had to deal with various health issues over the past few years I’ve had to learn to make some things that I really love in a new way. One of these things is chili, which I could happily eat every single day without issue. Below is the recipe I’ve been tinkering with for a while now and I’ve got it to the point where I really like. Give it a shot and if you find a way to improve it by all means please let me know! Start with…

Cisco Unified Contact Center Express Scripting Stuff

Thu, 10 Oct 2013 12:44:30 +0000

I recently participated in one of Cisco’s Collaboration User Group (CUG) briefings on scripting their Contact Center Express product. While I took the official class, UCCXD, I haven’t really had to do much with it because we had a vendor taking care of stuff for us. Well, that has now gone by the wayside so I’m trying to get myself back up to date on how to manage the application powering our call center. I had forgotten how much of a PITA it was to find the scripting documentation on Cisco’s site, so after finding it I thought it prudent to Provide a listing and some links here so I can find it later (and for you if you need it.) The scripting documentation for UCCX is organized into 3 separate documents. The general link for all supported version is to here. The links below are for the current 9.0 release.

Raising a Woman in STEM

Mon, 23 Sep 2013 16:22:22 +0000

My daughter is 19 months old and already has a pretty good idea of what to do with an iPhone and iPad. As a technical person myself I have great hope that my daughter will pursue a future in a STEM (short for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) related career; not because I want to her to follow in Dear Old Dad’s footsteps, but because I see the promise it holds for a life of learning and prosperity. Driving into work this morning I was listening to a report on NPR regarding a recent study at the University of Texas found that girls are more likely to take Physics in High School and follow a more STEM related path when they grow up with a presence of women working in STEM. While there are IT and engineering folks around, there is not a strong technology related community in my area, especially females, which got me to thinking about how can I help to get my daughter interested in such things? What can we as her parents do to make technology a potential path in her mind? At home we try to do things that get her involved with technology even now. We have family spread all over so she usually has a Facetime or Skype video call at least every couple of days, but we haven’t got into the games yet. Looking at pictures on the iPad is a favorite activity as well. While not necessarily tech, we abide by the old adage of “thou shalt read to thy child,” something that is a fact of nature in any of the STEM fields. Going forward I’ve been looking at is the various summer camp options as she gets a bit older. Locally (Huntington/ Charleston, WV area) I’ve been able to find the NASA Science, Engineering, Math and Aerospace Academy, or SEMAA and Lego Robotics at Marshall University starting as early as age 5 but I’d love to find something in the 2-4 year old space. At the educational level Marshall University offers a STEM focused preschool, but 35 minutes each way may be a bit much for pre-K on a daily basis. After that we live in an area with an excellent school system but I don’t really see any options for focused education until the college level That said, I’m opening it up to you. What options have you found or what do you do with your child that’s tech related? I’m mostly posting this in search of advice of others. Feel free to comment here or hit me up on twitter @k00laidIT.

Getting Started with Veeam Backup & Replication v7

Tue, 13 Aug 2013 14:02:33 +0000

Come one, come all virtualization geeks, the latest installment of Veeam’s excellent Backup & Replication suite has arrived. As noted in lots of places, v7 boasts a boatload of new and new-to-them features that the community has been requesting for some time. Among these are a few that I am quite excited about as they should in theory make my job as an admin easier; built in WAN acceleration, support for tape libraries, a vSphere Web Client Plugin, and the ability to create backup copy jobs to support your basic Grandfather-Father-Son backup strategy without external help. Among the biggies are:

Allowing Supervisors to Modify Skill Levels in UCCX 9

Tue, 13 Aug 2013 13:15:31 +0000

Since we installed Cisco’s Call Manager Express call center system a couple of years ago I could set my watch by the requests from our group of supervisors to modify the skill level of our various agents for the various Customer Service Queues (CSQs). Generally at the same time they will request access to do this themselves. Imagine my excitement when UCCX 9 was released and one of the features was a mobile browser application called, creatively, Mobile Skill Manager to do just that. Further you can imagine my chagrin when after upgrading we quickly realized that the app doesn’t work particularly well at this point, either in a mobile browser or through any of the major standard browsers. So to twitter I went trying to find a way to make this happen and lo and behold I found the answer within the System Parameters of UCCX. Start by logging into the web interface and look in System> System Parameters. Then under the Application Parameters section you will find an option called “Supervisor Access.” By default this will be set to No Access to Teams, and if you want to provide access you will need to choose one of the other two options depending on your need, Access to All Teams or Access to Supervisor’s Teams only. For us we chose the former because we are a relatively small call center where all the Supervisors cross train. [

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