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Interview – Joe Baguley, VMware EMEA CTO

General, , , , ,

A while ago, I had the brilliant idea to interview people and peer from the IT industry, from different area’s, such as end users/customers, resellers, and vendors. So to kick this off, I started by asking around those who I know in the community.

First up is Joe Baguley of VMware, to many he needs no introduction, after countless keynote speeches at various conferences, and a stalwart in the IT community.

Below I stumbled on a picture of Joe pre-beard, chickens and cats from 2009.

Joe Baguley prebeard

So a lot of people will know you from events, and the keynote speeches you give (Chickens and cats), but outside of that, can you give us an insight into the other things you work in?

Customers and strategy.  I essentially manage and maintain communication between our field folks and R&D. Whether that is meeting with CIOs and their teams at our customers myself, or working with the CTO Ambassadors here at VMware who help me scale that role, mostly I spend my time keeping on top of what is and isn’t working, what our customers and the market are doing and planning to do and making sure we are all doing the right things.  I spend time with our R&D leaders and our Sales & Technical leaders to keep things together.  Both sides look to me for opinion and thoughts on what is going on, and the best way to approach things.

If we look at the big vendors in IT, Dell are merging with EMC, HP split into two distinct companies and offloaded their professional services arm, IBM offloaded their hardware to Lenovo.  What things should we expect on the horizon for big changes with the big companies? Continue reading Interview – Joe Baguley, VMware EMEA CTO →

fan replacement

HP FlexFabric Switches – AirFlow direction is not prefered

HP, Networking, , , , , ,

Quick note,

Installed some HP FlexFabric 5700 switches the other day and I was getting a red LED on the front, and a status message in the CLI

HPE DEV/1/FAN_DIRECTION_NOT_PREFERRED: -Slot; Fan 1 airflow direction is not preferred on slow 1, please check it.

This is a pretty common issue if you chose Back-to-Front fans for your build.

The part numbers for the 5700 series are as follows (taken from this document);

HP 58x0AF Bck(pwr) – Frt(ports) Fan Tray  – JC682A
HP 58x0AF Frt(ports) – Bck(pwr) Fan Tray  – JC683A

The fix is quite simple

To display the airflow configuration;

display fan slot {slot No,}

To change the configuration

Fan prefer-direction slow 1 port-to-power

Below is a screenshot showing the error, the display command and the resolution. Continue reading HP FlexFabric Switches – AirFlow direction is not prefered →

TrendMicroDeepSecurity9

Trend Deep Security – Agentless Deployment with NSX – Issues with Web Reputation Service

Uncategorized, VMware, , , , , ,

So I’ve just had the pleasure of deploying Trend Deep Security via the Agent-less method, utilizing the NSX free license which allows guest introspection, but no other features.

Starting in NSX 6.2.3, the default license upon install will be NSX for vShield Endpoint. This license enables use of NSX for deploying and managing vShield Endpoint for anti-virus offload capability only, and has hard enforcement to restrict usage of VXLAN, firewall, and Edge services, by blocking host preparation and creation of NSX Edges.

The Issue

With the basic Deep Security License you get the following coverage;

  • Anti-Malware
  • Web Reputation Service

However upon deploying Trend and jumping through the various hoops. (flakey support for NSX free license). You will find that you have multiple errors showing against your VM’s.

Trend-Agentless-Issue-1

The Cause

After speaking with Trend, I received the following response, which seems kind of obvious; Continue reading Trend Deep Security – Agentless Deployment with NSX – Issues with Web Reputation Service →

veeam 2014 logo color tag

First look at Veeam 9.5 & Nimble Storage Integration – Part 2

Veeam, Storage, , , , ,

This is a continuation piece regarding the integration of Nimble Storage to the Veeam Backup & Replication software in the upcoming release 9.5.

Part 1

  • So what does the integration give us?
  • The test environment
  • Adding the Nimble Storage Array into Veeam
    • Configuration
    • Nimble Audit Logs

Part 2

  • Now we’ve added the Nimble Storage Array
  • What can we do with Snapshots?
    • Controlling Nimble Storage  snapshots and restoring files from the Veeam console
    • Backing up a Virtual Machine from a Nimble Snapshot
    • Backing up a Virtual machine to a Nimble Snapshot (Snapshot-only Job)
    • Replicating a Virtual Machine from a Nimble Snapshot
  • SureBackup from Nimble Snapshots

Following on from part one of this first look two part blog series, where we added the Nimble Storage Arrays into the Veeam software, we continue to see how this integration piece works.

Now we have added the Nimble Storage Array

So before we get started, we can now see the datastores of the Nimble Storage Array, and the snapshots of each datastore. In the second screenshot, we can see the enumeration of VMware virtual machines and which host they are were attached to.

Adding Nimble Storage to Veeam - Storage Infrastructure - Nimble Array and SnapshotsAdding Nimble Storage to Veeam - Storage Infrastructure - Nimble Array and Snapshots 02

Controlling Nimble Storage  snapshots

Continue reading First look at Veeam 9.5 & Nimble Storage Integration – Part 2 →

veeam 2014 logo color tag

First look at Veeam 9.5 & Nimble Storage Integration – Part 1

Storage, Veeam, , , ,

As a part of the Veeam Vanguard program, I have been given access to the beta version of Veeam 9.5. And in this blog post I will cover some of the integration components between Nimble Storage and Veeam, announced by Veeam back in April. If you have been following the Veeam forums, then you’ll know that there is a very active post where the forum users are all pitching in which storage vendor they think should be next to get integration.

Note: This blog post content is created from a beta version of Veeam 9.5, any features, dialog boxes, names and such are subject to change before the final public release.

What I’ll be covering in these series of blog posts;

Part 1

  • So what does the integration give us?
  • The test environment
  • Adding the Nimble Storage Array into Veeam
    • Configuration
    • Nimble Audit Logs

Part 2

  • Now we’ve added the Nimble Storage array
  • What can we do with Snapshots?
    • Controlling Nimble Storage  snapshots and restoring files from the Veeam console
    • Backing up a Virtual Machine from a Nimble Snapshot
    • Backing up a Virtual machine to a Nimble Snapshot
    • Replicating a Virtual Machine from a Nimble Snapshot
  • SureBackup from Nimble Snapshots
So what does the integration give us?

I think the below extract from this article by Clint Wyckoff sums it up best.

Veeam's advanced integration with Nimble Storage provides additional protection and recovery options that are not available without direct integration and joint development efforts that provide the ability to:

    - Schedule the creation of Nimble storage snapshots containing application-consistent VM images, and storage snapshot replication orchestration.

    - Restore from Nimble storage snapshots or their Replicated Copies (entire VM, guest files and application items)

    - Backup from Nimble storage snapshots or their Replicated Copies.

The only other company to have this kind of integration is NetApp, showing this high regards Nimble Storage are held in from Veeam. But also showing that Nimble Storage has been a dedicated partner working with Veeam over the past few years, and its paying off with this integration offering.

Veeam and Nimble Storage Integration - Feature comparison table

The test environment

Luckily for me, Veeam have produced a reference architecture diagram which pretty much describes the test environment used in this preview blog post. In this environment there will be no Tape nor cloud connect components.

Veeam-Nimble-Storage-Integration-Topology

Adding the Nimble Storage Array into Veeam 9.5

Continue reading First look at Veeam 9.5 & Nimble Storage Integration – Part 1 →