Interview – Matt Crape – Community Blogger & IT Manager

January 16, 2017Generalblogger, Community, Interview, IT manager, Matt CrapeDean

In the second interview, Matt Crape of 42u.ca a blog around everything IT, is the person answering the questions. I’d personally been following Matt after his website went live and had the fortune of spending some time with him in London as part of the Veeam Vanguard program.

(Matt is the guy on the right, seen here undertaking a vBrownbag Meet the Expert chat)

So Matt, you’ve made a big impact on the community in a short time, congrats, but tell us a bit about yourself?

Thanks for that compliment 🙂 I’m an IT Manager by day at an SMB in the Kitchener-Waterloo region, in Canada. I do all the typical managerial stuff like budgets, handling vendor contracts, personnel, etc. But, I also try to stay somewhat technical. I still find myself routinely tinkering around in vSphere, maybe some networking, or just looking at things from a higher level (e.g. reviewing backup and disaster recovery plans).

Outside of my day job, I’m also a first-time vExpert for 2016, a Veeam Vanguard, and I run my own local Veeam User Group. I’m somewhat active on Twitter (@MattThatITGuy), and when 140 characters aren’t enough, you can find a selection of my ramblings at 42u.ca.

What is the biggest challenge you have in your job day to day at the moment?

Continue reading Interview – Matt Crape – Community Blogger & IT Manager →

Interview – Joe Baguley, VMware EMEA CTO

December 24, 2016GeneralEducation, Hiring, Industry, Interview, Joe Baguley, VMwareDean

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.

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 →

HP FlexFabric Switches – AirFlow direction is not prefered

December 10, 2016HP, Networking5700, 5900, Airflow, Direction, FlexFabric, HPE, PreferredDean

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 →

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

September 12, 2016Uncategorized, VMware9.6, Agentless, Deep Security, Multiple errors, NSX, Trend Micro, VMwareDean

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.

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 →

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

July 1, 2016Veeam, Storage9.5, Backup from snapshot, Integration, Nimble Storage, Snapshot-only Job, VeeamDean

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.

Controlling Nimble Storage snapshots

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

vEducate.co.uk

Fixing issues and blogging