Tag Archives: Documentation

veeamon video camera

Video Blogs I appeared on at #VeeamON

General, Veeam, , , , , ,

Whilst attending VeeamON conference in New Orleans I had the chance to speak on two different video logs, three recordings.

  • Tim Smith – Tim’s Tech Thoughts
  • Dave Kawula MSDN – Channel9 page

First up Ransomware Talk with fellow Veeam Vanguards – Covering the big topic of the week ransomware, as the title states.

Second the first Channel 9 episode

Episode 64 – Interview with Dean Lewis at VeeamON 2017 – Covering what we are looking forward to at the VeeamON conference, the growth and important of Office365.

And then last, a follow up episode on MSDN Channel 9.

Episode 70 – Interview with Dean Lewis at VeeamON 2017 – another chat around Ransomware, Veeam VAO, the importance of documentation and finally things to think about when testing your DR environment and failover plans.

Regards

Dean


backup header

How to produce good documentation – Part 5 – Diagraming your (Veeam) Backups

General, , , , , , , ,

So it’s just been a little over a year since Part 4 of my how to document series was posted. I hoped to keep adding to the series, but at the same time, only do it when I felt I had relevant content to share. So this post is to show how I have documented some recent backup configurations. Note: I mainly work with Veeam, but hopefully this will give you idea’s of how to present the setup of your other backup software

Below are the previous posts;

The challenge

Note: The Visio file for these examples can be found at the end of the blog post.

Your backups evolve over time, as does your environment. Your backup schedules become more complex, and its hard to remember, what does what.

As past of my job, I setup backup solutions for customers, and then have the task of documenting how they are setup. I used to do this in a table format. It was quite simple

  • Backup/replication job name
    • Services backed up
    • Job settings
      • Storage/environment used

When you have a number of backup jobs, you have a lot of jobs and information to dig through. Its not user friendly.

Veeam backup job settings table 1 Veeam backup job settings table 2

So I re-visualised the way to present the data, I still have the detailed tables, however I also have three Visio diagrams

  • Backup Architecture setup
  • Backup and Replication jobs – Servers/services included
  • Backup and Replication job settings – high level

Continue reading How to produce good documentation – Part 5 – Diagraming your (Veeam) Backups →

read

And more blogs and sites I’ve been reading and sharing

General, Storage, VMware, , , , , , , , , , ,

A little bit of a longer one than usual, as I was part way through writing this the other month, then I got distracted with other blog posts.

Hope you find some of these useful.

Documentation

EtherealMinds Eleven Rules of Design Documentation – This is one the best articles I’ve read in a long time, and reiterates the fact you need to keep it simple and a diagram replaces a thousand words.

Microsoft Continue reading And more blogs and sites I’ve been reading and sharing →

Snagit color 300dpi

Screen Capture Software of Choice – SnagIT

General, Windows, , ,

Everyone has their favourites, and mine is SnagIT. It’s not free, but it has such a great interface, I can’t face using anything else.

I use it for capturing shots of the environment, as it is now, and after I’ve changed it, and then annotating them with arrows and text.

The end result is either the shots are used for my client project documentation, or here on in the blog posts.

To show off some of the features, I am going to try to use SnagIT to capture itself.

SnagIT – The capturing side

So SnagIT is broke down into two parts, the capture side, and the editing of the captures.

We can do static images and video, with an in-depth editing of the static side, but little options for video.

So here’s the capture side, which is based around the use of profiles.

SnagIT-1

Continue reading Screen Capture Software of Choice – SnagIT →

network

How to produce good documentation – Part 3 – Network IP’s & Interfaces

Networking, General, , , , , , , ,

The time is here, lets look at starting to document that network of yours.

Now lets look at the other side of the coin.

Click the above for the templates used in this diagram

SwitchPort Diagrams/Tables

So it’s not all creative visio diagrams, one of the best pieces of documentation I find that I produce is actually a switchport diagram.

Using Excel to diagram out a given number of switches, mapping the interfaces to the hosts or devices in which is connected to them.

Continue reading How to produce good documentation – Part 3 – Network IP’s & Interfaces →