Long time no hear, but I’m back now!

First, I’m sorry that you didn’t hear much from me as far as it was related to blogging. My start in 2019 was heavy. In late 2018 I was diagnosed with an aneurysm in the ascending aorta, this as a result of a congenital heart valve defect. That’s probably not the best news you wanna hear, but I’m grateful that this aneurysm was detected. I don’t imagine what could’ve happened if not… In January I got back to work after holidays but only for two weeks. The date for the surgery was already set and I went to the hospital. The surgeons and their team, the whole hospital crew, they all did an awesome job. My heart valve and the aneurysm were fixed properly. For the aneurysm, I’ve got now some kind of Gore-Tex hose (at least the doctors call it that) and my valve was repaired, not replacement parts needed.

Climbing mountains

After a week in the hospital, I went back home but only to repack my clothes and stuff I need for rehabilitation treatment. Then I went into the Swiss mountain area for the next three weeks to learn some things, for cardio training, and to recover from surgery. We had great weather up in the mountains, except for two or three days. We did cycling, hiking, sports, and fitness. And I really didn’t expect that my body is doing so well so shortly after the surgery. I was astonished. To be honest, I’m young and I’m not medically biased. I did all the necessary prechecks in late 2018 to make sure that there are no surprises. And there weren’t any, thank god.

Currently, I’m at home for the last few weeks of recovery before I’m going back to work, but also with cardio training every day (hiking or cycling on the home trainer). I can’t just Netflix and chill. It would get boring at some time. And I’ve got some goals for this year. As you may know, I’m a firefighter in my hometown. I can’t attend their training yet because my sternum (breastbone) was opened for the surgery and that has to heal first. As soon as this is fine, I’m allowed to do sports and more training. I want to do a 10k run with a smile on my face when I arrive, I want to train my strength and endurance. And I want to be 100% approved so that I can get back to my fire buddies for training, exercises and (hope not) firefighting operations.

I’m reading a lot to keep my brain cells active, and I’m currently building a huge LEGO project. It contains 7541 parts. It is the LEGO Star Wars Millennium Falcon from the Ultimate Collector Series.

Thank you

I’m very grateful to my girlfriend. She supports me in every way possible, and she also motivates me when I’m not in the mood of training. She had a hard time when I wasn’t at home for such a long time, even when I was allowed to stay home at the weekend, not for holidays, but for “supervised training at home” as the rehabilitation experts called it. A big thank you also goes to my parents, which supported me also when needed, and they did some things I didn’t know or expect. Some things I don’t shout from the housetops. I let my closest friends know that I will go for heart surgery and they all wished me good luck. The day after the surgery I was letting them know that I’m still here and that I’m fine. I also like to thank my boss and my employer. It isn’t easy with a small team to schedule everything properly if one is not there.

More good news

But hey, there is some more good news! A few weeks ago I received a mail from Veeam that I was accepted for another year as a Veeam Vanguard! That’s not a bad way to start the year! And last week I received the notification that also VMware want’s to keep me as a vExpert for one year more! Awesome! If we would talk about Soccer then this would be a Hattrick! Three years in a row I was awarded. Thank you all for your support and your outstanding community programs. Being awarded as a Veeam Vanguard and VMware vExpert is a great honor. It is not a certification exam but an award. It shows that you’re active in the community, helping others, doing things others don’t do, blogging, being active on social media. It’s all about the community.

Happy New Year 2019

The year 2018 was a year full of premieres for me and some major changes in my life. I switched my job, met my girlfriend, got a new home and cats. And in the end, all went fine and I don’t regret it for a minute that I have taken these steps. After all, some of my wishes came true, and some are still something for the next year, like upgrading my home lab and some certifications.

I hope that your wishes come true and that you find the courage to take new steps. For 2019, I wish you and your loved ones all the best. And I hope to see you soon!

Happy New Year!

Master Veeam Tricks Volume 1

If you are interested in learning more about Veeam Software from the Masters your journey has ended. This compilation of Master Tricks for Installation, Configuration and Troubleshooting will be worth your time.

Get this book now, for free if you like, or spend any amount you like if you think it’s worth it. And trust me, it is!

We’ve published this book at Leanpub. One of the major advantages is that we can update the book as soon as something should change. Like for example, if there is a new update for Veeam Backup & Replication, and something looks a little different than it did before. Or if there are new features. You can always get the most recent version of this book in a digital version. To mention, it’s not a hard copy, not a printed book. It’s really a digital document. But you can read it on any device, at any place, at any time.

Master Veeam Tricks – Volume 1

The Book

 This book is a compilation of Veeam topics written by experts from around the world.  Topics include troubleshooting, installation, vendor configurations (Nutanix, Amazon Web Services, StarWind, Microsoft Azure, and NetApp), and much more. The authors in the list are some of the most widely respected Virtualization professionals in their industry and the fact that they all came together for a book like this is impressive.  Each of them is a member of the prestigious Veeam Vanguard program that has a mere 50+ members worldwide.

What you will learn by reading this book is some of their Master Tricks for working with Veeam Software.  We know that you will enjoy the book and be left wondering “When is Volume 2 or 3 coming out”.

The Authors

 Dave Kawula, Cristal Kawula, Markus Kraus, Didier Van Hoye, Karl Widmer, Craig Dalrymple, Mike Conjoice, Eugene Kashperovetskyi, and Ian Sanderson

The idea was born…

The idea of writing a book was born during our Veeam Vanguard Summit 2018 in Prague. We’re proud to have two famous community experts in our rows. Dave and Cristal Kawula taught us how to write stuff, tools you could use, for example, tools for grammar, online platforms for publishing etc. It was a great session they presented us with so many interesting things and cool tips!

After the official part of their session, Dave and Cristal announced that they would like to write a book about mastering Veeam, with tips and tricks from the experts. And with experts, they meant us, the Veeam Vanguards. What an announcement! The people were surprised by that, that there would be the opportunity to work together on a book! So all the Vanguards did their best and brought in their knowledge for that book.

How we did that

The idea was that Vanguards, who would like to participate in this book, will bring in their knowledge and share it with the people. As this was a fast-publishing book project there was no time to write new articles and chapters. The Vanguards took their great blog posts and brought them in a form which then was used by Dave and Cristal for the chapters in the book. I was delighted when Dave and Cristal accepted my two articles about using Starwind VTL with AWS S3 in Veeam and Configure Azure Direct Restore with Veeam 9.5. There are so many great articles in this book, from PowerShell through troubleshooting to installation tips and tricks.

What’s next?

There is at least a chance of Volume 2 or even Volume 3 of this book. With the update 4 for Veeam Backup & Replication, there are also some cool new features. And why not have them all in a book for reference?

Stay tuned!

Veeam Vanguard Summit 2018 in Prague – Day 3 Summary

The last day of our Vanguard Summit in Prague is now in the history books. Another half day we had the pleasure to listen to several speakers and had many great discussions about products and features and where some when the cat bites his tail.

Day 3 Summary

How to become a community rockstar?

Christal and Dave Kawula from #TeamKawula are now on the stage, talking about how to become a community rockstar! Dave and Christal are the founders of the MVPDays which is the best IT conference by the IT community for the IT community. The MVPDays are currently an US-only event, but it’s planned to hold that conference worldwide. Looking forward to that! Both have written several books about things like PowerShell and Windows Server and are active in the IT community. With Dave, the Vanguards have a top speaker whose sessions are famous and were well awarded!

The title is king!

Christal and Dave showed us some stuff about getting motivated and staying motivated to do actual speaker sessions at a conference. First, the title is king! The event committee doesn’t have much time to evaluate the possible speakers and their sessions. If they see a good title, chances are high that they read also the abstract of your session, which makes it in turn more likely that they accept your session. Otherwise, you’re out already at that stage shortly after you’ve submitted your session for review.

Submit your session(s)

You should also submit more than one session. One point is that there are so many submissions, and if the committee is seeing several submissions with similar titles, your good title is more likely the one they will choose. And it is often the fact that event organizers are not allowed to have a single-session speaker. The more sessions you submit, the better your chances are to be selected.

Writing

Talking about your public persona/profile. Enhance it. A small website with all the relevant information about you isn’t that much effort. Conference committees often do research on speakers they don’t know before they finally accept them.

If you’re blogging, then you probably should think about using Grammarly. Especially if you’re not a native English speaking person, but you’re writing in English, it’s good to have a proper grammar. It looks more professional and it makes it easier to read and understand your blog posts. It’s free and you can even install it as a plugin for Google Chrome if you’re blogging with that browser. Why not giving it a chance?

Publish a book / several books!

Yes, that’s also a pro-tip! Write books! At least if you ever wrote a book, you know that it is a PITA. It takes a long time, you’re constantly in contact with the publisher and several other people, you send gazillions of drafts until they are happy. And probably the book is already outdated after release because the technology you were writing about was evolving during the write-up.

A great platform to publish your books is Leanpub. You can publish your book there even if it’s not yet finished! They only publish it as PDF documents. But that has one big advantage: you can constantly update your books and provide actual content to your readers! How cool is that?

if you fancy for the printed version of your book(s), then Amazon has a great service for you. With Amazon Create Space you can upload your book and let them print it for a bargain! And it is always a good idea to have some examples of your book with you if you’re attending a conference (where you probably also have a session…).

Create a good PowerPoint slide deck!

If you ever made a PowerPoint slide deck then you know that this can be frustrating sometimes. You’ve got the content ready (at least some), but you don’t know how to design the slides. The new PowerPoint version has some artificial intelligence (AI) in it which could help you with the design. This new feature is called PowerPoint Design Ideas.

PowerPoint Designer detects pictures, charts, or tables on your slides and gives you several suggestions for arranging them in a cohesive, attractive layout. The designer can also turn text such as lists, processes, or timelines into an easily readable SmartArt graphic. PowerPoint Designer watches also for key terms and concepts that it has illustrations for, and it shows you those illustrations in various layouts. The Illustrations are from the Office 365 icons library.

Now go out and become a community rockstar!

That’s it, folks!

That‘s it, folks! we‘re done! A huge thank you to and his team for the organization of that awesome . A huge thank you as well to for your engagement with the community.

And if you like to find out more about us and the Vanguard Summit 2018 in Prague, then just click the hashtags above to gather all the stuff on Twitter.

There is more to read about the Vanguard Summit:

Veeam Vanguard Summit 2018 in Prague – Day 2 Summary

With Day 2 there’s another day into the history books. It was another awesome day with so much interesting information!

First I have to thank Craig Dalrymple and his friends for yesterday evening. He organized a good tasting of different whiskeys and other good spirits. Thank you, Craig!

Day 2 Summary

Staged Restore

Michael Cade and Dima P. are on the stage today morning to explain us some stuff about Staged Restore within Veeam Backup & Replication.

One use case of staged restore and probably one of the main reason is GDPR and Article 17 (right to erasure). “The Right to be forgotten” is one of many requirements of GDRP. That makes the backup and restore a little more complex. During a staged restore, the VM to be restored will be run directly from the backup files in an isolated data lab, where you can actually make changes to the guest OS or applications before the VM finally will be restored into the production environment. The backup files will remain untouched. The deletions necessary are done by an easy PowerShell script. You can delete users from Active Directory, delete Exchange mailboxes etc. You can develop scripts for each of your application.

The Vanguards had interesting ideas and thoughts on how to do the restore and delete things which should be forgotten, and how you could or should implement that.

When you have to do a Staged Restore, your VM will be run directly from backup files in an isolated data lab, so you can make changes to the guest OS or the application before you restore the data.

Veeam ONE

Kirsten Stoner and Nikita Shestakov are now on the stage to present us some news from the Veeam ONE coming up with update 4.

Veeam ONE has evolved in the most recent update. It’s not only a monitoring and reporting tool anymore. It will be also your management tool for Veeam backups. Depending on the reports of your VMs you can take automatic actions. For example, if Veeam ONE is reporting that some of your VMs are currently not protected by any backup job, you can define actions what you would like to do with these VMs. You can, for example, take the unprotected VMs and put them into an already existing backup job. How cool is that?

All the things which can run or happen automatically can also set to be approved. If you’re uncomfortable with automatic actions, you can set them all to be approved manually.

In Veeam ONE there are lots of improvements! Let’s just have a look at some of them here:

 

 

 

Veeam ONE doesn’t have just some automatic actions for your VMs which aren’t protected by any backup job. There’s also a new feature called…

Veeam Intelligent Diagnostics

This feature will help you find issues in your Veeam Backup & Replication environment and it will help you solve these issues.

Veeam Intelligent Diagnostics searches your Veeam logs for issues, like known exceptions and error messages. It will use signatures from Veeam to detect problems in your backup environment.

You install Veeam ONE on a service and one (or more) Veeam ONE agent on your backup servers.

Veeam ONE will then go and search your logs for issues, and it will try to compare issues found in your logs with the Veeam Knowledgebase upon the signatures delivered by Veeam. The signatures are downloaded automatically from Veeam. In case you don’t like an automatic download of signatures from Veeam, you can do that also manually.

For all of you waiting for some AWESOME news, I have to say that I’m sorry. That’s completely RED content here. I’d like to thank to [redacted] for the great insights into [redacted] and for an interesting outlook into [redactedaswell].

But let’s move on here…

Veeam Agent Management

Dima P. is now on the stage and he will tell us some stuff about the Veeam Agent management.

All newer Windows Server versions are supported, including Windows Server 2019 and Windows Server Core. Also included is the support of Windows 10 October Update. Microsoft Exchange DAG’s are supported as well.

The rescan logic has been reworked. Test credentials for individual computers protection groups are available. You can get granular email reports. Also, granular network throttling options are available. You will have control over FLR functionality. There will be a “Task-based” view. You can now also easily uninstall the installer service with a simple click on a button. It is no longer needed that the Agent “sees” the VBR server through DNS resolution. The reboot option is now hidden.

Managed by Agent

That means that the backup is completely managed by the agent. Schedules, repositories etc. are all managed by the agent, and not by the VBR console. The agent supports wildcard and system environment variables for the backup source. Also supported is now the functions of “Compact” and “Health Check”. Deleted Agent retention is now also a feature which helps you to clean up the backups. With granular email reports, you can get reports from your backup runs depending on the settings you’d like to have, for example only a mail when the jobs run into an error. The managed Agent can also grab the configuration from the VBR backup server before it was pushed from the server to the agent.

Managed by Backup Server

In addition to the above-mentioned features, Microsoft Exchange DAG support (including IP-less DAG’s) is now supported. You will get a single process manager for all agent tasks. There is now also the secondary target options for a job.

The Veeam Agent has added support for PowerShell and RESTful API. Also, it’s possible to use Archive Tiers, to do a Secure Restore and export the backup to VBK.

That’s it folks for today!

There is more to read about the Vanguard Summit: