Anthony Spiteri kicks off the third and last day of the Vanguard Summit in Prague with CDP. It’s all about the filter driver. There are many competitors out which put their CDP solution out, but some of them still have issues sometimes, like pink screens of death when on the ESXi hosts. Veeam worked closely with VMware to get the stuff done right. Because when you’re going into the I/O stack with a data protection solution, you have to be sure what you’re doing.
CDP is a VMware-only available solution, there is no CDP for Hyper-V, at least not currently. That might change, but not soon. In Veeam you can leverage the usage of VMware tags for your data protection. You create backup jobs that will use these tags, and depending on these tags you’re able to protect your workloads with the needed RPO / RTO.
When you set up DCP in Veeam, Veeam will install the filter driver on a cluster base. You can’t install it on the host manually, Veeam does that for you but on a cluster base. With Veeam CDP there is an RPO as low as 15 seconds possible. For a restore, you can go back to either a restore point or go back with a slider to a specific point in time.
Write for us
Ilya Afanasyev is telling us more about the Veeam engagement in regards to a program for writers. It is called “Write for us” and it is not restricted to Vanguards only but all other tech people can take part in it. You chose a topic and apply for the program. Veeam will approve the topic (or maybe not) and then it’s your turn to create a draft. If the draft gets approved, your blog post gets published on the Veeam blog and you’ll get a revenue. A blog post brings you 200$ and a white paper is worth about 1000$.
If you’re interested to write some cool blog posts or even a white paper, then visit the “Write for us” program on the Veeam website for more information.
David Hill introduces us to the topic of containers, and how Veeam can handle that. Containers make it possible to use less different operating systems. Today you’ve got patches and updates to install on your operating system, no matter if it’s Linux or Windows. With containers, it becomes a lot simpler.
It’s all about buzzwords. Being or getting cloud-ready, being cloud-native, and being it now. A few years ago it was the same with the cloud. Cloud did help to solve some problems, but some problems are still the same, just on a bigger scale. The same for containers. They will help to solve some problems, but some problems will still be problems, just on a different scale.
David explained some things about the statefulness of a container. Containers are good when they are used for what they are thought. But having just any kind of application containerized doesn’t work. When an application fails, and the container management spins up a new instance of that application, the application itself doesn’t know what happened. If you click save in WordPress for example, WordPress doesn’t know what you did before when the application crashed in the backend.
Cloud Tier
Andrew Zhelezko and David Hill are talking about the Cloud Tier. In Veeam, you can set up and define multiple types of backup repositories. You can have local disk storage, NAS, deduplication appliances, etc. You can even combine them in a Scale-out Repository. Now with the latest VBR version you’re even able to scale-out to the cloud with the usage of object storage. You’ve got nearly unlimited storage available in the cloud to store your backups. And in Veeam, that’s all policy-driven. Depending on your policy, Veeam does the automatic cloud-tiering to the object storage of your choice. And you can put that object storage also into a Scale-out Repository as a capacity tier.
That means that you might have some backups local, maybe because of compliance reasons or to meet a certain RPO/RTO time. Everything which is older than a specified time will be tiered out to the object storage.
A new feature is the Immutability of your backup files in the object storage. That means that you can lock the backups which are moved out to the cloud. That gives you protection against rogue admins or to have a certain level of compliance. No one can delete your backup files on the cloud storage. You can set the lock for a specific time, and during this time the backup files can’t be deleted. These settings have to be set on a specific S3 bucket.
Nikola Pejkova and Rick Vanover welcome all new and renewed Vanguards here at Prague. As we know it from last year, and maybe also from other conferences, there are the famous traffic light signals. In the following days we will see and hear much of green, yellow and red stuff, which means that they are free to publish, embargoed (publish it somewhen) or even under NDA (don’t even think to publish it or talk about it).
Rick and Nikola explained some new things about the Vanguard program to us. Veeam likes to have more engagement with the Vanguards. There will be more recap movies like they did at VeeamON, helping to build up the profile of a Vanguard, not promoting Veeam especially. Rick guides us through the agenda. There are two rooms this year, with even more sessions for all kinds of tastes of technology and interests. For the official Vanguard Dinner on Tuesday we will have our own Veeam shuttles from the hotel to the venue and back. Awesome!
Rick shares some more program updates and priorities. Such an event, and also the Vanguard program is a great opportunity to get more information directly from the source. As a Vanguard, you’re also able to give your feedback directly to the responsible persons, like feedback for beta versions, or the program itself. These persons can push it into the right channels to make it probably happen.
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.
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.
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.
