The Veeam hardened repository at the TechNine User group

Posted on March 9, 2021 by workinghardinit

The Veeam hardened repository

Just a quick blog post to let you all know I will be presenting on the Veeam hardened repository in Veeam Backup & Replication v11. I will do this at the TechNine user group meeting on March the 23rd. It is the world premiere of this presentation, so grab your seat and be able to tell your grandchildren you were there!

There is a tremendous amount of new and enhanced capabilities in v11, both small and big ones. But this one stands out because no matter who you are, a small business or a fortune 500 global enterprise, we are all at risk from ransomware and wipers. And guess what, the Veeam hardened repository gives you yet another option in your arsenal to make sure you can recover from such a disaster.

And end to end solution

In VBR v11 Veeam now offers complete end to end immutability for all your backup copies if you desire to do so. You can bring your own storage and so it leaves you the flexibility and freedom of choice you are used to with Veeam.

Like many of you, I like to stay up to date with new technology and implement it to solve real-world problems. Often coo tech is very forward-looking and foundational. This translates into “it is very early days yet”, “the code exists but you cannot use it yet”.

Well, this is not something that shows you the promises of tomorrow and then leaves you to go back empty-handed. That always feels like a bit of a letdown when you are dealing with your real-world, real-time issues. The Veeam hardened repository is available now to help address the challenges you are facing today! It doesn’t get any better than that. I will show you the cookie, you can have the cookie and you can eat the cookie! Want to play with it yourself? You can, right now with the free community edition of Veeam Backup & Replication v11!

Register!

What do you need to do? Register of cause! Do it right here. Make sure you show up in time and stay around for an interactive discussion afterward. We start at 20:00 on March 23rd, 2021. And yes it is all virtual as we plan to get rid of the coronavirus first and then get together in real life again.

I will explain why you need it, how to set it up, and I will dive under the hood to show how it gets the job done. You can now protect your hypervisor and supported backups end to end with immutability in the hardened repository, giving you the extra security and protection you might need to recovery from a ransomware event. There will be demos! You can read up on it here but I will go behind the scenes with you!

I am a Veeam Vanguard 2021

Posted on February 26, 2021 by workinghardinit

I am a Veeam Vanguard 2021

This afternoon I received an email notifying me that my 2021 Veeam Vanguard Renewal Nomination has been approved! That means I am a Veeam Vanguard 2021!

The Veeam Vanguard Program

You can read all about the Veeam Vanguard Program here. It is Veaam’s top-level influencer community. We share our insights, provide feedback, and help each other, as well as Veeam, succeed. The Veeam Vanguards are a varied group of people and combine a wide range of expertise in different verticals and in different disciplines. We all contribute to the community at large in different ways. What unites us is that we all share a passion for our industry and show technical thought leadership for the different technical communities in which Veeam exists.

Now I would not call myself a technical thought leader but I do know that via this program I get to stand on the shoulders of giants. Doing so gives me a majestic view over this industry segment, a view I would not have without it.

Thank you!

This is a very nice way to head into the weekend. I am both honored and proud to be a Veeam Vanguard. Veeam as a company has won my respect many years ago and it has only grown. They focus on customer value, deliver an excellent high-quality product, offer top-notch support, and finally offer great tools to the community. I can honestly say that I enjoy working with their products as well as the company and the individuals I know at Veeam.

I am looking forward to another year in this program and the opportunities this brings to us all for sharing, learning, and growing.

Thank you, we’ll make 2021 a good community year!

Extra Evening December MC2MC

Posted on December 11, 2020 by workinghardinit

Extra Evening December MC2MC

I have the distinct pleasure of having been invited to speak at the Extra Evening December MC2MC user group. It is on the 17th of December 2020. This will be my final live and virtual event for the year 2020!

For the occasion I will be giving a talk to introduce you to Azure Virtual WAN and why this is really for everyone. You might not think so yet, but I am sure you will see where the future of Azure networking is heading, and why.

Register, it is free!

So, join us. The event is free, but for your time, but we hope you learn something. You can register on the MC2MC website for this event

My talk starts at 18:45 and after that session they have some more great sessions by fellow MVPs lined up.

Agenda

18h30 – 18u45: Welcome

Azure Virtual WAN for everyone

18h45 – 19u30: Azure Virtual WAN for everyone by Didier Van Hoye (Microsoft MVP Cloud and Datacenter Management).
We’ll look at what Azure Virtual WAN is, why you would use it, and what its “state of the union” is at the time of speaking. We will look at why small and medium enterprises should also adopt it as Azure Virtual WAN is for everyone, not just the global fortune 500. We’ll touch on how to use Azure Firewall Manager with Azure Virtual WAN HUB and show you the custom route tables along with some examples.

Offensive Azure Security

19h30 – 20h15: Offensive Azure Security by Sergey Chubarov (Microsoft MVP Azure).
These days, working with a cloud platform is already commonplace. Companies choose Microsoft Azure for a number of benefits, including security. But there are some responsibility on the customer side and that’s may become weakest link in the chain.
A demo-based session shows attacks on the weakest link.
Penetration testers and red teamers will find steps that can be used in their assessments, defenders will get ideas on what should be protected.
The session includes:
– Bypassing authentication & MFA
– Getting control over Compute
– Extracting secrets
– Pentesting Azure AD Connect

20h15 – 20h25: Break

I know what you did last project

20h25 – 21h15: I know what you did last project (common mistakes we make in Azure) by Mustafa Toroman (Microsoft MVP Azure).
One of major benefits of Microsoft Azure is vast number of services we can choose from. But huge amount of services can create problems like what service to choose in specific situations or what to avoid. Do we select IaaS or PaaS? Or maybe go serverless? What type of database do we choose? Azure SQL, Managed Instance, or something else? And when to go with Azure Cosmos DB?
Based on years of experience and hundreds of projects, this session shares do’s and don’ts when designing your solutions in Azure. Avoid usual traps and create rock solid applications in cloud!

Azure DevOps for Ops without Dev

21h15 – 22h00: Azure DevOps for Ops without Dev by Vukašin Terzić (Microsoft MVP Azure).
DevOps philosophy doesn’t really apply to non-developers who are not creating and releasing new versions of applications every week. Or does it? In this session, I will talk about how to leverage Azure DevOps tools to boost your productivity and project management and how to save and execute your scripts and ARM templates.

22h00 – 23h00: Social BYOB (Bring-Your-Own-Beer) teams meeting

I hope to see you there and I wish you all a festive period to end 2020 and start 2021.

Veeam Community Editions and the EULA

Posted on September 3, 2020 by workinghardinit

Veeam Community Editions and the EULA

Boring as it might be, reading your End User License Agreements can be useful. That is no different for the Veeam Community Editions and the Veeam EULA. The EULA came up recently when discussing Veeam services an IT Service business can offer to its clients.

For example, take a look at the Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition. See the Hitchhikers Guide to Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition for more information. It is a great resource and was written by Kirsten Stoner.

Veeam Community Editions and the EULA — The Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition

It includes support for up to 10 Instance licenses and allows you to protect any combination of physical machines, virtual machines, and cloud workloads for free. You get the standard edition backup functionality. Veeam also offers community editions of Veeam ONE™ and Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365. Cool!

The value for you

This is an awesome offering. It helps people with small environments and small budgets out big time. They get top-notch data protection for free, Not just that, they get all the goodness of the well known Veeam data portability, ease of recovery, reliability, and support. Then there are the forums, where you’ll find many helpful and skilled eyes. It is a very active community.

The value for Veeam

First of all, Veeam is smart. They put their products into as many hands as possible. When that happens people get to use, learn, know, and love the products. That leads to sales when 10 instances just don’t cut it anymore. It also leads to a lot of feedback and insights. A lot of the people using it are early adopters and IT professionals. This means that they use the products and if they find issues Veeam gets telemetry and early insights to potential bugs. This helps them deal with then proactively before the big enterprises upgrade as that usually takes a bit longer.

Secondly, Veeam is community-minded. And that is not just lip service, they act on it. I know this first hand and you will to when you experience it. The community editions of their products are just one example of that.

As mentioned, you get support. Within reason, just like with paid support the Veeam support engineers will not do implementations for you. So just doing “click, click next” like a baffling buffoon won’t get you far. Support is not meant to replace your own skills or provide free IT designs and implementations. That work is for you. The support with the community editions is about finding and fixing issues with the product. That’s very valuable for Veeam as early adopters who run into issues help surface those in time to address for the slower moving customers.

Do It Yourself

The Veeam Community Editions EULA boils down to the fact that it is a Do It Yourself (DIY) arrangement.

As a hobbyist, student, enthusiast, employee who wants to learn more about Veeam products or leverage them to protect a company or non-profit workloads you can do that up to the 10 free licenses. It is perfectly legal to do so. But as it is DIY, you cannot hire someone to do this for you. Likewise as an IT consultant. contractor or freelancer, solo or with a company, you cannot offer paid services around Community Edition. For that, they have different licensing options. You can read up on this in the EULA.

Conclusion

The rules around Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition are simple. As an end-user (hobbyist, employee, business) you get most of the famous Veeam capabilities and benefits for free up to 10 instances. Yes, you can use this in production and you get free basic support from Veeam. Then there are the forums, which offer a wealth of insights and where many helpful eyes can assist you. For this to be legal you have to implement and maintain the community editions yourself. You cannot hire people to do it for you. As an IT service company, no matter what the size or nature, you cannot offer commercial services and build a business model around the Veeam Community Editions. That’s what the commercial versions and partnerships are for. As far as EULA’s go, that is crystal clear.

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My view on IT from the trenches

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The Veeam hardened repository at the TechNine User group