TechNine (https://www.technine.be/) is organizing its first user group event of 2020 on Tuesday 3 March. The TechNine March Updates for IT Pro’s. This is just a quick blog post to invite all who are in our neck of the woods to join us. It is hosted by the Sentia Group in Lochristi.
Content
There are 3 sessions.The first session, Micha Wets – Enterprise Mobility MVP, introduces us all to Azure Policy Guest Configurations. What can this do today and what does it mean for Windows GPO configurations in the long run? Can they co-exist? Come find out!
Microsoft launched the new EDGE chromium-based browser. Erik Moreau – Windows Insider MVP will deliver his insights about this great new browser in the second session. I hope he has some good news about one of my main complaints about it. What is that? Attend and you’ll find out.
The 3rd session is still a mystery … TechNine likes to have a last moment surprise.
Practicalities
Schedule
18h00: Welcome & Food
18h30: Azure Policy Guest Configurations: The end of Windows GPO? – Micha Wets
19h15: The New Edge – Erik Moreau
20h00: Break
20h15: To be announced, stay tuned!
21h00: Networking and Questions
21h30: End
When: Tuesday, March 3rd, 18:00 sharp
Location: Sentia, Denen 157, 9080 Lochristi, Belgium
This is just a quick blog post to let you know the Hyper-V Amigos have released 2 webcasts recently. These are Hyper-V Amigos Showcast Episode 20 and 21. You will find a link to the videos and a description of the content below.
Hyper-V Amigos Showcast – Episode 20
In episode 20 of the Hyper-V Amigo ShowCast, we continue our journey in the different ways in which we can use storage spaces in backup targets. In our previous “Hyper-V Amigos ShowCast (Episode 19)– Windows Server 2019 as Veeam Backup Target Part I” we looked at stand-alone or member servers with Storage Spaces. With both direct-attached storage and SMB files shares as backup targets. We also played with Multi Resilient Volumes.
For this webcast, we have one 2 node S2D cluster set up for the Hyper-V workload (Azure Stack HCI). On a second 2 node S2D cluster, we host 2 SOFS file shares. Each on their own CSV LUN. SOFS on S2D is supported for backups and archival workloads. And as it is SMB3 and we have RDMA capable NICs we can leverage RDMA (RoCE, Mellanox ConnectX-5) to benefit from CPU offloading and superb throughput at ultra-low latency.
The General Purpose File Server (GPFS role) is not supported on S2D for now. You can use GPFS with shared storage and in combination with continuous availability. This performs well as a high available backup target as well. The benefit here is that this is cost-effective (Windows Server Standard licenses will do) and you get to use the shared storage of your choice. But in this show cast, we focus on the S2D scenario and we didn’t build a non-supported scenario.
You would normally expect to notice the performance impact of continuous availability when you compare the speeds with the previous episode where we used a non-high available file share (no continuous availability possible). But we have better storage in the lab for this test, the source system is usually the bottleneck and as such our results were pretty awesome.
The lab has 4 Tarox server nodes with a mix of Intel Optane DC Memory (Persistent Memory or Storage Class Memory), Intel NVMe and Intel SSD disks. For the networking, we leverage Mellanox ConnectX-5 100Gbps NICs and SN2100 100Gbps switches. Hence we both had a grin on our face just prepping this lab.
As a side note, the performance impact of continuous availability and write-through is expected. I have written about it before here. The reason why you might contemplate to use it. Next to a requirement for high availability, is due to the small but realistic data corruption risk you have with not continuously available SMB shares. The reason is that they do not provide write-through for guaranteed data persistence.
We also demonstrate the “Instant Recovery” capability of Veeam to make workloads available fast and point out the benefits.
Hyper-V Amigos Showcast – Episode 21
In episode 21 we are diving into leveraging the Veeam Agent for Windows integrated with Veeam Backup & Replication (v10 RC1) to protect our physical S2D nodes. For shops that don’t have an automated cluster node build processes set up or rely on external help to come in and do it this can be a huge time saver.
We walk through the entire process and end up doing a bare metal recovery of one of the S2D nodes. The steps include:
Setting up an Active Directory protection group for our S2D cluster.
Creating a backup job for a Windows Server, where we select failover cluster as type (Which has only the “Managed by Backup Server” as the mode).
We run a backup
After that, we create the Veeam Agent Recovery Media (the most finicky part)
Finally, we restore one of the S2D hosts completely using the bare metal recovery option
Some more information
Now we had some issues in the lab one of them suffering to a BSOD on the laptop used to make the recording and being a bit too impatient when booting from the ISO over a BMC virtual CD/DVD. Hence we had to glue some parts together and fast forward through the boring bits. We do appreciate that watching a system bot for 10 minutes doesn’t make for good infotainment. Other than that, it went fine and we were able to demonstrate the process from the beginning to the end.
As is the case with any process you should test and experiment to make sure you are familiar with the process. That makes it all a little easier and hurt a little less when the day comes you have to do it for real.
We hope the show cast helps you look into some of the capabilities and options you have with Veeam in regards to protecting any workloads. Long gone are the days that Veeam was only about protecting virtual Machines. Veeam is about protecting data where ever it lives. In VMs, physical servers, workstations, PCs, laptop, on-prem, in the cloud and Office 365. On top of that, you can restore it where ever you want to avoid lock-in and costly migration projects and tools. Check it out.
Conclusion
We will be doing more web casts on Veeam Backup & Replication v10 in 2020 as it will be generally available in Q1 as far I can guess.
But with Hyper-V Amigos Showcast Episode 20 and 21, that’s it for 2019. Enjoy the holidays during this festive season. The Hyper-V Amigos wish you a Merry X-Mas and a very happy New Year in 2020!
Are you are working with Veeam software solutions? Are you passionate about sharing your experiences, knowledge, and insights? If so, you might want to consider a nomination for the Veeam Vanguard program. If you are already a Veeam Vanguard I’m pretty sure you already know submissions for Veeam Vanguard Renewals and Nominations 2020 are open.
Veeam Vanguard Renewals and Nominations
As we are nearing the end of 2019 Veeeam has opened the Veeam Vanguard Renewals and Nominations for 2020.
Describing the Veeam Vanguard program is not easily done. But Nikola Pejková has done a great job to do exactly that in Join the Veeam Vanguard 2020 class! She also explains how to nominate someone or yourself. Read the blog post and find out if this is something for you. I enjoy being a part of it because I get to learn with and from some of the best minds in the industry. This allows me to help others better while also keeping up with the changing IT landscape whilst helping others.
My fellow Veeam Vanguard and me in a Q&A session with the Veeam R&D and PM teams at the Veeam Vanguard Summit.
I would like to emphasize that the diversity of the Veeam Vanguard is paramount to me. It works because we have people in there form around the globe, from all kinds of backgrounds and job roles. This helps open up discussions with different points of view and experiences. Customers, consultants, and partners look at needs and solutions from their perspectives. Having us together in the Vanguard benefits us all and prevents tunnel vision.
Nominate someone, yourself or be nominated
Nikola explains how to do this in her blog so read Join the Veeam Vanguard 2020 class! and apply to become Vanguard! It is quite an experience. Quality people who are active in the commumnity and help by sharing their knowledge are welcomed and appreciated. Maybe you’ll find yourself to be a Veeam Vanguard in 2020!
I am back from Experts Live Europe 2019. The conference was very well organized and a great success. The speakers and attendees alike were passionate, drive and inquisitive IT professionals. We all came there to learn from each other. To talk shop and share our experiences and war storage. There were plenty of opportunities to network to do exactly that.
Back from Experts Live Europe 2019
I call these types of conferences “boutique conferences”. They are open to all who want to learn and be part of the community. The real-world content is not driven by marketing but by people sharing their experience and knowledge. People like you and me, who practice IT on a daily basis.
A big thank you to the attendees of my session Hyper-V Backups – The good, the bad, the ugly. I had fun presenting and the vibe in the room felt good. It enjoyed seeing that I was pointing out some of the problems some of my attendees encountered. It was even better to able to help them out. I sent the slide deck (pdf) to the conference organizers and it will be shared with you shortly. If you found my contributions helpful and enjoyed the session and the talks we had let the conference organizers know via your feedback. Also, note if something could have been done better. It helps us improve.
Well done!
Finally, dear Isidora and Marcel, well done. We all felt so welcome and appreciated at the conference. This made it easy to share with each other and learn how to become better technologists together. I hope to make it back next year! Thank you!
I can only advise you to try it out and attend or speak in order to learn with the community. Be part of it and advance professionally as well as personally.
