I made Veeam Vanguard 2018!

Posted on by
Reply

While attending the Microsoft MVP Global Summit 2018 I received notification that I was renewed as a Vanguard in 2018. This is my forth year, as I’m one of the inaugural members in 2015.

clip_image001

The Veeam Vanguard group is a collection of smart, hardworking IT experts that have a healthy interest in data protection and availability. No matter what you build in IT to support your business or customers it requires to be protected against down time. You also need the ability to perform disaster recovery and deliver business continuity for those days things are not going smoothly. Those requirements keeps these technologist busy and honest. They have to deliver on those requirements and they can’t talk their way out of not being able to do that when needed. The result is that this group of experts is very experienced and knowledgeable in both their specialties and in how to protect their workloads. Being part of the Veeam Vanguards means sharing that experience and knowledge and tapping in to their collective brain power. I’m happy and proud the be a Veeam Vanguard as it is a great learning experience and it helps me to deliver even more value to my employers and all Veeam customers. It’s win-win all over. Thank you Veeam for the opportunity and recognition.

Attending the Microsoft MVP Global Summit 2018

Posted on by
Reply

Attending the Microsoft MVP Global Summit 2018

Once more I’m flying to the USA (Bellevue/Redmond, in Washington) where I’m attending the Microsoft MVP Global summit 2018. I’ll be spending my week at the Microsoft campus in Redmond and the offices in Bellevue. I feel grateful and honored to be part of this community and of the chances it offers to learn, connect and build a network world of class experts.

clip_image002

The Microsoft MPV Global Summit is always a very busy week with both official and unofficial, planned and unplanned meetings. From breakfast till nightcaps we’re talking tech with peers from all over the world. The amount of expertise, experience and knowledge that descends on and near the Microsoft offices that week is nothing but amazing. Especially when you consider that MVPs are not Microsoft employees. They are independent experts who care enough about the technology to share what they’ve learned with Microsoft and each other. We provide feedback, the good the bad and the ugly.

I feel very lucky and privileged to get this opportunity once more that comes with being an MVP. As such I always try to attend by freeing up the time and the budget. It’s an investment. It also provides for an opportunity to meet up with many of my fellow MVPs and Microsoft employees we talk to, collaborate with and provide feedback to on a regular basis. Feedback is a dish we server with care and respect. Likewise, we expect Microsoft to listen and when possible, act. Our feedback is meant to be constructive and help, not to insult or cause pain.

If anyone still doubts the viability of remote teams spread across the world you should see a bunch of MVPs interacting, troubleshooting, assisting each other, create presentations and deliver results. All while spread around the globe.

Flying high above it all

I am and remain in the trenches because I don’t think you can design great solutions in the isolation of an ivory tower and without being in touch with reality. But I do tend to make frequent journeys and fly high above it all regularly to keep perspective.

clip_image004

Yes, I’m even flying above the clouds. That’s because “Cloud” has become a polluted word that means whatever a vendor/ISV/VAR/OEM wants it to mean as long as it helps them sell whatever it is they are selling. But hey, nothing new there, sales will be sales.

In order to make sure we talk about usable and valuable solutions that put customer needs first we literally have to rise above it. We need to look at the needs of the customers and find ways to serve them with the solutions we build and offer. Too often today customers are offered cookie cutter services that are designed to meet the profitability of the provider and whatever politics that are at hand and not primarily the needs of the customer. I see “cloud” projects last for years and fail to deliver as much or more than they used to so in the client/server era. The failures of bad ideas, politics over customers, lack of context, bad designs and architectures are still blamed on technology or companies. Nothing new there. Customers or employers are not resources to be mined for every penny. And because I pride myself in not playing that game to make money I keep investing in myself. Getting out of the echo chambers that projects and organizations tend to become is key in achieving that. Way to often the focus is on “a can-do attitude” and “loyalty”. People, voicing concerns, discussing issues and speaking one’s mind are key to achieving success. Conformity and compliance are not, those are measurements, that’s all.

So, what is it I go and discuss for a week on end? Well, I cannot tell you, my employers or customers. Luckily, I get to discuss a lot with my fellow MVPs. It’s always a blast to see so many of them again.

Forging valuable solutions

clip_image006

I can tell you that it helps me make better decisions. It enables me to provide the excellent advice, great designs and functional architecture. These are forged in the fires of reality with my knowledge and insights for a hammer. My context and situational awareness are the furnace and the technologies Microsoft and partners provide are the resources that are turned into valuable solutions. Those are built, not bought. If that’s something you’d like, we can help get you in touch with many MVPs that have a wide variety of skills and are able to assist you.

Our regular schedule resumes after the summit

Anyway, while that week will be busy and while we’ll be anything but quiet over there within our Non-Disclosure Agreement (NDA).

clip_image008

That means you won’t hear about anything under NDA and as such we’ll remain silent on what we see, hear, learn and discuss at the MVP Global Summit 2018. See you after “The Summit”!

It’s not as simple as renaming the avhdx to vhdx

Posted on by
1

This arrives in via the feedback option on my blog

Hi. I see through your website that you are an expert in vhdx / avhdx file. I had a system crash with data loss. I think this data is in an avhdx file. When I rename this file in vhdx, I can mount it but I have an error: the file is corrupted. Do you know a procedure to repair this type of file? I thank you in advance for your support!

Oh dear! An expert? While flattery can get you a long way in life with certain people virtual disks are impervious to that sort of thing. Look, MVP, Veeam Vanguard, Dell Rockstar … tip of the spear, edge of the sword, it’s all fine and well but it’s no good to split a granite piece of rock and virtual disks don’t care about titles, jut about how they are designed to work.

Before we dive into some more details please use the comments sections under the relevant blog post to ask questions. That way everyone can benefit form the answer. It’s all quite anonymous if you want it to be. Secondly vendors like Microsoft have great public support forums with many thousand pairs of eyes reading. That might also work better and faster for your needs.

Some details

When you have avhdx your data is stored in the avhdx and in the parent disks (more avhdx but at least always one vhdx). While you can throw away what’s in a avhdx under certain conditions (and lose that data) and mount the vhdx you cannot throw away the vhdx and hope to be able to access the data in the avhdx you rename to vhdx.

clip_image002

For a case of real data corruption, not just phantom or mixed up VHDX/AVHDX chain, where you can try to intervene, even manually if needed – and if you have the skills – you’ll have to recover or restore data.

If the storage on which the vhdx/avhdx reside is corrupted a good but time-consuming run of chksdk /f /r can do the job. I have done that before with success. But there are no guarantees in this game.

Other than that, or when the storage is gone, it is restore time. This can be leveraging whatever backup solution you use or VSS snapshots on the storage side of things. Those options are your best bet. You can find some more info on manually manipulating vhdx/avhdx files here but that’s not what you’re facing here it seems.

If you don’t have recovery options in place, what can I say?

Stop what you’re doing and contact a good data recovery company. Only damage can come from trying if you don’t know what you’re doing. You can hope trial and error will fix it but that would be the triumph of hope over experience. You’re usually not that lucky. Trust me.

The snarky bit

I’ll fight like hell if I’m in a pickle and the data is valuable. But it’s near to impossible to do it for someone else as it’s hard, time consuming and often it’s a case were the files have been worked on before, so they tend to be messed up. If the data is not that valuable, just eat the loss.

In reality my time always seems less valuable then peoples their data . Now if you say you can help me retire early by trying anyway and are OK with a best effort, no guarantees given deal I might do it. But I’m pretty sure investing in backups and restores is way cheaper and will lead to better results. Your data is important and valuable, even when my time is not. Just saying

Azure Site Recovery (ASR) supports IAAS managed disks region to region

Posted on by
Reply

Introduction

When we see enough progress, not perfection, and get to the point that all our minimal needs are covered is when we decide to adopt a technology, feature or solution as the default. We might even move whole sale, either over time or on an expedited time line.

clip_image002

As more and more companies reach for the cloud we see the offerings mature. That’s when cloud becomes the new normal for a majority. I’m happy to say that with managed disks we are at the point we have not many reasons not to use them. Which means latecomers get a more complete offering “out of the box” and can focus on the next generation of solutions, beyond cloud so to speak, in another wonderfully inadequate term called serverless.

What are IAAS managed disks?

Managed disks provide simpler storage management (no more storage account limits leading to managing and monitoring those accounts) along with better availability, disk level data protection with encryption, RBAC and backups, the ability to create snapshots etc. Clearly, they are the way forward. Read up on them here. I did migrate many virtual machines to them but we could not do this for equally as many despite the clear benefits. Why? Read on!

Azure Site Recovery (ASR) Supports IAAS managed disks region to region

But they had a key piece missing. ASR until last week did not allow to setup Disaster Recovery (DR) for IaaS VMs with managed disks. Those already running everything on managed disks might have found out during a hurricane or flooding scare that they could not quickly set up ASR and move those workloads to another region. I know people who were in that situation.

But as Microsoft announced public availability for the capability to Protect machines using managed disks between Azure regions using Azure Site Recovery. I’m very happy with this because I really like manage disks but this was a real show stopper for the IAAS virtual machines where ASR between regions is a hard requirement. It’s often the case in the quickly evolving cloud environment that features are missing for a while. Those can slow down adoption until they are available.

Now we have a full IAAS solution on par with on-premises VM to Azure IAAS VMs where managed disks are also supported. Which reminds me I need to check if the failback option form Azure to on-premises works already with managed disks (it used to be a one-way street with managed disks). Today, with managed disks I can say we’ve reached the point where we’ll convert the remaining IAAS virtual machines as it covers many needs and we’re confident the remainder of needs will be following.

Progress, not perfection

It’s not perfect yet. We’re still looking forward to encrypted disk support, incremental snapshots etc. But as I said, we decide and work based on progress, not perfection.