Don’t miss your opportunity to attend the Dallas-Fort Worth VMUG Movie Event #2 taking place August 13th, with limited seating available following the State and Local COVID procedures. Registration is open and available to all VMUG members.
04:00 pm. vSocial – Please plan on attending our awesome vBeers right after the movie!
NOTE: You MUST RSVP to attend. No walk-ups will be allowed at this LIVE event. With that consideration, please ONLY REGISTER for this event if you expect to attend in person. We have very limited seating and will be adhering to our regional COVID safety recommendations. Masks are encouraged but NOT REQUIRED at the time of this invitation.
“Cloud is about how you do computing, not where you do computing.”
–Paul Maritz, Former VMware CEO
This June I was honored to selected as one of the Cloud Field Day Delegates for CFD11. First I want to say thank you to Stephen Foskett and all of the Tech Field Day Crew for allowing me the opportunity to network, learn, and have fun!
Even though this was a virtual event it was a good bonding experience with the other delegates and the sponsors provided thought-provoking talks. Thank you to all the delegates and #CFD11 sponsors for the live interactive sessions and enlightening my cloud journey.
All of the talks were excellent and this is just a highlight on Morpheus Data, “Manage Hybrid Clouds and Modernize Apps”. The Morpheus Cloud Management Platform (CMP) simplifies self-provisioning provides automation and orchestration, and now includes the cost management. The Morpheus presenters were Adam Hicks, Brad Parks, David Estes, Martez Reed, and you can find their presentations at “Morpheus Data Presents at Cloud Field Day 11”.
The Morpheus cloud management automation and orchestration provides simplicity’s for the various deployment models for IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. The Morpheus products and services enable faster go-to-market enablement and provide visibility to help reduce cloud costs. The following diagram reflects the echo system and some of the popular key integrations and applications:
Morpheus does a good job of integrating the best of breed 3rd party software and creating a powerful but simple workflow for automation, orchestration and cost visualization. Check out this Morpheus, Self-Service Case Study to better understand how they use persona-based approach for solutions – How did AstraZeneca take provisioning time from days to minutes?
Morpheus is really good at bridging the gaps to help automate, orchestrate, and for discovery. They support and integrate very well with Terraform and have their own Morpheus Terraform Provider.
In summary, Morpheus roots are in automation and orchestration, and the tool does an awesome job in enabling enterprise self-service provisioning. The most exciting part for me is they added cost management as part of their holistic solution. The beauty of Morpheus is it provides the glue for workflows and simplifies automation management while eliminating complexities and a plethora of disjoint automation software sprawl.
‘Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.’
–Benjamin Franklin
Please join us for #CFD10 to network, learn and have fun!
I am excited and honored to been have selected as a delegate panelist attending Cloud Field Day 10!
The Cloud Field Day 10 streaming video will be broadcast live on 2021 March 10-12. Join us for the entire broadcast or feel free to pick and choose. Go to Cloud Field Day 10 to see the presentation calendar to select the sessions of interest. Please participate and ask questions using twitter #CFD10.
“Cloud Field Day focuses on the impact of cloud on enterprise IT. Cloud Field Day brings together the best independent thought leaders in enterprise cloud to discuss pressing issues and technology advancements with key companies in the space.”
The 18-wheeler Cohesity truck has live demos featuring how Cohesity solves the Mass Data Fragmentation problem for your back-up, recovery, file, cloud, and more.
We’ll have tables and chairs set-up next to the truck so that folks can enjoy Cane Rosso pizza, then hop inside the truck for a private demo/tour during “Truck Tour Open House!”
“You can have data without information, but you cannot have information without data.” — Daniel Keys Moran
I am lucky and grateful to be one of the new members of the NetApp A-Team (@NetAppATeam), selected late last year. One of the perks is having the opportunity to listen to NetApp exclusive 3rd party vendor/partner talks, such as Veeam. Today fellow NetApp A-Team member Adam Bergh (@ajbergh), Global Alliance Architect for NetApp Solutions for Veeam, gave an excellent talk on the new upcoming Veeam V10 NAS Backup Solution. The product is available as RC1 today and will GA next month, February 18, 2020.
Some of the new Veeam v10 enhanced NAS Back Solution for enterprise customers features and capabilities are:
Performance in processing petabytes of unstructured data
Scalable Components with fast-incremental file-level backups
Outstanding data consistency at a lower price to reduce cost
High-Level Overview of Veeam V10 NAS Backup
A data protection backup solution that is optimized to provide performance by providing massive parallel processing and includes a new backup format designed for NAS workloads and can scale to billions of files and petabytes of data with data compression.
Supported Sources:
SMB versions 1, 2, and 3
NFS Version 3 and 4.1
Windows File Servers
Linux File Servers
The following diagram is a snapshot taken from today’s meeting and provides a high-level overview of the components.
This solution components work with NetApp ONTAP or other sources utilizing Advance Transports Modes to:
Backup directly from a file share
Backup from VSS Snapshots on the file proxy
Backup from a Native Storage Snapshot
The fast Cache Repository stores checksums in memory and does not process any real data. While the File Proxy is fast because of the parallel processing providing high performance and scalability.
The Short-Term Retention – leverages the new NAS backup format and is for daily and weekly retention.
The Long-Term Retention – an older version of files and data with more extended retention requirements for months and years and uses cheaper storage to include object stores. Retain incremental copies, and not full copies are not.
The Secondary Copy – provides short term full copy and is also used for DR purposes.
The File Tracking System is the “secret sauce.”
*COPYRIGHT 2019 VEEAM SOFTWARE
It provides for quick Check Sums on every folder and file, and the algorithm ignores files and folders that have no changes, the checking engine also scales with the number of proxies. Allowing for quick incremental backups when there are large blocks of static data. The diagram reflects this use case for incremental backups.
*COPYRIGHT 2019 VEEAM SOFTWARE
The next picture is an example reflecting speed when backing up mostly static data for like 50 million files and which takes around 13 minutes to backup.
*COPYRIGHT 2019 VEEAM SOFTWARE
The live demonstration showed how to backup and protect a file share with data of various file types and sizes by taking an ONTAP snapshot. It simulated a Ransomware event and showed how one could roll back to a selected point in time snapshot to remediate the Ransomware Event. The Veeam Restore Wizard replaced only the files that were changed, and so the restore was fast. Backup and recovery are quick because of the CRC Engine algorithms.
Veeam Enterprise Manager
The Veeam Enterprise Manager can provide self-service restores and perform a universal search, using the Self-Service HTML5 Interface, and can do a federated view and utilizes Role-Based Access Control. Need to pick a backup, for example, from ONTAP, then do a search for a file or wild card search and restore files from the share. Search from a file to recover can restore in place or to another location or can download into browser and review.
This Veeam NAS solution also works with the various cloud providers like AWS, Azure, and Google if they can present an SMB or NFS mount.
New Feature and Capabilities:
Application Consistent HW Snapshot
MS SQL and Oracle from Point-in-Time log replay
ONTAP SVM Level Credentials Supported
Restore Cloud-Native Workloads to VMware from the Cloud
Object Lock S3 Immutable API Support for Cloud Tier (Prevent S3 delete/modifications)
Questions
What about backing up databases such as Oracle?
The answer – Veeam has other database solutions focused on database use cases that are more appropriate for databases. This NAS solution is not a good fit for a database solution, and it is suitable for traditional NAS use cases for unstructured data.
What about rebuilding the cache if it is corrupted?
The answer – Since there are multiple copies of the cache and it is in memory, rebuilds are fast. The Cache is not super large, and for example, the cache size for 1 million files is about 2,100 KB.
Thanks to everyone who was apart of this awesome event! We held our first ever DFW VMUG VMware Hands-on-Lab Odyssey Event in Dallas on December 12th, 2019. It was a blast, lots of learning, networking and having fun!
Thanks to our DFW VMUG members for taking 4 hours out of your busy day to spend time with us from 10am – 2pm. Also, I would like to thank our 2 Sponsors, thank you Dallas Arista Team ( Bryan Reinke/Paul Petersen) for buying our lunch, and thank you Rod Wetterskog and the University of Dallas UTD for hosting us in the UTDesign Studio which is a part of the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science. We were so lucky to have both a conference room and a lab for this lunch and learn event. Big shout out to a rather special young group from the VMware Academy, who helped coach our DFW VMware User Group members to a successful learning experience.
The DFW VMUG Odyssey Idea
When I attended VMworld 2019 in San Francisco this year, I became familiar with the Odyssey Competition and the top prizes of Mac Book Pro’s, this is a link to an interview with Nick Morgowicz (@nmorgowicz) – Odyssey Winner. I was so impressed by Odyssey I reached out to the VMware’s Hands-on-Labs head geek, Mr. Pablo Rauch (@heyitspablo)! He gave me some great ideas to think about how I might do an Odyssey Event. Pondering this after VMworld I began thinking about how do we make Odyssey happen in Dallas. So as a VMUG leader I thought, I will reach out to my local VMware VMUG sponsor Joseph Griffith (@Gortees) and also contacted my VMware SE Nick Korte (@Networknerd_). In late October we began discussing amongst ourselves and Nick contacted the VMware Odyssey Team right before VMworld Barcelona. Then the week after they returned from Barcelona we started planning. We had a short timeline so I jumped into my marine corp mode of ““Improvise, Adapt, and Overcome”, to make it happen this year. As a passionate community guy, I really wanted to share the Odyssey experience with my DFW VMUG Community in 2019. Unfortunately, dark clouds rolled in and the stars were no longer aligned. Things looked grim and it looked like we were going to have to cancel everything at the last minute due to unforeseen circumstances, and have to wait until next year. Thankfully the optimist and being persistent, I believe in the proverb, “Where there’s a will there’s a way”. Just glad to say, thank God, it all worked out and we were able to make it happen.
The Event
Our event was different from that of VMworld, and in that our open competition this was more of a learning journey experience that included people familiar with hands-on-labs and people that had not taken labs. So we paired up teams like in a hackathon, we pair experience and nonexperience persons to balance out team and make it a cool learning experience.
Another thing we did to help get new lab users familiar with the Odyssey Platform and the gamification of the Hands-on-Labs was to perform an initial walk-through. We selected vSphere as our first module, and the first module was more of a warm-up and did not count. Once we completed this introduction we started the competition. In our competition we selected the following 3 modules, 1) vSAN, 2) NSX-T and 3) vRA. We also had a dashboard up where we could see all see and keep track when teams finished tasks for a particular module. After the last module was completed we aggregated all scores for each module to calculate the fastest times to select winners.
The top 2 winners got DFW VMUG Bragging Rights and a Google Stadia Pro. Everyone was a winner as we provided a variety of swag such as pens, stickers, sunglasses and Odyssey T-Shirts. For our last big Stadia prize give away of the day we did a random drawing for our group of VMware Academy kids who helped make this a very fun and exciting event.
This was an awesome event and I want to give special thanks to VMware’s Tim Koishor (@TimKoishor) as he was our lab captain leading the teams through their Odyssey journey. We are also very grateful to our DFW VMUG Volunteer’s Paul Bryant, Brandon Graves, and VMware SE Rusty Hale supporting our NSX module. Lot’s of thanks and gratitude to the outstanding Odyssey Team who set up the lab environment and supported us remotely with the event planning and the Odyssey swag.
Photos reflecting the day’s fun-filled activities.
Lessons Learned and Next Steps
The lessons learned and our post mortem to help improve the Odyssey Labs.
Yes, we can send out pre-work and homework for participants, but the reality is not everyone has time to do labs beforehand. We all want to learn and sometimes we intend to do pre-work, but the reality is life gets in the way.
Another thing is maybe most users are familiar with vSphere, and do a little vSAN but might not have much experience with NSX-T or something like vRA.
So to help remediate the above and to help make this a more educational experience, the next time we will do an Odyssey Lab Event we will perform a 30-minute introduction on module topic and then do the 30-minute lab module. For example for vRA, we will explain what it is and how you would use it in the real world. The idea is to provide a better context before doing an Odyssey Lab module.
I also think it is very important you have a lab captain to run the show
I urge you to invite the local VMware SE’s that have expertise in the different lab modules you will be performing during the event.
To avoid game day lab issues it is strongly recommended you do a dry run to ensure labs works as intended and you have good network connectivity.
The dry run also provides a great opportunity for first time Odyssey lab helpers to get familiar with the labs before the real event.
If you would like to set up a VMUG Odyssey Event for your local VMUG, I strongly suggest you please reach out to a VMware SE assigned to your local VMUG chapter and have them reach out to the Odyssey Team. The key to the successful event is to have fun, learn and network!
NOTE: Please ask Wences & John for a parking pass once you arrive, because they must be displayed in your vehicle, or else you will get a parking ticket
Goals
Have Fun (seriously, number one is have fun)
Learn
Healthy Competition
Agenda
10:00 AM Register and Setup Teams
10:30 Odyssey Walk-Thru of vSphere Module to get warmed up
11:00 1st Module to start competition is the vSAN
11:30 Sponsored Lunch Break
Thanks Arista!
12:00 2nd Module is NSX-T
12:30 3rd Module is vRA
1:30 Wrap up and Awards
2:00 Can leave or hang out for Q&A session with experts
Cloud Architect, NetApp A-Team, vExpert, VMUG Leader, AWS-SAA, TOGAF, ITIL, CISSP, USMC, Mariachi, Gaucho-Texano & Dad
A seasoned architect and technologist at heart that loves innovation and playing with cloud computing, data center virtualization, operating systems, and information security.
Watch out! Trapping comfort won't let you flit to your next goal! Experiences of a Tech Junkie, self taught artist and his craving for new experiences. Opinions are personal. Content published is not read or approved in advance by any company and may not reflect the views and opinions of my employer or any of its divisions, subsidiaries, or business partners.
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