vRops: Beware of the Filters
The other day we were messing around with VMware vRealize Operations Manager a.k.a. vRops. My customer wanted to have a clear overview of virtual machines being over- or undersized. I like to use default…
Homelab Synology backup strategy
A while ago I finally had some attention for my much beloved data. I gave some thought on how my data would be safe if disaster would struck, like my Synology NAS catching fire. Or worse, my house…
So when I speak of ‘my beloved data’, I am talking about:
- Homelab data (VM’s etc.)
- Personal documents
- Photos & videos
I could live with my homelab data being lost. I would not be a happy man, but a complete homelab reinstall would be possible without any backup. However, if one can avoid the loss of data, one should. 🙂
More important however, are my personal documents and my photos/videos. Those are invaluable to me! I wanted to make sure that all this data is centralized on my Synology NAS and I have the requirement for an off-site backup. The off-site backup would have to be affordable while growing in GB’s. The RTO would not matter that much as long as I’m able to recover the data.
Also, I would like to reduce the number of cloud storage solutions (Google Drive, Onedrive, Dropbox) and their associated clients.
The diagram below shows the setup I came up with:
My VCDX Experience
On Friday the 30th of October 2015 I got the great news that I passed the VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) defense! What a trip it was! In this blog…
VMworld 2015 US recap
After our Silicon Valley Tour it was VMworld 2015 time! We registered on Sunday and immediately felt it was going to be pretty busy, numbers-of-people-wise. This was confirmed in the first general keynote. It was said there were approximately 23.000 attendees at VMworld US. That’s insane!!
The general keynotes withheld some cool announcements, but it did lack of a real ‘wow’ factor. The most significant announcements were;
- EVO:SDDC; A rebranded name for the EVO:RACK offering that includes SDDC manager and the following (updated) products:
- vRealize Suite for management
- vSphere 6
- NSX 6.2 for Software Defined Networking
- VSAN 6.1 for Software Defined Storage
- Project SkyScraper
- Cross cloud vMotion; Demoed and looking very nifty! vMotion virtual machines between your on-premises (private cloud) to vCloud Air (public cloud).
- Content Sync; seamlessly sync your on-premises content library with the content catalog in vCloud Air.
- Cloud Native Applications
- vSphere Integrated Containers; extending vSphere for visibility of deployed containers running in a VM from an IT infrastructure point-of-view.
- VMware Photon platform; new platform built and optimized for cloud native apps
- Windows 10 + VMware AirWatch = Project A2; VMware has brought the capabilities of AirWatch and App Volumes together to create unified employee management. This allows simple movement of apps from previous Windows operating systems into the Windows 10 environment.
Silicon Valley Tour
As mentioned in our previous post, we had have the opportunity to visit a couple of very interesting companies located in silicon valley prior to VMworld US.
Rubrik
We started off on Thursday at Rubrik. Chris Wahl, John Koo and Arvind Nithrakashyap (aka Nitro 🙂 ) were kind enough to welcome us at Rubrik HQ. We also had the pleasure to shake hands with Rubrik’s CEO Bipul Sinha!
We had a preview on Chris his upcoming VMworld presentation and discussed the vision and strategy of Rubrik as we went along. Some very interesting statements there about converged data management. As far as we can tell, Rubrik is bringing simplicity and infinite scaling into backup and recovery. The ease of deployment and their idea to create SLA domains to protect your data is really something that impressed us.
Attending VMworld 2015
This August Rutger Kosters & myself will attend VMworld 2015 US where we will represent our employer YaWorks. We will fly in a bit early (on Wednesday the 26th of August) to check on the Valley before we will head to downtown SFO. We will hook up with a (near) local who is quite familiar with the Valley and SFO surroundings. 😉
Update 1: Our befriended near local inhabitant (Frank Denneman) arranged visits to some of the most interesting vendors out there. We will meet-up with the clever minds of the following vendors in their HQ prior to VMworld!
Flights booked, straight from Amsterdam to San Francisco. Some pretty cool residences booked in Palo Alto (first few days) and SFO. Gotta love Airbnb! Ford Mustang > check!!
Needless to say we are pretty damn pleased, to say the least, with the support from our employer who made this all possible for us. 😀
Cloudfix colleague Robert Verdam will, almost certainly, attend VMworld 2015 EMEA in Barcelona. We will try to make it to Barcelona also… Time will tell.
Update 2: Robert and myself are among the few of many vExperts to have received a blogger-pass by VMware for VMworld Barcelona!! Rutger will wander the streets of Barcelona during day hours and will be available for dinner and parties! 😀