So yeah, I’m heading to an in-person tech conference next week. Not just any tech conference but arguably my favorite, VeeamON. The event is being held at the Aria Resort in Las Vegas May 16-19 for the in person aspect but like so many of conferences in the post-COVID era it will be a hybrid event with a free of charge, online aspect as well. If you have not registered for either in person or online there is still plenty of time to get involved.

It’s been since August of 2019 since I last did any event of real size and while I am absolutely excited to be able to hear about some wonderful technology and be back around friends, colleagues and fellow Vanguards, I’d be remiss to not acknowledge a healthy amount of hesitance about being around large groups of people again. That said at this point I’ve done everything that I can possibly do to protect myself and those around me from all the health concerns so it’s time to get at it.

On a personal note this time around is going to be a bit different for me as well as it is going to be the first event I’ve attended as part of a partner organization as opposed to just being there as a customer. In the lead up there is quite a bit of preparation involved when attending this way but a great deal to be interested in as well.

What’s Going On?

So a look at the full agenda tells you that Veeam Backup & Replication v12 is going to be a major focus of the conference this time around and for good reason; v12 from everything I’ve seen so far is going to be a MASSIVE release in terms of under the cover infrastructure. I’ve been working with the beta since release and honestly I’m rarely leaving the backup infrastructure tab because there’s so much different there. Layer in improvements to related products such as the Veeam Agents and the hyper scaler cloud backup products and I’ll be busy long after the event watching recordings.

While V12 will be a major focus it won’t be the only one. Support for backing up SaaS application will be there as well with further improvements to Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 and the upcoming release of Veeam Backup for Salesforce.

I’m personally going to have a couple of speaking sessions myself. The first will be with Josh Liebster as we discuss why “All Good Things Start at 11:11” Monday at 6pm on the partner stage in the expo hall. This quick session will be for my employer iland, an 11:11 Systems company and will talk about how we can help you with your disaster recover and cloud workload needs.

The second session I will be involved in will be with Mr. Liebster again as well as Sean Smith from VMware Tuesday at 10:15am titled “VCPP, VMware Cloud Director and Veeam — Bringing It All Together as a Full Stack.” In this session Sean will be talking about VMware Cloud Director and the overall VCPP program of which iland is an “all-in” member. Josh and I will talk about how iland takes what VMware provides and turns it into an award winning set of products.

All in all I’m expecting it to be an excellent as always. If you are going to be there please reach out to me through twitter and I’d love to meet up!

I recently had a successful attempt at the latest version of the Veeam Certified Architect (VMCA) certification exam and I’m happy to have that one done. I found this newest version of the exam to be much more approachable than the rap on the last (and first) version of the exam. I wanted to take a minute to give some thoughts about the credential and pointers about how I prepared.

Training Requirements

Unfortunately one thing that still survives in the latest version of the Veeam certification programs, the VMCE and VMCA, is a hard course requirement for each level of certification. This means that if you want or need to achieve both levels of certification you are going to need to take 2 courses and 2 exams. Further, each are now “year versioned” exams, with versioning done on an annual basis. When it comes to renewal each exam will need to be independently renewed. As long as you pass each every year you will not be required to retake the class to upgrade but if you miss a year you will need to retake the course.

I wholeheartedly disagree with this approach and consider it especially burdensome on the certified person. In my mind it is understandable to have ONE course requirement but not for both, I struggle to think of another vendor certification program that does this. Even more if you feel you need to do annual recertification, which I’m not wild about but can understand with the number of new features each release brings, doing the top level exam should recertify for both. It’s been explained to me the rationale for this is because the exams are testing for different skill sets but the VMCE is still listed on the website as a prerequisite for the VMCA so i believe it to be a bit too much. At the end of the day this whole setup screams money grab for a company that should be well past the point of needing it.

That said many of you like me may have employer requirements to maintain the credential so this is for you.

VMCE vs VMCA

While you would think that for a skill set as siloed as Veeam core backup platform, Backup & Replication, that there would be two exams worth of content to cover but these really are targeted for different levels of IT Professionals. The VMCE exam really wants you to know and understand the Veeam Availability Suite of products, requiring memorization of knowledge about the various components and how they all fit together, think of this as your stereotypical memorization exam. While both exams are multiple choice exams with the VMCE the questions are all against a core set of knowledge, if you can memorize you’ve got this

The VMCA on the other hand is very light on memorization but very heavy on thinking through how you would scale out the core products to work in a very large, distributed scale. Really here the focus on looking at a potential customer scenario and requirements and determining what you need to build or suggest to give them successful outcomes.

My VMCA Back Story

I was lucky enough that through the Veeam Vanguard program that I was able to take the course for the VMCA free of charge both in 2017 and again in 2021 while the courses were in beta status. Oh what a difference four years makes. In 2017 I was at that time well versed with what VBR could do but at the time I was a Systems Administrator for essentially a SMB, protecting 4 hosts and 60 VMs in a single location. While we had requirements they weren’t exactly stressing the product’s most basic capabilities. When I took the course the first time I’m not ashamed to say that it intimidated me to the point where I didn’t even consider sitting the exam because so much of it was not in line with my day to day work.

Fast forward to 2021 and not only has the course been retooled to be more approachable but I am now in an architecture role where I am working with Veeam at scale every day so a good deal of it made more sense to me. I say all this to point out that I wish I would have taken the exam before because I wasn’t as far away as I thought I was and even if that is the role you are in now if you want to do more this is something you can do, you just have to think differently about it.

The Exam Methodology

The entire exam is based on a single scenario, that in theory is stylized off of a very real Veeam customer design request. There are more than one of these so if you have to retake it won’t be the same so don’t bother with trying to brain dump this. In any case the scenario is broken up into a number of tabs and will always be present on the left side of your screen as you take the exam so you can refer back to it as needed. Even with that I will say that I do very much so recommend taking 15-20 minutes at the beginning of your exam and read through the ENTIRE scenario so you at least know where to look for information and understanding he basics of what is being asked for.

Once you get through the scenario there will be a number of multiple choice questions that all relate to the scenario, but one thing I will share from the Exam Guide is that none of the questions will build upon other questions, the all independently are asking you to provide an answer directly back against the scenario. This is nice in that it won’t create a cascading problem.

Preparation

As I stated above I was lucky enough to be able to take the course while in beta status so my impressions of the course itself may not be in line with what is currently being put out there. That said the core idea of the class is very good, that it teaches you the Veeam architect way of thinking through a design based around customer requirements. This is especially on point because the Subject Matter Experts for the course itself were the Global Solutions Architect group within Veeam, some of the most knowledgeable people I know on the subject. The course walks you through what they consider the six stages of the solution lifecycle, which in turn make up the six sections of your exam, with each being tested against.

Further the course focuses on the four basic design principles;

1. Simplicity
2. Security
3. Cost/Benefit
4. Flexibility

All of these will be well covered in the course and in the Exam Guide that will be a part of your course materials. The guide itself is only 5 pages I think but it is jammed packed with information like the above that will really assist you so definitely give it a read through.

Once you get past the point of understanding both the life cycle and the design tenants there is a requirement to really know how to design the various Veeam components for use at scale and for this I highly recommend you consider a full read through of the Veeam Best Practices guide. This again is content created and managed by the Veeam Solutions Architecture group and is exceptional for understanding how you need to consider things both for the scope of this exam but also for right sizing your environment.

Conclusion

In the end if you can conceptually think about designing a BCDR plan based on Veeam solutions at a large scale, understand the lifecycle of that plan and the given needs of a customer, and are familiar with the best practices for deploying such systems this exam is very doable.

I received an email yesterday that the fast track program for VMCE 2021 is available now through December 21, 2021. So what is this? According to the e-mail and discussion with Rasmus Haslund of Veeam Fast Track is designed to be a self service resource to allow existing VMCEs v9, 2020 or people who took the v10 course to upgrade the certification to the latest version with access to study materials and a test voucher all for just a bit more than the voucher itself.

According to the email the program will provide you in total with the following:

• The latest Veeam Availability Suite v11 Configuration and Management (VASCM) courseware
• 13 days access to VASCM Labs for practicing and exam preparation
• VMCE 2021 Exam Specification Guide
• Access to the ‘Haslund Knowledge Check’
• Exam preparation videos
• VMCE Exam Voucher to take the exam at Pearson Vue

I will share that in the past (I’ve been a VMCE on versions 8 and 9 and recently renewed to the 2020 release) I’ve sworn by Rasmus’ always excellent practice exams so their inclusion here is noteworthy. While they are included these seem to remain a community resource provided by Rasmus so the value is more in the course materials and the videos, but still worth calling out.

If you are not currently 2021 certified and wish to be able to do an upgrade in the future without taking a course you will need to do so to keep current versions. If you are a standard end customer it’s true, your certification never expires but if you are in the partner space like me you unfortunately have to always be within the past 2 versions. In any case this is a pretty good deal for a recertification prep package

To purchase the fast track package you will need to log into the website you’ve been given access to your Veeam training materials at in the past, veeam.lochoice.com and click on whatever is the latest version of the VMCE materials you have available. Once there you will see a “Buy VMCE Fast Track to v11” button. Once clicked it’s as simple as providing a credit card and you are off and running.

I have been in the Information Technology field for about 20 years at this point but there was a very distinct inflection point in 2013 when the social side of my career began. In a very quick series of events (at the same time actually) I attended my first technical conference (CiscoLive US), setup my twitter account, and met many of the people I now consider the thought leaders I turn to when it comes to deciding what new technologies are coming to be and how important they are going to be to me and my organization’s needs.

At this same time I was also introduced to Tech Field Day and it’s founder Stephen Foskett and I was pretty much instantly in awe of what they were all about; selecting panels of delegates, flying them to a common city where a number of companies would present either themselves as a company or their newest products over the course of a couple of days, all of which was then recorded and put on their YouTube channel. I as a member of the tech twitterati could tweet at delegates and often get questions answered, it was amazing to me then! I honestly can’t tell you how many solutions I’ve used TFD presentations as part of my research into if I should be looking to purchase their products and services but it’s more than an handful.

From the get go I’ve had a bucket list item of being on a delegate panel, but sadly my previous role had distinct rules against such things. Fast forward to now, new organization, new rules and here I am invited to be on the panel for Cloud Field Day 8. While this is a virtual event I am no less excited to be a part of the early group delegate panel. The experience so far has been great and I’m very appreciative of Stephen, Ben Gage and Mel Zura in helping to get me up to speed with how the event will go.

Pictured here is the entrance, five years ago, to the Customer Appreciation Event on the last night of Cisco Live US 2013. This was my first CiscoLive and first tech conference at all. I was exhausted from all I’d learned and excited by all the new people I’d met. The conference was in Orlando, FL that year and the CAE was held in a portion of Universal Studios theme park. This all comes full circle because this year

• I will once again be attending CiscoLive 2018
• It will once again be held in Orlando, FL
• And the Customer Appreciation Event will be held at THE ENTIRE UNIVERSAL STUDIOS FLORIDA PARK!

Customer Appreciation Event Info

You read that right, for one night only, Cisco customers, employees and other conference attendees will have the whole park to themselves with food, drink, and all that jazz included.While the party itself is from 7:30 to 11:30, attendees will also have non-exclusive access to the Islands of Adventure side of the park starting at 6 so you can get there early, hang out in Diagon Alley and then hop the Hogwarts Express over to the party when the time comes. Can anybody say Geek Overload? Once the party starts all of the attractions will be available to you, rides like Transformers:3D, Harry Potter and the Escape from Gringotts, and Race Through New York Starring Jimmy Fallon just to name a few.

There will also be a “festival style” music line-up to be announced later. Considering Cisco’s recent track record of musical acts (Aerosmith,  Maroon 5, Elle King, Bruno Mars) it’s a good guess that those will be great as well.

Keynote Speakers

There are other announcements out now as well. Included in these are the guest keynote speakers. This year it appears Cisco is going all in on the future looking vibe by having Dr. Michio Kaku, and Amy Webb as the Thursday speakers. Dr. Kaku is a renowned theoretical physicist and futurist while Ms. Webb is also a futurist and founder of the Future Today Institute. While I don’t know much about them at the moment I look forward to what they have to say.

Sessions, Labs and Seminars

Finally it looks like the Session catalog has quietly gone live today as well. Here you can begin looking for ideas of sessions you think you will find helpful, but I will tell you it is always my suggestion to pick these for now by the instructors you may really want to be able to interact with. All of these sessions will be available online after the conference so that frees you up to network (socially, not with wires) while you are there.

What you can’t access after the fact is the Labs and Seminars Cisco puts on the weekend prior to the conference itself. These come in 4 or 8 hour flavors and as someone who has attended a couple myself I will tell you they are a very fast way to deep dive into a topic. The catalog of these has been made available as well so you may want to check them out.

One note for those of you that like me that are heavy users of ad blocking in your browser. I noticed that uBlock Origin was keeping the actual list from appearing, you will need to turn it off to see the session catalogs.

Conclusion

As somebody with a small child and thus has spent a good deal of time in the Orlando area 😉 I’ll have some more to share soon in that regard. If you are heading to the show feel free to reach or say hi there! These events are much better when you allow yourself to get out an meet others.

Here in the US Thanksgiving Day traditionally falls on the fourth Thursday of November. While it is one of my favorite holidays today is a day of thankfulness for me as I’ve been honored to be named a Veeam Vanguard for 2018. I’ve been fortunate enough to have been a part of the group since its inception and it is one of my highest honors. Thanks as always to Rick, Kirsten, Dmitry, Andrew, Niels, Anthony, Michael, Melissa and Danny for keeping the Vanguards the best of its kind around.

To those who have also been renewed into the program please accept a heartfelt congratulations as you’ve earned it through your involvement and I look forward to trolling right along with you for another year.

While the e-mails have just been sent so there aren’t any statistics yet I see quite a few new members who are quite deserving popping up on twitter. Some I know already and other I look forward to getting to know. One of the really nice thing about the Vannies is we are a small group so everybody pretty much gets to know everybody. If you are looking for success in this group please don’t be shy, come be social and share the knowledge you have.

Are you just learning about the program or didn’t make the cut this year? If you are active with Veeam join the conversation in the forums, on Twitter, on Reddit, any of the various Slack communities, or your own blog and it will come. It doesn’t matter where you join, it just matters that you do.

Finally to dear, sweet Vanny Vanguard. We all miss you, please come home. 😉

If you haven’t noticed the new content on this site has got a little scarce for the past few months. To be very honest my life seems to have been a bit crazy, both professionally and personally, and writing, unfortunately, has been back-burnered. On my drive home yesterday I was listening to Paul Woodward‘s excellent ExploreVM podcast episode with Melissa Palmer where she was speaking about the process of writing her excellent book “IT Architect Series: The Journey“. This served to remind me that I really should get back to writing as I’ve got a few topics I really need to blog about.

So as these things often happen in my head this led me this morning to think about why I blog in the first place. There are a number of reasons I do this and I thought for those that are passionate about any topic but in this case about technology maybe a little bit of the why would be the thing to get you started yourself.

1. So I can remember how I did something. Way back in the olden days (2004ish?) when my blog was called tastyyellowsnow.com this was the main reason I created the blog. I was 3 jobs into my career and all of my notes for how to do anything were saved in Outlook notes that I move from a work account to PST to work account to PST to work account. I was tired of doing it that way so I thought I’d try putting it out there. That hawtness ran on some asp based package with an Access database on the backend (I still have it!), and while some of the content was absolutely horrible the reason behind it is still my primary driver, to make sure if I figured out how to do something a certain way I could remember how to do it when I invariably had to do it again. Looking through some of those titles some like “Changing the Music On Hold Volume in Cisco CallManager” and “Recovering from a Bad Domain Controller Demotion” are still actually relevant. It’s nice to know where to find those things.

2. So that others can learn how I did something. I joked on twitter the other day that in preparing a Career Day talk for my daughter’s Kindergarten class that I should title it “SysAdmin: I Google things for those who will not”. If you are new to IT or aspire to work as an *Admin  I cannot express how much of my “how in the world do you know that” is simply being good at feeding errors into google and processing the results. There may be 20 posts on how to do a single task but one of them will make more sense to me than others. Because of that, I try to feed many things back into the collective Google, especially the things that I wasn’t able to find much on or that I had to piece together through multiple KB articles and blog posts. In doing so I really do hope that I help others get their job done without having somebody send them the sticker to the right.

3. Writing something down in a manner you expect others to understand can often provide clarity. There’s an old adage that says “the best way to learn something is to teach it.” While yes, it is cliché, speaking as a former adjunct college professor and current internal staff trainer when needed, it is absolutely true. When I am learning something new or I have just finished working through a complex issue I find that documenting it, either here or internally helps to solidify what the core issue was, what components led to the issue, how the problem was solved and finally how it can be prevented in the future.

Conclusion

Those are the reasons why you see new things here from time to time.  I do want to mention one thing you did not see above and that was to gain access to influencer programs. I’ve been very fortunate to be included in the vExpert and Veeam Vanguard communities and while many will say the way to get there is through blogging I disagree. I think the best way to achieve those accolades and keep them is the develop your own version of commitment to the Tech Community.  If you find that giving things back to the community at large is something you find value in then you will find a way to do it, blogging, tweeting, podcasting, or any other way. If that’s a goal of yours and blogging or writing isn’t your thing, there is any number of ways to meet that goal as long as you focus on why you are in the community to start with.

As life has its ups and downs so does the regularity of content here. What are your reasons for blogging? If you have thought about it and haven’t done it yet, why not? Let’s continue the discussion on Twitter by reaching out @k00laidIT and help the distributed mind grow.

I am lucky enough to be a father to a wonderful 5-year-old daughter, fresh into her Kindergarten year of school. Recently she came home with the dramatic cry of a 5-year-old, upset that her class has a Leader of the Month award and she didn’t win it. Once the sobbing subsided she got around to asking me how to be a leader, one of those basics of life type questions that all parents know and yet always get thrown by. How do I boil down the essence of leadership to something she not only can understand but can apply herself?

Thanks to the reoccurring themes of Special Agent Oso I got the idea to try to condense leadership to 3 simple steps. Simplistic I know, but the more I thought about it the more I realized that not only would it get her on the right track but that, to be honest, there are a great number of adults in leadership positions that experience differing levels of success with them. So thanks to my daughter and our good friend Oso I present Jim’s 3 simple steps to being a good leader.

Step 1! Have A Good Attitude

Seriously, there are so many studies/articles on the effect that a leader’s public attitude has on the productivity and efficiency of their team. If those linked articles aren’t enough for you Google it, there are a lot more. I know we all have our days when it all falls apart and have experienced these myself, but when those days stretch into weeks or months that team you are leading or even being a part of is going to start to fall apart as well. Some days it is going to require you to put a good face on what you are internally feeling, but coming in with a bounce in your step and not being negative is a great first step.

One of the realizations that I’ve had recently is that with any position there comes a time when you have to decide to either have some internal reconciliation with the job you have and make peace with the issues you have with it or decide to make the jump to something new. I’m not saying you should try to make the things you dislike better, you absolutely should, but staying in something you actively dislike and have lost the willpower to try to fix not only hurts you it hurts those around you.

Step 2! Listen

So for a 5-year-old trying to get them to listen to anything that isn’t on Netflix or YouTube is a challenge. Guess what? The same is true for me and you and those around you in the workplace from time to time. As framed to her, listening means making sure you pay attention not only to your teachers when they talk (and you absolutely must do this) but also to those around you that may be having issues. The teacher is talking about how to make the perfect “R” but your neighbor is having a problem? If she’s got it down this is a great opportunity to help!

As this applies to us how many of us go into meetings or conversations with our co-workers with a preset agenda or outcome of it already in our mind? Worse still is when we try to find the implied meaning of what is unsaid in a conversation. We as workers and leaders do better when we open our minds and actually listen to the words that are being spoken, then ask for clarification as needed. I know I have to work hard to quit relying on my own biases or trying to guess what the speaker means simply because we don’t want to ask “Ok, I didn’t get that, can you expand on this?”

Step 3! Apply What You’ve Learned

As we complete our journey through leadership we need have to apply what we’ve learned in the first two steps. We’ve spent the last 20 minutes learning how to make that perfect “R” and now we have to practice in class. My 2.0 may have this down, but she see’s her neighbor is trying to get help from the teacher. With a great attitude and an understanding of what’s expected this is her time to shine and help out her classmate!

At work this is important too. We have a great attitude now and we really want to be a helper, getting things done, and we’ve listened to those around us and learned not only about the needs and processes of our organizations but also the needs of our co-workers and staff. With all this ammo we are now in a position to truly make a difference because regardless of who you are helping when the knowledge gets distributed the potential for greater outcomes goes up. For those of us in traditional IT or other “support departments” this is where the true value lies. If we can’t learn, interpret and apply technology to the organization and staff’s needs then we aren’t supporting anyone.

Conclusion

So there you have it. Yes I know it’s simple, yes I know there are other factors (ego, time management, etc) that go into it as well but as in all things, you have to master the basics first. How many of you that have made it to this point were shaking your head and considering interactions with others as you read them? How many read these and had a “doh” thought about something you yourself have done? I know I did in thinking about it and there’s nothing wrong with that as long as you learn from it.

I had/have the honor today of presenting a couple vBrownBag sessions while here at VMworld. The first of these was about my journey from living in an area with little to know Tech Community resources available to becoming a part of the bigger global community and why that’s a good thing. As I feel this has really changed my career and enabled me to grow my skills as an IT professional in ways I never thought possible this is a subject I’m pretty passionate about.

So does that paragraph sound familiar to you? If so please consider watching the presentation below (it’s only 10 minutes) and start your own journey. If you need help along the way reach out to me on twitter @k00laidIT.

I write this while traveling to sunny and amazingly hot Las Vegas for the 2017 edition of VMworld US. I hope to provide feedback and news throughout the conference, highlighting not only the excellent content and programs but also the best the virtualization community has to offer.

Today will be a travel day as well as a day to meet up with friends, new and old. Tomorrow, the Sunday before the conference, is when the real fun begins with things like Opening Acts for me, TAM and partner content for others as well as a number of social events.

What We Know So Far

Yesterday was the day that Vmware went on a killing spree, announcing the depreciation of Windows based vCenter, the flash based vSphere web client and the vmkLinux APIs and its associated driver ecosystem. All of these enter the depreciated state with the next major version of vSphere and then will be gone for ever and ever in the revision after that. Each of these are significant steps towards the evolution of vSphere as we know it, and when coupled with the advances in PowerCLI in version 6.5 the management of our in house infrastructure has been changed for the better.

These announcements came rapid fire on the Friday before Vmworld with the death of the Windows based vCenter coming first. As we have had versions of varying success of the vCenter Server Appliances (VCSA) for over 5 years now it’s been a long time coming. I myself migrated two years ago and while it was good then with the latest 6.5 version, with its PhotonOS base, excellent migration wizard and in appliance vCenter Update Manager support it has show it is definitely the way forward.

The flash client was the next announcement to come and again, we are looking at an depreciation that needs to happen and is most definitely going to be a good thing but does come with some apprehension. With most things that have been depreciated by Vmware we’ve had at least 1 feature rich version of the replacement out and stable before they announced the predecessor’s demise. This isn’t the case with the flash based web client. While the latest builds are getting very, very good there are still major things that either are quirky or simply aren’t there yet. The good news to this is we have been given almost immediately assurances by everyone involved with the product management that we the vSphere admins will never be left without a GUI management ability for any given task we have today and I for one believe them. The last components of what is known as the HTML5 client in my opinion simply can’t come enough, I’m tired of having to hop through multiple GUIs and browsers to be able to perform basic tasks in my daily work life.

Finally the day was finished with the announced depreciation of the non-native Linux drivers. To be honest I didn’t know that these were even still a thing as every Linux VM I’ve rolled for the past many years have been able to work with the native drivers. I’m sure there are those that at this point may still need additional time but the as the removal is still a couple of versions off this should be something can be mitigated now that the end is known.

Conclusion

With all of these preconference announcements related to Vmware’s flagship product is this going to be the year where Vmworld is chocked full of improvements to vSphere. This will be my 3rd one in 4 years and each year I’ve felt their focus was elsewhere. While vSAN, NSX, and the like are definitely where the company’s seeing growth all of these things rely on vSphere as an underlay. I for one would be happy to see a little love shown here.

With that happy thought I’m going to shut it down and land. For those coming to Vmworld this weekend safe travels and for those at home look for more info as its known here on koolaid.info.