A how-to on cold calling from the customer perspective

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Now that I’m back from my second tech conference in less than two months I am fully into the cold call season and I am once again reminded why I keep meaning to buy a burner phone and setup a Gmail account before I register next year. It seems every time I get back I am destined to months of “I am so glad you expressed deep interest in our product and I’d love to tell you more about it” when the reality is “I am calling you because you weren’t nimble enough to lunge away from our team of booth people who are paid or retained based on as many scans they can get. Most often when I get these calls or e-mails I’ll give each company a courteous thanks but no thanks and after that the iDivert button gets worn out.

The genesis of this post is two-fold. First a cold call this morning that was actually destined for my boss but when informed he wasn’t here went into telling how glad the person was that I had personally expressed interest in their product, WTF? This first event reminded me of a second, where a few months ago I was at a mixer preceding a vendor supplied training when I was approached by a bevy of 20 something Inside Sales Engineers and asked “what can I do to actually get you to listen?” From this I thought that just in case a young Padawan Sales Rep/Engineer happens to come across this, here are those ways to make your job more efficient and to stop alienating your potential customers.

Google Voice is the Devil

I guess the first step for anybody on the calling end of a cold call scenario is to get me to answer the phone. My … Go Read More →

Veeam Backup Repository Best Practices Session Notes

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After a couple days off I’m back to some promised VeeamON content. A nice problem that VeeamON had this year is the session choices were much more diverse and there were a lot more of them. Unfortunately this led to some overlap of some really great sessions. A friend of mine, Jaison Bailey of vBrisket fame and fortune, got tied up in another session and was unable to attend what I considered one of the best breakout sessions all week, Anton Gostev‘s Backup Repository Best Practices so he asked me to post my notes.

For those not too familiar with Veeam repos they can essentially be any manner of addressable disk space, whether local, DAS, NAS, SAN or even cloud, but when you start taking performance into account you have to get much more specific. Gostev, who is the Product Manager for Backup & Replication, lines out the way to do it right.

Anyway, here’s the notes including links to information when possible. Any notations I have are in bold and italicized.

Don’t underestimate the importance of Performance

  • Performance issues may impact RTOs

Five Factors of choosing Storage

  • Reliability
  • Fast backups
  • Fast restores
  • DR from complete storage loss
  • Lowest Cost

Ultimate backup Architecture

  • Fast, reliable primary storage for fastest backups, then backup copy to Secondary storage both onsite AND offsite
  • Limit number of RP on primary, leverage cheap secondary
  • Selectively create offsite copies to tape, dr site, or cloud

Best Repo: Low End

  • Any Windows or Linux Server
    • Can also serve as backup /backup proxy server
  • Physical server storage options
    • Local Storage
    • DAS (JBOD)
    • SAN LUN
  • Virtual
    • iSCSI LUN connected to in guest Volume

Best Backup Repo: High End

Getting Started with rConfig on CentOS 7

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I’ve been a long time user of RANCID for change management on network devices but frankly it’s always left me feeling a little bit of a pain to use and not particularly modern. I recently decided it was time for my OpenNMS/RANCID server to be rebuilt, moving OpenNMS up to a CentOS 7 installation and in doing so thought it was time to start looking around for an network device configuration management alternative. As is many times the way in the SMB space, this isn’t a task that actual budgetary dollars are going to go towards so off to Open Source land I went!  rConfig immediately caught my eye, looking to me like RANCID’s hipper, younger brother what with its built in web GUI (through which you can actually add your devices), scheduled tasks that don’t require you to manually edit cron, etc. The fact that rConfig specifically targets CentOS as its underlaying OS was just a whole other layer of awesomesauce on top of everything else.

While rConfig’s website has a couple of really nice guides once you create a site login and use it, much to my dismay I found that they hadn’t been updated for CentOS 7 and while working through them I found that there are actually some pretty significant differences that effect the setup of rConfig. Some difference of minor (no more iptables, it’s firewalld) but it seems httpd has had a bit of an overhaul. Luckily I was not walking the virgin trail and through some trial, error and most importantly google I’ve now got my system up and running. In this post I’m going to walk through the process of setting up rConfig on a CentOS minimal install with network connectivity with hopes that 1) it may help you, the two … Go Read More →

Community and the Rural IT Professional

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I was born and raised in a small area between Charleston and Huntington, WV. While I recognized my hometown, Scott Depot, was a small town growing up I thought of both those cities as just that, proper cities with all the benefits and drawbacks that go with them. As I grew older and my worldly view wider I came to realize that what I considered the big city was to many a minor suburb, but never the less it was and still is my home.

This lack of size and economic opportunity has never stood out more than when I began my career in Information Technology. After graduating from Marshall University with what I still believe to be a very respectable skill set many of my fellow graduates flocked to bigger areas such as Columbus, OH, RTP and Atlanta. I chose for a variety of reasons to stick around here and make a career of it and all in all while not always the most stable it has been fairly successful.

There are very few large datacenters here with most datacenters being composed of a handful of racks. Some go to work for various service providers, others enter the VAR space and I found my niche in what I like to call the Hyper Converged Administrator role. The HCA tends to wear most if not all of the hats; virtualization, storage, networking, server administration, etc. I consider myself somewhat blessed that I’ve managed to avoid the actual desktop admin stuff for most of my career, but still some of that too.

In the past couple of years I’ve got more and more active within the social IT community by way of conference attendance, social media and blogging and while it hasn’t necessarily changed the direction my career is going … Go Read More →

Presenting at VeeamON 2015: Design, Manage and Test Your Data Protection with Veeam Availabilty Suite

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Last week I was presented with the honor of being invited to speak at Veeam Software‘s annual user conference, VeeamON. While this was not my first time doing so I was very happy with the end result this year, with 30-40 attendees and positive feedback both from people I knew beforehand as well as new acquaintances who attended.

My session is what I like to think of as the 1-1000 MPH with Veeam, specifically targeting the SMB space but with lots of general guidelines for how to get your DR system up and running fast and as error-free as possible. Some of the things I do with Veeam buck the Best Practices guide but we have been able to maintain high levels of protection over many years without much interruption. The session starts with the basics of designing your DR plan, then designing your Veeam infrastructure components to suit your needs, followed by tips for the actual implementation and other tricks and gotchas I’ve run into over the years.

Anyway due to the amount of information that was covered I promised attendee’s that I would put my slide deck out here for reference so here it is. If anybody has comments, questions or anything in between please feel free to reach out to me either through the comments here or on twitter. For attendees please keep an eye on your e-mail and the #VeeamON hashtag as the videos of all presentations should be made available in the coming weeks.
This is an embedded Microsoft Office presentation, powered by Office Online.

Let’s See How This Goes: Getting Started with vDM30in30

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For those of you that don’t know the idea of #vDM30in30 (virtual Design Master: 30 articles in 30 days) started last year by the same fine folks that bring you vDM with the stated goal of getting people to write more and become better writers. You can learn more about the basic rules in Eric Wright’s (aka discoposse) post announcing this year’s event. I caught up to the idea a little late in the game to make any kind of effort at it, but this year due to my writer’s funk of late I’ve decided to give it a go.

So what do I expect to write about? Since I’m freshly back from Veeam Software‘s annual VeeamON conference expect quite a bit of content related to that. Also I’ve had a few ideas regarding career and community here lately so there will be quite a bit of that as well. Past that? I guess we’ll just have to see what happens.

If you are interested in participating yourself really the only two things you need to remember is to write/create content anywhere (go setup a blogger.com account if you don’t have a site yet) and then post to social media with the #vDM30in30 hashtag, that’s it! If you don’t feel like you are ready for that kind of commitment, trust me, I get you, then you can still follow along and learn from everybody else using the same hashtag. For those of you who are participating good job and I look forward to learning from you!

Quick How To: A restart from a previous installation or update is pending.

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Just a quickie from an issue I ran into today trying to upgrade vCenter 5.5 to Update 3, or at least the SSO component of it. Immediately after running the installer I was presented with an MSI error “A restart from a previous installation or update is pending. Please restart your system before you run vCenter Single Sign-On installer.” Trying to be a good little SysAdmin I dutifully rebooted, repeatedly, each having no effect on the issue. I’ve seen different versions of this error in the past so I had an idea of where to go but it seems to require googling each time. This is caused by there being data present in the “PendingFileRenameOperations” value of the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager key. Simply checking this key and clearing out any data within will remove the flag and allow the installation to proceed.

In this case I had an HP print driver doing what they do best and gumming up the works. I’d love to say this is the first time I’ve been done in by a print driver but you all would know I’m lying. 🙂

VMworld 2015: What We Know So Far

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As the first general keynote is wrapping up here in San Francisco I’ve been trying to keep track of what’s been announced this morning both in the keynote but also by way of the blogsphere. Long story short my take is there isn’t any thing new for the traditional vSphere customer, but if you are ready to start moving some of those workloads to the cloud there is going to be plenty of new things to enable what VMware is calling the hybrid cloud (repeatedly); the ability to support both your legacy apps (you know what we’re actually using) as well the new, shiny cloud native apps your developers are deploying at the speed of light.

Please forgive the notes based format found below, but I wanted to get the information out there.

Announcements so far:

Where In The VMworld Is Jim?

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Two weeks from today the official start to VMworld 2015 begins and to say I am excited to head out is a bit of an understatement. VMworld is a great place to learn more about a different branch of virtualization, see the bleeding edge of this technology and meet new people or renew conversations with some of the brightest minds in the industry. I myself will be focusing on VDI, specifically in the case of Disaster Recovery, and looking at Hyper-Converged systems this year along with all the other fun stuff. While this is only my second year going I’ve found that one of the biggest challenges to VMworld is schedule management; if you are interested in the social/community side of things you can very well go 20 hours a day Sunday through Thursday. Even with that you are going to be challenged to hit all the things you want because there is a great deal of overlap. With a paid conference attendance you (or VMUG Advantage membership) you will be able to view the vast majority of sessions online after the fact, but that doesn’t help with the get out and meet people stuff.

Since by nature I am a schedule driven kind of guy I took some time this weekend to kind of map out the whats and the wheres to what I want to do and in hopes of getting to meet up with the 5 people who may read this blog I’ll throw a copy of it out here. The sessions are still in flux because there a few that are full that I still  hope to make it into, especially a couple of the Expert Led HOL Workshops, but I think I’ve got the rest of it worked out. Hope to see you there!

… Go Read More →

Proud to be a Veeam Vanguard

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On July 27th Rick Vanover over on the Veeam Blog announced the inaugural class of what is known as the Veeam Vanguard of which I am honored to have been selected as a member. What the heck is a Veeam Vanguard? While best described in Rick’s announcement blog post, my take is that this group is composed of members of the IT and virtualization global community who are Veeam users and go above and beyond in sharing their knowledge of the ins and outs of the various Veeam products.  Frankly I am flabbergasted to be named and wish to thank them for the nomination.

Without getting too gushy or fanboyish, I have found over the years that Veeam’s products tend to solve problems we all deal with in a virtualized world. Backup & Replication especially had made my day in, day out life easier because I know my data is nice and protected and I can test just about anything I want to do without effecting the production environment.

In closing I just want to say congrats to all of the other nominees and that I look forward to seeing what you have to share. To say the group is geographically diverse is an understatement as Veeam was ever so nice to include the nationalities of all members, it’s very cool to see so many flags represented. Many included I’ve followed on twitter and the blogspace for quite some time, while are others are new to me but in the end I’m sure there will be some great knowledge shared and I look forward to getting to know you.