I was part of TechField Day 27 in not-so-sunny San Jose, CA, in March (3/8-3/10). There was a great focus on emerging technologies, in particular CXL. You can read about CXL here.
One of the companies presenting was Men&Mice and their DDI solution. Men&Mice is a smaller company based out of Reykjavik. I was particularly interested in their solution; while I don’t use an Excel sheet for IP management, I’m always interested in a better way to manage DNS, DHCP, and IPAM.
I wrote a Tech Note Article on Bare Metal as-a-Service is Packing up the On-Premises Datacenter powered by Pure Storage and its relevance in the financial industry. I was published at GestaltIT. You can check it out here.
During the last Veeam Vanguard/Veeam 100 summit in Prague, Czech Republic part of the summit was “Fun field facts” where attendees presented various topics they found useful for sharing. I presented on how to integrate Veeam Agent into Windows. This will be a short follow-up post on how to incorporate the Veeam Agent Recovery Media into Windows Boot Manager.
As part of the Veeam Vanguard program I was invited to participate in the community event in Prague, Czech Republic. This was the first time for me, and I’m forever grateful to be part of this group. This was also the first time of a combined event between Veeam MVPs, Veeam Legends and Veeam Vanguards.
Cloud Field Day 14 (https://techfieldday.com/event/cfd14/) took place in sunny Silicon Valley from June 22–24, 2022. I was honored to be a delegate and could attend in person. While I encountered some challenges on my travels to San Jose from Potomac, MD (Delta flight cancellation and SW doing a pitstop for more fuel), I did make it there!
CFD14 had a heavy focus on MutiCloud, with some presentations that took me a while to understand the concepts behind it. Check out the roundtable that was recorded onsite “Multi-Cloud is Inevitable” (https://gestaltit.com/podcast/stephen/multi-cloud-is-inevitable/)
It’s now been a few days after VeeamOn 2022, and I had some time to reflect on the first conference I attended post-Covid. (yes, I know Covid is still very much alive, but hybrid conferences are starting to be the new norm).
So, let me first say it was a blast. I have done, I don’t know how many, virtual conferences in the past 2 years (or 10, because if feels like eternity). When I attended the first virtual conference in 2020, Cisco Live, it was a novelty, but by the end of 2021, it surely had lost its appeal. And by no means do I want to diminish the work organizers put into a virtual conference; you just can’t beat meeting people in person to exchange ideas and build relationships.
VeeamOn is happening in-person and virtual next week (May 16th-19th). This is a hybrid event, and for me a special one; It will be my first VeeamOn event and the first conference I will attend in person since the pandemic. I’m stoked to be going back to Las Vegas in a week.
Earlier this week I received the email I’ve been looking forward to!
Dear Nico,
I’m happy to report that your 2022 Veeam Vanguard Renewal Nomination has been approved, congratulations! Through 2021, we hope you have enjoyed the Veeam Vanguard Program despite it has been still a different experience than we used to have before Covid times. We are happy to extend to you an invitation to the 2022 Vanguard class hopefully enabling us to host more events with an in-person element in the hybrid format, that will most probably become a new standard nowadays and meet you also in other than online way.
This will be my second year as a Vanguard and I’m forever grateful for the possibilities it provided to me.
Some of the highlights:
Access to test/beta version of software to run in the home-lab. I get to play with features that are yet to be released to the public.
Friday Vanguard calls, where a bunch of us join a meeting and talk about whatever comes to mind. Might be work, current news, weather, Internet in West Virginia, or family.
I was able to participate at VeeamOn update being interviewed in a very awesome TV Set as a customer of Veeam. It was a great experience and something I had never done.
Veeam Summit; While I was not able to go to Prague for the summit in 2021 due to concerns for Covid, I’m hopeful I’ll be able to attend this year.
Not gonna’ lie, the swag is top notch!
Slack channel for Vanguards, which is a great resource for laughter and to tip into the “Hive Mind”
If you are curious about the current list of Vanguards, it can be found here.
In November, I was honored to be invited to be a part of Cloud Field Day12 in wonderful San Jose, CA. This was the first hybrid event and the first time delegates were onsite since Covid hit the world. It was a split between onsite delegated and remote delegates from over the world. I’d highly suggest checking out TechFieldDay and Gestalt IT here and here.
We had a pretty good schedule with many excellent presentations from numerous companies. I was especially looking forward to MemVerge newest announcement of their product Memory Machine Cloud Edition. I first learned about MemVerge and their Memory Machine at TechField Day 22.
A while back I had a conversation with Synology and learned about their review program. After some discussion about different models for some testing scenarios I plan on doing, I received a very nice Synology DS1621+ well packaged. Currently disks are hard to come by, but I also received 4x Seagate IronWolf 4TB ST400NV008.
This blog series will go through some of the features and use case scenarios I’m planning on doing. This first part will focus on unpacking and getting the basic setup down.
