Rick Vanover
Rick Vanover is a Senior Director of Product Strategy at Veeam. Rick’s passion for challenges led to his commitment to educate and communicate at all levels—engaging those new to availability technologies as well as those who are experts. As a blogger, podcaster and active member of the IT community, Rick builds relationships and spreads excitement about Veeam solutions.
Before becoming the “go-to” guy for Veeam questions, Rick was in system administration and IT management. His community designations include Microsoft MVP, VMware vExpert and Cisco Champion. Follow Rick on Twitter @RickVanover or @Veeam.
On Feb. 1, 2012 Veeam Backup & Replication will have new pricing. This is timed loosely with the release of Veeam Backup & Replication v6, which brings 72 new and improved features to our flagship product.
Read more This is a special guest post by Veeam SE Mike Beevor from the United Kingdom. Follow mike on Twitter @MikeBeevor. Over the last few months, I have found myself being asked more and more about Veeam’s permissions, coming face to face with the ultra-paranoid of the IT world: the Security team. Having promised to send out the Permissions Guide to a customer with a rather unusual set up, I thought that I would blog about some of the more interesting questions I’ve been asked and some of the more useful information I’ve discovered.
Read more While completing the beta process before releasing Veeam Backup & Replication v6, we compiled a list of new v6 features and enhancements—a total of 72! Version 6 will be released very soon, officially this quarter; but the excitement is building by the minute! Although that earlier list is now public in the What’s New document, we wanted to show this in another way. We decided to create a numbered list for a better look at v6 features and enhancements: a 30,000-ft. view from the top. WOW!
Read more You’ve probably noticed a lot of Veeam Backup & Replication v6 promotional activities lately. We’ve previewed v6 at VMworld, SNW, TechEd and other big events. Further, we’ve just completed our special series of webinars that outline features of the upcoming release. These four webinars are now available for replay, and you can download the presentation slides as well.
As Veeam moves forward and starts to become focused two virtualization platforms, I thought to myself now is the time to work out how I’m going to introduce Microsoft Hyper-V in my lab environment. I wanted to know if it could be virtualized running inside a VMware virtual machine of some sorts. Veeam has been very successful in presenting its solutions through the use of portable labs running for example on laptops nested under VMware Workstation. We would often have a nested ESX server, vCenter, DC and Veeam apps running on a single laptop and I wanted to know if Hyper-V could be thrown into the mix.
Read more Since I’ve started at Veeam, I’ve had the unique pleasure of working on a number of different projects that engage virtualization technologies with the virtualization community. One of the projects I began working on right from the start was a community educational resource, Backup Academy. This week, we are happy to announce that it is now in session! But what is Backup Academy? Backup Academy has a simple mission:
VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas was an amazing week! The Veeam team was in full force, and we hope everyone who attended the event had a chance to stop by, say hello and check out the new features of Veeam Backup & Replication v6; which we previewed at our booth.
One of the things I like best about VMworld and other events is the constant interaction with the IT community. In doing so, I had one conversation with a Veeam customer that was a good story to share. Basically, his situation was this: an on-demand virtual lab was used to safely test and then adjust the ... Read more
No matter what segment of technology we are talking about, unique terms and a never-ending acronym soup seems to follow us. Veeam Backup & Replication has a number of terms that may be used as well. These can be shown in the product itself, discussed in the forums or even in these very blogs. Here is a rundown of five common terms in the product:
Storage options for a vSphere virtual machine (VM) can be configured a number of different ways. Each option has pros and cons associated with it, and every situation of course is different. Let’s start with the two main categories of storage resources in vSphere: NFS and SAN. NFS storage has VMDK files residing on an NFS share and is a standard file server protocol.
The vSphere SAN options are where the configuration choices increase and may become confusing. SAN options include VMFS volumes on fibre channel and iSCSI shared storage resources or local disk resources on an ESX(i) server.
When it comes to designing a vSphere environment, a lot of topics come into play in deciding how to provision storage to a virtual machine (VM). One decision point is whether or not to use Raw Device Mappings or RDMs. RDMs allow a special file in a VMFS volume to act as a proxy for a storage resource. The logical unit number, or LUN, that is a candidate for an RDM is attached to an individual VM; rather than formatted for the entire cluster. The benefits of using an RDM are for clustering support requirements and to allow disk commands to be sent directly to the storage resource from a VM.
