Austin PowerShell User Group - From Scripting to Toolmaking: Taking the Next Step With Powershell

About a month after my presentation of my “From Scripting to Toolmaking: Taking the Next Step With Powershell” session presented at SpiceWorld 2019, I presented the same topic to the Austin PowerShell User Group. Having a longer period of time to give my presentation led to me being a little bit less rushed, and gave me some time to demo some advanced methods for better performance with PowerShell. You can get more details on the presentation in my blog post about SpiceWorld, the video of the presentation here, and the version of the slides from this session here.

Being Effective at Technical Communication - Technology Not Required

The leaders of the NY/NJ VMUG chapters selected me to present to their usercon in September 2019, for a session titled “Being Effective at Technical Communication - Technology Not Required”. This session is meant to help IT Pros more effectively deliver their presentations and messages, both within their current organizations, and throughout their careers. Many of us focus too much on the technology which is part of our roles, and we do not give enough attention to developing soft skills such as effective communications.

Spiceworld 2019 - From Scripting to Toolmaking: Taking the Next Step With Powershell

I got selected to present at SpiceWorld (hosted by Spiceworks) in September 2019, for a session titled “From Scripting to Toolmaking: Taking the Next Step With Powershell”. I also got to attend a great PowerShell workshop and a few sessions by one of my PowerShell heroes, Jeff Hicks, and to chat with another Microsoft MVP and Veeam Vanguard, Dave Kuwala. It was pretty cool to see my picture next to these two on the speakers page.

VeeamOn 2019 Presentation – Automate Yourself Out of a Backup Job: Advanced PowerShell and API Usage

I have had requests to make my slides from the newest “Automate Yourself Out of a Backup Job” presentation available, so I am finally getting them posted here for public download. The attachment is only a PDF export of the presentation slides themselves. I will be working on recording my demo videos with some added voiceover, so they will be available outside of the recorded breakout sessions posted on the VeeamON site.

Tech Field Day Extra VMworld 2018 – Runecast

DISCLAIMER: I was invited to join in for a few vendor presentations during Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld US 2018, but I was provided any compensation, only stickers/swag. No one requires that I write this blog post, nor did they request it. I have written my honest opinion about this vendor, product and the presentation made during Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld US 2018. Runecast was the third and final presentation which I attended at Tech Field Day Extra during VMworld 2018.

HPE Storage Tech Day starting now

HPE has invited a great group of bloggers and influencers to join for HPE Storage Tech Day. We are here to get a deep dive on all things storage within the HPE ecosystem, including all of the topics seen here: You can find out more by watching the livestream, by keeping an eye here for blog posts as a follow-up, or by checking content from anyone within this great list of bloggers:

Tech Field Day Extra VMworld 2018 – Quali

DISCLAIMER: I was invited to join in for a few vendor presentations during Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld US 2018, but I was not compensated in any way, I only grabbed some stickers/swag during this event hosted by GestaltIT and the Tech Field Day organization. No one requires that I write this blog post, nor did they request it. I have written my honest opinion about this vendor, product and the presentation made during Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld US 2018.

Tech Field Day Extra VMworld 2018 – JetStream Software

DISCLAIMER: I was invited to join in for a few vendor presentations during Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld US 2018, but I was not compensated in any way, I only grabbed some stickers/swag during this event hosted by GestaltIT and the Tech Field Day organization. No one requires that I write this blog post, nor did they request it. I have written my honest opinion about this vendor, product and the presentation made during Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld US 2018.

Storage Field Day 17 is about to begin

After too long of a hiatus, I am out in Silicon Valley this week for the honor of being a first-time delegate for Tech Field Day, specifically at the Storage Field Day 17 event. I’ve still got posts coming from TFDx at VMworld 2018. This is the event specific page where you can find out more about Storage Field Day 17. Here is where you can learn more about the awesomeness that is the ecosystem of Tech Field Day.

FYI: Veeam Credential errors after April/May 2018 Windows patches

I just wanted to post this up in case it helps someone else out. Short recap: Starting yesterday, when our VBR server was inadvertently rebooted and finished applying some patches that were outstanding for many weeks (don’t get me started on the fiasco of a background story), we started getting multiple failures and error messages. I only caught this while doing a job reconfiguration and trying to map a cloned job to an existing backup chain, which was failing with an error of “Unable to perform data sovereignty check…".

VeeamOn 2018 Presentation – Automate yourself out of a (backup) job

I had some folks who have asked for a copy of my presentation titled ‘Automate Yourself Out of a (Backup) Job’. Below is both a PDF export of the presentation slides, along with a copy of the full PPT with the embedded videos. PDF Version is available here, and the full PowerPoint version with embedded videos is available here. I hope this helps y’all out on your path and gives you some benefit within your own environments.

Installing the Pure Storage plugin for Veeam Backup & Recovery Snapshot Integration

Whew, that title is a mouthful. This post will cover the installation and configuration of the Pure Storage plugin for Veeam Backup & Recovery, but we’ll incorporate some background first. One of the most significant enhancements released with Veeam 9.5U3 is one from which most users have not seen direct improvement — until now. The specific enhancement that I am referring to is the Universal Storage API, which is the framework that storage vendors can leverage to integrate their storage arrays to allow for Veeam to offload snapshots for backup & recovery operations to the array, rather than relying on VMware snapshots.

Exagrid Installation and Initialization

We are testing out two new ExaGrid 40000E appliances. These will be new initial target repositories for backups from Veeam Backup & Recovery. This is a prime opportunity to get out another article about the install and initialization of the ExaGrid hardware. I intend to follow with a post about the benefits of the Veeam integration. ExaGrid is an exceptional idea for their layout with the distinct partitions of a “landing zone” and “retention zone”.

First impressions on CWOM – a less green Turbonomic

Early this year, there were talks of Cisco acquiring Turbonomic. A few months back this became a partnership to release Cisco Workload Optimization Manager (CWOM). This is one of the newest products included in the Cisco ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite. Cisco Workload Optimization Manager is now in its 1.1.3 release. Starting with this release, you can target UCS Director as an orchestration target. I would love to leverage this, I now need to get UCS Director back into the environment).

Own The Imposter Syndrome

Howdy, this is Joe Houghes. I’d like to introduce myself some in my first real post before I try and speak about technical content. This has been a big year of change for me with regards to my career, personal life, and social presence. As such, I want to share some reflection. This relates to my own experience as someone new to sharing knowledge with others. I’m a run of the mill 35-year-old out of shape IT geek who is a native of Austin, Texas.

Potential upgrade issues going to Cisco UCS Manager 3.2(1d)

We recently upgraded a few of our UCS domains from 3.1(1h) and 3.1(2b) up to 3.2(1d) and we had issues with a few IO modules hanging for up to 2 hours with trying to activate the firmware. The backup version was updated with no issues, but then the activation stalled through anywhere from 16 to 30 tries before failing. We decided to leave most of the faulted IOMs alone to see what they would do, but after 2 hours we decided to attempt a reset of one IO module, and that just made it angry…

Welcome to the blog

Howdy everyone, this is Joe. I recently got accepted into the vExpert program for 2017 (second half) mostly based on internal and vendor community contributions. It’s now time to become a bit more social and share what I can with the wider community. I’m starting off with adding VMware content about the VMworld 2017 experience. Along with that I’ll be sharing experiences a UCS, PowerShell and VEEAM, and we’ll see where things go.