Kevins Adventures in Life and IT
Kevins Adventures in Life and IT
I’ve not posted for a few weeks as my partner and I have been looking after the newest addition to our household, our little girl Rosalie.
Rosalie came into our lives at 17:28 on 7th Feb, 2018 and has been the recipient of much love and attention since then from family and friends.
I’m back on deck now and will start trying to get more regular blogs out.
VMware has the ability to pass through from shared storage the raw settings of a LUN to a single VM. This Raw Device Mapping (RDM) is achieved using a proxy file inside of a VMFS volume. The benefits of this include being able to send disk commands to the storage, and support for clustering technologies. In the Veeam world this has stopped backups from working as Veeam has traditionally accessed VMware snapshots to perform backups.
With the addition of physical agents, centrally managed through either the Veeam console or through Veeam Availability Console, these VM’s can now be protected, providing cluster aware backups on RDMs, inside of the virtual world.
Before we dive into protecting RDMs, lets take a look at what they are, how they are different, and some competing technologies.
For block storage presented to VMware, there are four major ways to use the storage. RDMs, independent disks, vmdks, and VVols. Continue reading “RDMs, Clusters, and Veeam”
Wolfe Creek. Ask anyone who has seen the film Wolf Creek if they would go there and the answer is extremely likely to be “No!”. But if you’re this close it’s hard to say no, especially if you love photography and really strange spots.
I’ve been incredibly fortunate to go all round Western Europe when I was younger, and as I’ve gotten older some of the most beautiful ski spots in the world, and some of the best places in the world for work.
Wolfe Creek stands apart from these places and is in the same league as Uluru, Pearl Harbour, and Normandy for the haunting stillness, and sense of grandeur.
Wolfe Creek is a crater from a meteorite impact around 300,000 years ago and is about 870 metres in diameter and 60m deep. To get there you have to go down the Tanami Road. Calling it a road is a bit of a leap though as it was a dirt track about 8 lanes wide through cattle country, and the cattle were crossing it whilst we were going along it, and graders were on some sections but not others. Continue reading “Wolfe Creek”
I spent a week at the start of the year in Bangkok for Sales Kick Off. Each year the company sends me to different parts of the world and Bangkok wasn’t somewhere I thought I’d end up getting to see. Just getting to Bangkok was a mini adventure up to Singapore and across, once again the tyranny of distance was in effect. Getting to see everyone from the company was great, and the updates on where the company is going was invaluable. And I picked up a couple of awards.
I woke up on Monday to the smell of smoke, and the thump of helicopters. A quick search online and I spotted the problem, a bushfire had been started in Kings Park, around 3 blocks away from the house. After sending a message to a friend on the other side of the park I checked where the fire was on Sky News and found out that it was actually heading towards the house.
I woke my lovely girlfriend, and threw some supplies in the back of her Land Rover and then we had the word come through that the fire was contained. It smouldered away for a couple more days, but didn’t cause any more problems. I cannot thank enough the pilots of the helibombers, who were doing an amazing job.
The fire at night