Mike Preston, Author at mwpreston.net

She said I’m Tragically Hip

Posted by Mike Preston | Nov 19, 2016 | All Articles, Posts |

Come on, just lets go! She kinda bit her lip…geez I dont know I’ve written non tech related posts here before – usually it takes something near and dear to my heart to spark them. Hockey and music was kinda my crutch throughout my life – In the spirit of share, and the spirit of getting 30 posts out in 30 days this one will deal with the latter For those that don’t know there’s an iconic Canadian band called The Tragically Hip Their lead singer, Gordon Downie announced earlier this year that he had incurable brain cancer, you know, the shitty kind, as if their was a kind that wasn’t. Instead of undergoing treatment and calling it quits The Hip announced a country wide tour, starting in Vancouver, 15 shows later ending in their hometown of Kingston, Ontario – a small quaint city not far from where I live now and a place I called home for some time during college! God knows I tried to get tickets – I was online right at 10 o’clock the day they were released and I had four in my shopping cart but during check out something happened – I along with many, many other people, tremendous other people (see what I did there :)) doing the same thing were denied and the tickets were gone within seconds. Sheesh, you’d think...

StarWind Software HCA brings hyperconvergence to the SMB

Posted by Mike Preston | May 2, 2016 | All Articles, Briefings & Reviews, Posts |

Virtualization drastically changed the way we deploy applications and servers within our datacenters – eliminating racks upon racks of single purpose servers and replacing them with compute clusters and shared storage. In terms of IT, the timespan that virtualization has been mainstream has been short, but even in the small amount of time that it has been in our datacenters we have seen evolutions in the underlying infrastructure that supports virtualization. We’ve seen converged systems enter the marketplace, bundling the server clusters and storage together under one support SKU. From there we’ve went one level further with hyperconvergence, eliminating...

Adding Veeam Proxies to jobs via Powershell

Posted by Mike Preston | Apr 21, 2016 | All Articles, Automation & Scripting, Day to Day SysAdmin, Posts |

There will come a time in every growing environment when you need to scale your Veeam Backup and Replication deployment to help keep up with ever increasing demands as it pertains to backing up all those new virtual machines. Veeam itself has a couple of different deployment models when it comes to scaling – we can scale up – this is done by adding more CPU and RAM to our current proxies and increasing the number of maximum concurrent tasks that our proxies can process – a good rule of thumb for this one is dedicating a CPU per...

How the Friday Shorts posts come to be

Posted by Mike Preston | Apr 20, 2016 | All Articles, Posts |

I’m always looking for a way to automate things – whether it be in my work life, personal life, home life, or even my blog life – when I first started to do Friday Shorts, an initiative for me to share out some blogs and articles that sparked my interest it was a manual process. There was a lot of “Who wrote that article again?, What site was that again?, Where’s that link I emailed?” going on in my head and even though it was only a handful of links it was still a lot of work. Now I had already automated my sharing of links out to Twitter (needs an update BTW, oauth1 depreciated in Google Script now – another post) and for the most part I’ve found that the articles I chose for Friday Shorts are the same as the ones I share out. So with all that said I set out to automate a process that would at the very least get a draft of a Friday Shorts article into this blog – and this is what I’ve come up with. So in order to do this I’ve utilized four different services; Google Drive/Scripts, IFTTT, Delicious, and WordPress – each playing a key role in the automation. So the process goes as follows While perusing all the great blogs out there if I find one...

Quickfix – Mass editing Veeam VM Attribute settings with PowerShell

Posted by Mike Preston | Jan 11, 2016 | All Articles, Automation & Scripting, Backup & DR, Day to Day SysAdmin, Posts |

Hi – I’m Mike – you may remember me from such blogs as, oh this one last year! I know, it’s been a while since I’ve written anything, moreso, published anything. It’s been a hectic couple of months and I’ve got a ton of drafts sitting just waiting to be touched up so stay tuned – I promise to be a bit more visible in the next coming weeks! Anyways I called this a quick fix so I guess I should get to the point… There is a setting within the notification options inside Veeam Backup and Replication that allows you to write some details to a processed VMs annotations section. Now I’ve never had a use for this…until now. I was reporting on a wide variety of things in regards to specific VMs, and having the last successful backup was one of the things that I wanted to report on. This was within an asp.net application, and dropping to PowerShell and loading up the Veeam cmdlets was something I just didn’t feel like coding within the application. Also, accessing the Veeam REST API was out of the question seeing as these VMs were being processed by Veeam Standard lisenses – REST is only available within Veeam’s Enterprise Plus offering. Since I was already connected the vSphere API to gather a bunch of information such as CPU and Memory...