Tag Archive: PowerCLI


Its been a busy weekend – not only have I been to a most excellent Chilli Festival but I’ve been migrating the backend storage for my 2 Veeam Proxies from a temporary LUN on our main IBM XIV over to a dedicated MSA p2000 . Its cost effective and will allow us to replicate the backup data offsite for some extra resiliency. Its taken me a while but now that I have plenty of storage , I wanted to be able to crank up the retention time for the backups from the current 14 days.

 

If you’ve read the previous posts about the setup I have , you’ll remember that its split into a fair number of jobs , which I didn’t particularly fancy having to mod via the GUI. I remembered that there was a Powershell plug-in for Veeam backup installed with the application , so thought I’d open up the help file and see if this could be scripted.

 

You’ll be glad to know it can. With the following command I was able to add an extra 5 days retention to all backup jobs on the server. I’ll keep an eye on the consumed storage by this and hopefully be able to up retention to a target of 30 days.

 

Get-VBRJob|Set-VBRJobOptions -RetainCycles 20

I’m the furthest thing from a  powershell guru that you’ll ever imagine , but can still string a 1 liner together when I have to 🙂

trainsignal

Great as it is to take a week off to go on a classroom based training course , its not always possible due to restrictions on work / home life. Do not despair , you can still assimilate knowledge quicker than Neo in a battered recliner chair thanks to some of the many video training providers. These allow to to press your study at your own pace from work or from home. If you are looking for VMware training videos , then you need look no further than Trainsignal , who have been producing some of the best VMware training videos I’ve seen for quite some time.

The most recent release is the second volume of the vSphere Pro Series, a video training series that seeks to really go beyond VCP level , not only teaching you things you need for the exam but skills you are much more likely to need in your day to day life as a VMware admin. Series 1 covered such topics as VMware view, Power CLI and the Cisco Nexus 1000V virtual switch. Series 2 takes you into some vSphere Advanced features , VMware Site Recovery Manager , more PowerCLI , VMware Data Recovery and what I think is a first of many a section on 3rd party tools , in this case the Veeam series of products for vSphere , but more detail on all of that to follow.

The Keystone presenter of the Trainsignal VMware videos is David Davis – a voice you’ll recognise well from the old videos in the series and also from his free video site at http://www.vmwarevideos.com/ – if you like the content on there , you’ll know the Trainsignal videos are worth every penny.

He’s not alone though , in this series you’ll also hear from Eric Siebert ( http://vmware-land.com/ ) , Sean Clark ( http://seanclark.us/ ) and Hall Rottenberg (http://halr9000.com/ ) a Trio of fellow vExperts who should all feature heavily in your RSS Reader & twitter feeds.  Having more than one presenter makes this series for me as not only does a change of voice break things up a little , you get the feeling that each presenter is giving a talk on his strongest subject the he really does know inside and out ( and in many cases *did* write the book on! )

For a summary of the lessons , I’ll refer you to the link below – The TS folks describe their products much better than I can !

http://www.trainsignal.com/VMware-vSphere-Pro-Series-Training-Vol-2-P98.aspx

As you can see – there is a LOT of content in this pack – and mean a lot- 21 Hours. I anticipate needing a lot of redbull to try and watch them all in one session. However if I had to pick my favourites out  of the lessons so far, I felt that the Direct Path & VMCI sessions from Eric Siebert’s sections really taught me something new – not having the biggest home lab , I’ve yet to get a play with SRM , but found great value from Sean Clarks sessions. The most topical for me personally was the sections on Veeam’s Backup & Replication – as a product I am in the middle of rolling out I am going to try and persuade the powers that be that the purchase a multiple licence for this set so we can make use of the videos as on demand training sessions.

You are also spoilt for choice in terms of formats – not only do you get the DVD’s them selves , but on disk 3 there is also a copy of the Videos in MP3 / iPOD video / WMV and finally high quality AVI. As a non apple type person , I uploaded the WMV versions straight to my Touch HD2 to keep me occupied on the train back from the London VMware user group, The MP3’s went straight onto a USB stick to play in the car on my drive to work. The videos are also available as streaming content via the Trainsignal website – handy when you find yourself with a little spare time and a web connection.

I still have a few more videos to watch but I have a pretty quite weekend ahead , so I’m going to find a comfy chair , laptop and before you know it….

lolcate0b6c9a7ee5db24f9355ba079bf8df270d0020d3

EDIT: In the interests of disclosure I would like to make it clear that I received a complimentry copy of the video reviewed.