Blog Series Part 1 - Intro

Hello… This is the first in a series of blogs I plan on posting regularly (fingers crossed).  The first topic I will cover is my use of Veeam, how/why we started using it, and what we are doing with it now.  I will also plan to discuss business continuity/disaster recovery, our virtual infrastructure including, UCSX, storage, backups, and vSphere.  The purpose of these are not to be super technical but just to share how we over came small challenges and improved our processes and environment.

Let me start by introducing myself… My name is Eric Kubla and I’ve been in IT for 24 years, and I’ve been with my current employer for 15+ years and the last 6 as the IT Server Manager.  I have been a VMUG (VMware User Group) leader for the Pittsburgh VMUG group for 10+ years and US East VMUG Regional Champion Leader for 2023-2024.  I enjoy the community and attending VMUG UserCons/events, especially as a community speaker.  I attended 9 UserCons in 2023 and spoke at 8 and have been to 6 as a speaker so far in 2024.  I presented at VeeamON in 2023 and have had a community talk accepted at VMware Explore in 2024.  The community is fantastic and I have made a lot of friends from all over during my time as a VMUG member and leader.  And a huge shout out to the VMUG team that does so much for the community and makes all the difference!

I’m writing this blog on a plane from the Indianapolis UserCon on 6/11 to present at the New Jersey/New York UserCon on 6/12.  I will leave NJ/NY after my session and head to Minneapolis for their UserCon on 6/13.  Yes, I really do enjoy VMUG and attending UserCons!

A quick recap of how it all really got started… While we have been using VMware since 2010 with 4.0, we really only went all in around 2014 when we went through a large core conversion.  This conversion is what led us to using Veeam as we needed a DR scenario and since we had already piloted Veeam in our environment the previous year it made the decision quick and easy.  Quick and easy is what we needed as we were near the end of the conversion when DR was brought up.  The implementation and configuration to get us what we needed was truly quick and easy.

As we became more and more virtual, it was time to revisit our VI hardware.  At the time we were using HP rackmount servers and we started looking into more sensible solutions which led us to going with Cisco UCS.  With no knowledge of UCS, we were able to install and configure our environment with the help of Pluralsight videos.  Our initial UCS environment lasted us 8 years until 2023 when some of the hardware was nearing EOL.  We went with UCSX.

Over my series of posts, I will dive a little deeper in each of the topics mentioned above.  And while I will name vendors/products we use, or have used, I’m not openly prompting one or the other, we chose what we thought was best for us at the time.  You will learn over my series that we use multiple vendors and while we may have chosen one over the other, they have all worked for what we needed, some better than others.

I look forward to posting more and will plan on a new blog each week until I get tired of talking about it or run out of things to say.  Hopefully at that point I’ll have more, newer, stuff to discuss and share.

Thanks and hope you enjoy!