Category: General

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2020 – A retrospective view

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration when I say “2020 was a year like no other.” Pretty much everyone in the IT industry and elsewhere will confirm that. I’m taking this last day of 2020 as an opportunity to write my last blog article of the year and review important events for me in it.

January

The year began quite normally, almost like any other. After the turn of the year, tasks and projects for the coming months slowly started. According to experience, it is a quiet month, because many customers usually don’t resume work before the second week.

February

February had some of my personal highlights of the year.

We held a VMUG meeting in Nuremberg on February 13th. Today I have to add that it was an on-site meeting. At that time a matter of course. Today it sounds like a tale from a distant past. I myself had given a presentation there on the topic of “Strategies for proactive error prevention”. A closer look at the products VMware Skyline and Runecast Analyzer. What do they have in common and what are their unique selling points?

A long planned private trip took us to the high latitudes of the Arctic. Spitsbergen in winter. No other event left such deep impressions this year like this one. On February 14th, after 84 days of darkness, the long polar night ends on Spitsbergen and the sun comes above the horizon again for the first time. In mid-April, the sun will not set at all for another 99 days. In the time in between the ice desert shines in wonderful light. We love the Arctic and wanted to experience this natural spectacle and – of course – capture it in pictures.

Polar bear warning applies to the whole archipelago of Svalbard.

Exploring Spitsbergen means being away from civilization for many hours at temperatures down to -38°C. Always accompanied by an armed guide, because the island is polar bear country and you’re required by law to have at least one armed member in your party once leaving the settlement.

We’ve learned, for example, that such simple things like eating can be a real challenge at very low temperatures We’ve also witnessed what it means to be caught in a white-out when the sky merges into the coulour of the ice, visibility is close to zero and everything around you is just white.

Svalbard reindeer

While being abroad I got a pleasant notification in my inbox. I was nominated to be a vExpert for another year.

March

Our stay lasted until the first week of March. But the world we returned to was a different to the one we left. Already on the way we read news about Corona outbreaks and sold-out toilet paper. When we left Germany, Corona was hardly a topic. Now it was THE topic and would remain so for months.

On March 11th, the last German on site VMUG took place at VMware’s premises in Munich. I myself was co-organizer and speaker and had no concerns about the train ride and the meeting at that time. Looking back and with the knowledge of today, it was certainly not the brightest idea. We were unnecessarily putting ourselves at great risk. Washing hands alone is not enough against SARS-CoV-2. Luckily (as far as I know), the event had no further health consequences for anyone involved.

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ExaGrid Time-Lock – Who’s (still) afraid of ransomware?

Introduction

Ransomware currently represents one of the most prominent threats to IT infrastructures. Reports of successful attacks are accumulating, the attacks are getting closer. More than 30% of all companies, institutes, universities or public authorities in Germany have already dealt with such attacks. In some cases, a ransom was paid to get access to their own data again.

Even with payment, success is never certain. After all, one negotiates with criminals. Authorities therefore advise against payment.

The essential protective measure against the consequences of such an attack is an up-to-date and consistent backup.

Ransomware vs. Backup

Unfortunately, attackers also know about the importance of backups. The currently circulating malware, such as Emotet or Ryuk, contain code that actively searches for backups on the net. Using previously obtained access data for Active Directory accounts or by attacking via RDP exploits or using the brand-new Zerologon exploit an attempt could be made to take over the systems that operate the data backup in the company or hold the backup data.

The automatic attack is often followed by hackers in the flesh who actively browse the net and try to destroy all backups. This is often an easy task, since backups today are preferably held on hard disk systems, permanently connected to the infrastructure.

The reason is obvious: If all backups are deleted or also encrypted, the compliance of the “customer” to pay his ransom increases by far.

Many approaches have therefore already been conceived to store the backup data out of reach of an attacker. A very simple and secure variant is an Air-Gap – a physical separation of the backup media from the system. For example, LTO tapes can be physically removed from the library.

Without this kind of time-consuming manual extraction – which would also have to be performed daily – the data remains latently vulnerable. It doesn’t matter whether it is stored on disk systems, dedup appliances, tapes in a library or even in an S3 cloud repository.

S3 cloud providers have therefore proposed an API extension called “Immutability” some time ago. With this, at least the backups in the cloud layer can be made immune to changes for a certain time.

Some of these solutions are natively supported by Veeam. Amazon AWS is one of them. Microsoft Azure is currently still missing. Furthermore S3 memory is not suitable for every application. A primary backup with Veeam on S3 is for example not directly possible. The S3 layer is only available as an extension of a scale-out backup repository.

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VMware vExpert 2020 application (2nd round)

The VMware vExpert program is VMware’s global evangelism and advocacy program. The vExpert program was designed by VMware to reward community members for evangelizing VMware’s products and services. Each year the title vExpert is awarded to people who have contributed to the community in an outstanding way. That can be bloggers, book authors, public speakers, VMUG leaders, VMTN contributors, VCDX and other IT professionals who share their knowledge.

Application

Application opens twice a year. Currently the second half application is open from June 1st to June 25th.

Why to become a vExpert

Yes there are benefits (I will come back to that later), but that’s not the point. Being a vExpert is not about what to get, but what you can give. Many vExperts put a lot of their spare time into the community. Preparing a blog post, a VMUG presentation or organizing a VMUG meeting consumes a lot of time. For those community warriors is the vExpert program.

Since I’ve joined the vExpert program I made a lot of friends in the community. I also witnessed a very warm welcome as a newcomer by seasoned vExperts. To name just a few there was Ather Beg from Britain, Andreas Lesslhumer from Austria and Vladan Seget from Reunion Island.

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VMUG GermanyVirtual Events 2020

Forced by the Corona Crisis we had to postpone our German VMUG UserCon 2020 to December 11th 2020. Meanwhile we’ll provide short bi-weekly virtual events. One hour, one speaker, one topic.

First speaker will be Niels Hagoort (VMware), co-author of Host Resources Deep Dive und Clustering Deep Dive.

You can join the Zoom session for free (VMUG registration required).