Webinar: Ben Armstrong AMA on Containers

Think containers are just for developers? Think again. Containers have recently gained massive industry adoption and many IT pros are now being asked to support this new disruptive technology. Are you in the know?

Join us on April 24th for a very special webinar with the co-creator of Hyper-V, Microsoft’s very own Ben Armstrong. Andy Syrewicze from Altaro will be moderating this AMA-styled webinar with Ben to answer all your burning questions about containers in the Microsoft ecosystem.

The discussion will include:

Industry adoption of containers

• Container and micro-services examples
• Best practices for deployment
• The future of containers

This webinar is a rare chance to ask your technology questions directly to Ben Armstrong drawing on special insights from the inner workings of Microsoft and over 20 years of experience working with operating systems and virtualization. It’s an opportunity you cannot miss!

We look forward to seeing you there!

Tuesday April 24th 2018

Webinar presented live twice

• Session 1: 4pm CEST
• Session 2: 1pm EDT / 10am PDT

To register, please click here

Upload your questions to Ben through social media in the coming days until the webinar and include #AskBenArmstrong hashtag, so he’ll be able to see them!

Archiving to Microsoft Azure

In this post, we are going to look into how to replace traditional physical tape and use the public cloud to store long-term archival data. We will look into using Microsoft Azure Storage - Cool Storage Tier. Currently when writing this post Archive Storage Tier is not available in South East Asia Region.

Microsoft Azure Blob storage is divided into 3 tier
a) Hot Tier - optimize to store data that frequent use
b) Cool Tier - storing data that is infrequent access and stored for at least 30 days
c) Archive Tier - optimize to store data that is rarely accessed and stored for at least 180 days

To calculate the cost of Azure Blob Storage according to tier, you can refer to https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/storage/blobs/

[Environment]

• Microsoft Azure 
• Veeam Backup & Replication
• Starwind VTL

[Pre-requisite]
1. Go to Azure Market Place, deploy Starwind VTL Appliance

2. Setup site to site vpn between on-premise and Microsoft Azure
3. Create new Azure Storage, upgrade it to v2 (Storage | Configuration | Upgrade)

Set to Cool  Access Tier

4. Add a new data disk into the VTL and point to Cool Access Tier Storage

[ Configure Starwind VTL]

1. Add Tapes and point it to Data Disk (where Cool Access Tier Storage) is located

[Configure Veeam Backup and Replication]

1. Use iscsi initiator and connect to VTL which located in Microsoft Azure.
2. Rescan your tape server and able to see drive & tape

3. Create a GFS Media Pool which the setting : Weekly -4, Monthly - 12, Yearly - 1
This pool has the retention:-

• 4 weekly
• 12 monthly
• 1 yearly

4. To protect the tape store in cloud, configure to use encryption and define the password.

5. Create a Tape Job and run the backup.

Lastly, backup successful transfer to Microsoft Azure Blob Storage (Cool Access Tier) using VTL.