Disaster Recovery Story Contest!

The 1 year anniversary of Jpaul.me is right around the corner, May 1st to be exact!

To celebrate my first year of blogging, Veeam has graciously found some swag, and we even have a couple Amazon Gift Cards, to give away! The hard part was coming up with a reason to pick some winners…so here is what I’m thinking:

Because Veeam was nice enough to sponsor my site before it was even a year old, I wanted to somehow promote them as well as my blog. The contest will ask you to tell us about a VMware related “disaster” you’ve dealt with (be it a single file or an entire cluster). Then I, and a few others, will look though all the replies and determine the winners based on the “WOW” factor of your response. Hopefully your response will involve Veeam Backup and Replication and how it saved the day like it did for me a while back, after all some of the judges will be part of the Veeam Team.

So what do I have to do:

Short Version: Tell us a story 🙂

Long Version: Tell us a story about a VMware disaster that you have been through and tell us about how you recovered… how you saved the day so to speak, and preferably how you used Veeam to do it. Priority will be given to people who’s story involves Veeam products, but you are welcome to enter your story even if you used a different product.

How to enter:

Simple. Post your story as a comment to this post. Or if you have some sort of special requirements you can email me at [email protected].

The Deadline:

All comments posted between the date of this post and May 8th will be eligible, comments after that time will not be considered.

Winners will be posted on Monday May 9th or 10th (depending on motivation), and emails will be sent that day.

Rules:

  • You should only enter once, if you have multiple stories feel free to wrap them all into one post.
  • Winners will be chosen at the judges discretion
  • My co-workers aren’t eligible (sorry guys), nor are Veeam Employees
  • Winners will be notified via email, SO MAKE SURE TO USE YOUR REAL EMAIL ADDRESS
  • Email addresses are hidden except to me, and I promise not to sell them (unless someone offers me a huge amount of cash)
  • If winners do not respond within 48 hours of notification they forfeit their prizes
  • You should probably be 18, if you’re not 18 but are a VMware admin… wow, congrats to you man!
  • By entering the contest you give jpaul.me and Veeam the rights to use your story
  • If you have never posted a comment before the system will mark your comment for approval, don’t panic if you don’t see it posted right away, I will approve them on my 15 minute company mandated breaks lol

Example:

Here is the kind of thing we are looking for… you can keep it as anonymous as you need to.

“My cluster contains 2 ESXi servers and a Fiber Channel SAN. On a Sunday morning my one server which hosts a blog website was not responding. After logging into my vcenter server i discovered that the array group that my server was on was offline. I checked the SAN management interface to find that two drives had failed in my RAID5 group because I’m a slacker and wasn’t paying attention. I live about an hour from the data center, so driving in was a no-go at this point. To recover I RDP’d into the Veeam server and started the instant restore process and used it to present my Blog Server back to the ESX cluster from the previous nights backup. Within 15 minutes I had the server back online and working!!! Later I was able to storage vMotion the VM back to the SAN after I replaced the bad drives and rebuilt the array group.”

More information:

If you have any questions or if something isn’t clear, please feel free to shoot your questions to me at [email protected]

 

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4 Responses to "Disaster Recovery Story Contest!"

  1. My DR Story -> A fairly critical VM crashed. It just so happens this VM houses our A/V solution, our network monitoring solution, as well as…yep, you guessed our Veeam Backup & Replication. I wasn’t fully aware how intensely critical this VM was until it crashed. The VM wouldn’t boot after a VM Hardware change (increased vCPU). Luckily, I could access the drive by attaching the virtual disk to another VM. So, I created a new VM, then restored the Veeam DB to it with the help of Ben M. at Veeam support. From there, Ben helped walk me through restoring my jobs and verifying their completion success. During this process, it was realized that this VM’s criticality level needed to be elevated due to the importance of what it provides. It *IS* our DR recovery solution since it backs up and replicates all our critical VM servers to our offsite DR location. If this VM is down, we’re potentially ‘hosed’ without any DR recovery options. We now backup and replicate this VM offsite in the event of it crashing, or our main site crashing. Everyone talks about how great Veeam is for recovery, and I’m no exception…it’s excellent. But, what also sets Veeam heads above the rest is it’s ease of self-recoverability. Veeams recoverability in the event the host it’s installed on crashes is a lifesaver! THANKS VEEAM!

  2. Dateline Monday Morning… All of a sudden I’m getting emails and helpdesk tickets stating that users cannot access our web-based fiscal applications. Many of our customers are on a twice-a-month payroll system, and they needed to process payroll that day.
    I quickly determined the problem was related to an update that had recently been done to the VM. To get our users up and running quickly, I restored the VM using vPower NFS and the applications were back up within minutes. Fiscal departments were able to process payroll, and everyone was happy.

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