Transcript
We're back, start of the year, semi, at least half of us are in normal circumstances. Happy New Year, Madalina. Good day, Rick, good day, community, and happy New Year to everyone. Wish everyone a fantastic 2026. With a lot of traveling, it looks like you are on the road again. Tell us about it, Rick. I did not expect you to be already on the road. What's happening? Yeah, me neither. So, yeah, I had a partner event come up in Las Vegas, actually, which is ironic, because I'll be back here next week. But yeah, just a short trip. Well, three nights, I guess that's not short. But yeah, I'm in Las Vegas, and then it was just like I had so much good time off, and I really had a good rest over the holidays. So that's over, though, that's for sure. Yeah, it's going to be a full year with good stuff. I know at the community, at least, we have amazing plans for 2026. And also today we have a lot of great content to share, because our community was super active during the holidays as well. So looking forward to jump into that. Yeah, let's do it. I'm on one screen again, everyone, so please forgive the crazy, you know, cascading. But I think we're seeing it correct now. And first up is a name we haven't called in a long time, Johan. Looks like Johan is playing with the new Windows Admin Center VMO. This is pretty interesting. Yeah, this is a good one from Johan. And indeed, I think it's been a while since we mentioned him in the recap, but glad that you are back. It seems like he had some time off, and he decided to put on some great content. So thank you for that, Johan. And yes, you are right. He looks at the new Windows Admin Center virtualization mode preview with a focus on Hyper-V host onboarding, the cluster management, the VM creation, the role-based access. And Johan is testing it on Windows Server 2025 and walks us through what works well today and what still feels unfinished. And, you know, probably a solid first step, he says, especially around onboarding and the VM creation. Very simple, very familiar if you already use the Windows Admin Center. And Johan, what he talks about, it's interesting in here, about the BGAP RBAC at the VM level, which is kind of still missing, and it will matter probably a lot for the enterprise environment. And he says, you know, maybe you don't want to base a migration decision on this yet, but it's definitely something worth watching as it matures. So I think that's a great perspective. Really like that. Thank you, Johan, for putting together. Or Johan, actually. I said Johan. No problem. No problem. So I really like this, Johan, in the sense of, you know, it comes up every day, the new virtualization platform discussion, and I'm a big Hyper-V fan. So, yeah, this is something to watch. So, yeah. Will there be more? Let's see. Say what's next. Let's see if we can see if you cover some of these other topics. So thank you, Johan. I'm sure he's going to get back with more if he's not getting too busy with VME stuff. Yeah. So, yeah. VME stuff, that happens. Yeah, indeed. Keeping on the Microsoft train, we've got Eric, aka Double E, as I like to call him, up with part three of one of his security posts around the VMAP from Microsoft Sentinel, which was new, that came out last year. So it's good to see that he's picked up the series. Yeah, indeed. And I think we haven't called Eric in a long time as well, but he's been quite present in here. Probably we have a lot of content and we had to always choose, you know, so it was not his turn. But great to have you back in the recap, Eric. And I really like this one. As you said, he talks about the VMAP for Microsoft Sentinel. This is part three from the series. And the VMAP for Microsoft Sentinel, that's a dedicated solution, right, that makes it much easier to turn VMSyslog data into something actually usable. And instead of building and maintaining your own rules, the app comes with like 100 plus built-in analytics rules ready to use workbooks for backup and security visibility and playbooks to let you take action directly from Sentinel. And Eric puts a strong emphasis in this article on time to value. He says getting logs into Sentinel is straightforward, but turning them into something actionable usually is not. So the built-in rules, dashboards, playbooks remove a lot of the manual effort and make it much easier for teams to integrate Veeam into their security workflows. And if you're already using the Microsoft Sentinel, I think this is just like a practical, very mature step forward. It doesn't feel just as another integration. So good stuff. Are we going to get more parts of this, Eric? Let us know. Yeah, I'd hope so. This is really good stuff when you can see it, you know, in Sentinel here, which I love that point of the time to value from getting these alerts and then really putting it into like specific information for your environment. So that's really awesome. Thank you, Eric. Hopefully we call your name again soon. All right, here's another one. This guy, Pete Steven, like this guy, smart one, he is talking about his kind of perspective on a great combination of the 3-2-1 rule, combining the hardened repository and the object-first would-be appliance. Yeah, really cool picture, right? You have would-be and then you have, oh, look at that one. Yeah, wow, didn't see that coming. Love at first sight. Yeah, that's a cool one. But, yeah, what Peter is doing here, he's comparing as well the Veeam hardened repositories and object-first appliances, and then he's highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of each. He explains why, especially for SMEs and SMBs, combining the two technologies can create a much more resilient, secure, flexible backup architecture. You can use the hardened repository for the speed and the simplicity and object-first for security and immutability, he says. And this is not just a product comparison. He's using, like, real-world experience to put everything in this article. And combining both approaches makes a lot of sense. You get the best of both worlds without having a very complicated environment. So he says, like, for smaller organizations in particular, but I would say probably for all organizations, this is like a practical way to help your cyber resilience and operational reliability. So pretty good one. We hear a lot of object-first in here, but I think that this is more like something very practical, something that he experienced, you know, by using both and making a lot of tests. So I really kind of like this perspective. Thank you, Peter. Yeah, for sure. Thank you. And I also like that he did kind of highlight some potential disadvantages, you know, of the combination here. So I think that's also a fair, balanced perspective here. And, yeah, he's got the disadvantages really of both angles, which, you know, are one of the things you want to think about from a management standpoint. But in the end, it looks like he loves it. So I think that's really cool. And the other thing I'll kind of highlight here is just that, you know, this is one of the many ways you can draw up the 3-2-1 rule, and it's super important. I feel like, you know, I'm in my 16th year here in Madalena. I always talk about the 3-2-1 rule, but I probably still need to talk about it more. But thank you so much, Pete Steven. By the way, Pete is smart. He is an advanced practitioner. He lives this stuff every day. So this is, you know, right from a real scenario. Yeah, really nice guy. We're happy to have him in the VIM 100 program as well, and thank you for sharing good stuff at the community hub with us. Indeed. All right, so we have plenty of other things to talk about, but those are the three featured content. But for the Vanguard Blog Spotlight, you've pulled something fun out of the box here today, Maddy, and Mohamed is up with the VIMBot 13 Adventures of sysadmin Sam. I did not see this coming. I thought this was different and fun, you know, coming, Mohamed, of course, coming again with another genius idea, technical comic series. That's how I called it. Pretty cool. And this seems to be the second episode of the series. And as you said, we have some cool characters in here, the sysadmin Sam, the VIMBot V13, and the Ransom Raccoon, and pretty cool AI pictures we have there. And he's basically what he's doing, I think, with this, where he's going with this series is like focusing on the new security features in Vim Backup and Replication V13. And he highlights AI threat detection and the Raccoon Scanner 3.0, the AI malware analysis. And basically, he's showing us how the system can detect suspicious behavior and identify safe versus compromised restore points. And I really like how this, you know, explains serious security features in a very fun and visual way. And the comic makes it easy to see how AI-driven detection and malware analysis in V13 can protect backups proactively. And this is just informative, but also engaging and really clever way to make the technical security features approachable for the community. And you know what I was thinking, like for the techies, dads, you know, produce their kids to technical world, this is an awesome series. So fantastic work again, Mohamed. Thank you for sharing that. Yes, very creative part, creative delivery here. It's not fleas, it's advanced encryption software. That's hilarious. Awesome. I'm getting a little giggles out of that. So thank you for the comic. You know, this takes me back to my childhood. So that's, this is awesome. This is great. What the face. Yeah. All right. Final call for the Vim Vanguard 2026 class nominations. They're open until Friday of this week. Nicola extended it a little bit. Isn't it January? I think she said Jan, she extended it. Jan, she said January 11th. 11th. Okay. So that would be Saturday, I guess. That's Sunday actually. Yeah. I think she's going to keep it open. Basically Sunday included. And she's going to close it Monday. So I think you still have a bunch of days to apply if you haven't done so. Yes. Yes. And so final call. So if you see this and you want to apply, drop everything and do it now. All right. So I want to take a moment. You know, it's first of the year. We've got a lot of content that we just talked about. We also have a lot of events that are getting ready to activate. But we had a really important milestone happen over the holiday, Maddie. Over 30,000 members. This is wild. I know. We've hit this exciting milestone. I had to put it as well on LinkedIn. I don't know if you saw my post, but I had to put it there. The Vim Community Hub now has over 30,000 members. I remember when I started back mid-2022 with Vim, we had around 11K. So it's a really big milestone to get to 30K. And I want to say a big thank you to all of you for being part of our community and your community and to everyone helping share and promote great content and projects on the hub. And we appreciate each and every of you. It's a really good reason to celebrate. Yeah, it's absolutely incredible. We've seen incredible growth in just, you know, active chats and questions getting answered. It ensured a lot of people. And, you know, for those of you watching, if you go to, like, events up here, you know, you'll see going into 26 all the groups. They took a little holiday break, but they're going to be activating up here pretty soon, right? So don't worry. This will get populated up very, very soon. Absolutely. We are working already on a bunch of VUG events. So they are on the pipeline. And also I want to say that if you are looking forward to watch Vim 100 show, it's coming back in February. It's going to be with a little bit of twist. So I'm really looking forward for this year series of Vim 100 show. Yeah. And just to give you a sense, I mean, this is the history. I mean, there's a lot that goes on here around the world, online stuff, in-person stuff, local language stuff, you name it, we got it. So good stuff. And we could not do it without the community and then some of the sponsors that help the different community events. So thank you all for sure. And this year we are activating a few more groups as well in Latin America. So stay tuned for that. Latam never disappoints. Love it. Never. We love it. All right. Next up, this little special project you were working on, eh? Yeah. I know I promised I'm coming back with the video recap from Vim 100 Summit. I was hoping it would be ready earlier. I wanted it to be a surprise for Christmas. It didn't happen because our video producing team was very busy at the end of the year. So it got a bit postponed, but it's finally ready. I've been working with Jingwen, and I want to thank her for her help in the past two weeks. And we have a great recap in here. I think it's fantastic, and I really want everyone to watch it and share any thoughts. And, you know, the Vim 100 members and the VUG leaders that were present at the Vim 100 Summit in Prague last year, just share, as I put it in there, what was your favorite moment or, you know, what excited you the most. Just share it with us in the comments. It's great. And thank you all for participating in the interviews, and we are happy to have it finally out there. Yeah, so this was awesome in the sense of, yes, Jingwen did a great job. She is a fantastic person on our video team. And I love that you've just captured all these different types of moments here. So give it a watch. This is great. If you're on the edge of, do I want to apply for Vanguard? Well, now you do. Exactly. Now you do. Yeah, now you do. All right. So guess what? Sophia's back from vacation. We have who's new. And we are happy to welcome plus 388. Oh, boy. I love that name. Look at that. That's great. Yeah. Yeah, Nightmare, Guardian, Mr. Abs, and Little Fool is Alfred's pick. You have a badge coming your way. So I just love seeing those creative usernames. Sorry about that. Now we're back. But, Maddie, it's been a great 25, and it's going to be a busy 26. I can already tell you it's going to be an absolutely crazy 2026. I know, but I am looking forward to it. Am I crazy that I'm looking forward to the craziness? No, because it would be a problem if it scared you. So, yeah. Okay. So let's do it. Let's have a great 2026 then. All right, everyone. So next week I'll be right back here in Vegas. I'll probably be right back here doing this call at either 5 or 6 in the morning. That's what I do for you because it's just ridiculously late for Maddie, especially this time of year when it gets dark so early. But thank you so much, Maddie, for curating the content. My pleasure. All right, everyone. We will see you next week on 246.
