Author: Brian

Returned Peace Corps Volunteer, Systems Engineer, Papa, and eccentric individual.

I am constantly conflicted with building my LinkedIn and online persona, and my desire for privacy and anonymity.

VMworld 2021

I am floored that I will be presenting an on-demand session at VMworld 2021. This is an incredible honor and I am very encouraged that I having something to offer the wider mobility world.

 

Device as a Service – Taking Modern Management Beyond Windows [EUS1928]

Managing Device-as-a-Service requires approaching the WS1 console OG design with an eye towards maximizing automation and leveraging the API as much as possible. This presentation will explore lessons-learned when designing Workspace ONE from a notable Device-as-a-Service deployment. Successfully deploying 600,000 iOS devices and 100,000 Windows laptops using Modern Management approaches was enabled through up-front time working with VMware PSO, the customer, and maximizing available automations. An introduction to Device-as-a-Service will be provide by Jack Nichols, the Chief Technology Officer of CDWG.

Brian Deyo, Senior Consultant, VMware

Topic: Embrace Unified Endpoint Management
Track : End User Services
Primary Product: VMware Workspace ONE
Primary Audience: Platform/System Architect
Session Type: Breakout Session
Level: Technical 200
Pass Type: General and Tech+ Passes

Rule #1 of “Time to Restore from Backups” Club is Do Not Panic

Oh the lovely “Restore from Backup” dread that will only open pit in your stomach.

I received a panicked call from a friend recently who had the mistaken fortune of running a bad robocopy job that literally wiped out everything on their file server. When I say everything, I mean everything.

They had their Client backups on that server. Their file history on that server, folder redirection on that server. EVERYTHING.

When was their last reliable backup? Three months previous.

What had they done between panic and calling me? They did a rush job of buying recovery software and restoring from one drive with the live data. Unfortunately they restored to a drive that had only two weeks previous had everything on it. Using restore software on that drive and restoring to a different drive would have put their recovery point objective (RPO) only two weeks back.

Turns out its rather difficult to use recovery software on SSDs and get reliable data. This was something I wasn’t prepared for.

 

Workspace ONE PowerShell cmdlets

I’m going to reopen the PS1 script repository on GitHub. There is a significant amount of work to be done, but I don’t think I will be compelled to fix any of it unless it’s publicly accessible and I spot someone looking into it.

I was asked again today for a script to send a CustomMDMCommand for LostMode to a device via the API. Although this worked when I wrote it, there was a console discrepancy where the console didn’t actually reflect the device was in LostMode. The VMware documentation does specifically say to not issue an API command for anything that already has a function built in the console. This is clearly a good example of why not to do that.

In either case I would have been very quick to point my colleague to my repository had it been publicly accessible.