VeeamOn 2019 – Day 1
It all started with a joke to my wife when I said in November “He honey VeeamOn is right before your birthday in Miami. I think I will go there.” If looks could kill I would have been a dead man after I said that. But thanks god this look lasts only for 5 seconds and then my wife proposed a family vacation (3 weeks long) where I can attend VeeamOn during our stay in Miami. Well that went very well for me.
Anyway let’s jump right into VeeamOn and what happened during the 3 days. I have never attended a VeeamON before so I was curious about what to expect. Although the conference is scheduled for 3 days there are only 2 days of technical content in form of breakout sessions, each 45min long, as you know it from other conferences like VMworld. The first day started at 4pm and was just for registration and for the Veeam Welcome Reception in the Expo Lounge. I met there a lot of people I see only once or twice a year like Shane Williford, Al Rasheed, Val Carvalho, Jim Jones, Brian Knudtson, Christopher Glémot, Joe Houghes and many more. But I also had the opportunity to meet with people for the first time face to face like Florian Raack, Falko Banaszak, Luciano Patrão, Craig Rodgers and of course Vanny Vanguard. I also met the only other Austrian guy, Werner Steinegger, whom I know from my very first VMCE training. We had all great conversation and I’m happy I met all of you guys.
Day 1
Day 1 starts with the obligatory General Session where Veeam co-founder Ratmir Timashev talked about Veeam’s momentum, customer testimonials and key focus on Microsoft. Veeam became a one billion dollar company and has 350k customers worldwide. Ratmir showed also the innovations Veeam delivered through the last years as well as a new program called “with Veeam”. Also Veeam Availability Orchestrator v2 was announced.
The General session overall was good and only 1 hour long so the rest of the day was packed with breakout sessions.
Breakout session 1: The Dark Side of the Synthetic Backup
When I read the title for the first time I thought that doing synthetic backups are bad and they will show us why but the session turned out to be completely different. In summary the session was about how synthetic backups in Veeam works, how the internal file structure of such backups look likes and what tools I can use if something goes wrong. It was one of the deepest deep dives I have ever attended at a conference but it was cool content. I hope a recording or the presentation will be available afterwards. The only thing which could be improved is that the first presenter (unfortunately I forgot his name) should make eye contact with the audience more often.
Breakout session 2: From the Architect’s Desk: Sizing of Veeam Backup and Replication, Proxies and repositories
This session was delivered by Tim Smith (Solutions Architect at Veeam) in the General session room. I was really impressed that his session was there and that a lot of people showed up. The session was based on a customer example for backing up 2000 VMs. Tim walked us through the process on how to size all the components like Management Server, Proxies, Repositories, Database Server and Enterprise Manager correctly. He also mentioned that not only the sizing of the components should be done correctly but also the supporting hardware needs be be sized correctly. Also keep the laws of physics in mind. You can’t squeeze hundreds of TB in a reasonable amount of time through just 1Gbit.
Breakout session 3: Let’s manage Agents
This session was held by Dmitrii Popov (Product Manager, R&D) who gives us best practices on how to manage, implement and deploy Veeam Agents in our environments.
Technical General Session
The technical General Session was all about demos and the Product Strategy team around Rick Vanover showed us new products that were released at VeeamOn like
- Veeam Availability Orchestrator v2
- Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 v3
- Availability Console v3
But there were not only demos about new products but also demos about the future release of Veeam Backup and Replication v10 which was announced at VeeamOn. The 4 key features of the new version includes:
- Cloud Tier
- NAS Backup
- Direct Restore to VMware (Agent backup)
- Data Integrations
The audience got also a brief sneak preview of a new product Veeam is currently developing which is Veeam Backup and Replication for Microsoft Azure.
Beside the new cool technical features there were also 2 cool other things during this session.
- Michael Cade was wearing a Vanny Vanguard t-shirt!
- Rick Vanover dumped his laptop into water to demonstrate “Direct Restore to VMware”
Summary
Day 1 was from my personal view an awesome start for a great conference. I got so much technical information that can help me with my customers. Also the General Sessions gave an good overview where the company is going to and in which ways the products will evolve. My personal favorite was the session from Tim Smith about designing the Veeam infrastructure components. I hope this session was recorded and will be available after VeeamOn.