VeeamOn 2019 – Day 2

Some weeks befor VeeamON, Brian Knudtson was asking about some #vCommunity events happing at VeeamOn. I jumped onto this and included Shane Williford in this Tweet and suggested #vBreakfast. Thanks to Shane he found some great place called The Tavern which wasn’t too far from the venue.

So VeeamOn day 2 started with #vBreakfast which some of you already know from VMworld. Unfortunately I was little bit late because of the kids but I made it just with 20min delay. Other people I met there were Shane Williford, Brian Knudtson, Florian Raack, Falko Banaszak, Calvin Zito, Sebastian Talmon, Nathan Oldfield, Adrian Moser and again Vanny Vanguard. I think this bird is stalking me. I sat next to Sebastian and Adrian and all 3 of us didn’t know that we were german speaker until Adrian mentioned that he is from Switzerland! 🙂 Vanny took also the opportunity to make a picture with our awesome server.

VeeamOn Day 2

Breakout session 1 – Top 7 Worst Practices when Using Veeam Backup & Replication

Day 1 began with an awesome session about worst practices in the field presented by Edwin Weijdema. Some of this practices I already encountered at customers but some of them were also very useful (Security) to know so you can help your customers not making the same mistakes. One personal highlight after the session was that I ran into Richard Arnold. I looks like we only meet every 3 years at a Veeam event. Hopefully the next meet-up is not 2022. 🙂

General Session Day 2

Jason Buffington, VP of Solutions Strategy at Veeam, introduced for this session Nancy Giordano (founder of playbiginc.com) who is a strategic futurist with a drive to help enterprise organizations and visionary leaders transform to meet the escalating expectations ahead. I really didn’t know what to expected from this session. During the talk Nancy mentioned that we are producing 2.5 quintillion bytes (2500 petabyte/2.5exabyte) per day which is way above my imagination but she has also for that an example. This amount of data is approx. 10M blu-rays which is stacked 4 Eiffel towers. I can’t really describe this session but you can watch similar talks from Nancy here and here.
In the end Ratmir summarized the general sessions and messages and revealed the date and location for the next VeeamOn.
VeeamOn 2020 will take place in Las Vegas from May 4th-6th 2020 at the Aria hotel.

Breakout session 2 – Secrets to Design an Availability Infrastructure for 25.000 VMs

After attending Edwins session about Top 7 worst practices, it was time to see how to size an environment for 25.000 VMs. Edwin walked us through the process and the requirements and from my point this session was invaluable. I hope this session was recorded so every attendee can watch it afterwards.

Expo Hall

Before the next breakout session starts I took the opportunity to visit the Expo where a lot of Veeam technology partners showing their integration with Veeam. But the Expo wasn’t solely for technology partners but also for service provides who offer their customers a BaaS (Backup-as-a-Service) solution with Veeam. Unfortunately I was familiar with most of the vendors and integrations like Netapp and HPE but there was also one new I didn’t know before which was Quest QoreStor.

Breakout session 3 – Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows: Tips, Tricks and What NOT to do

Tom Sightler, Principal Architect at Veeam, showed us tips and tricks and what not to do when implementing and configuring Veeam Agent for Windows. Some of these were obvious but some were new to me. Unfortunately my attention was drawn to something else which is the reason I can’t tell you some of the details! 🙂

Breakout session 4 – Ransomware Resiliency Tips from Veeam and the Veeam Vanguards

The last session of the day and of VeeamOn was a special session lead by Rick Vanover. Rick was talking about Ransomware and how to avoid it. He also asked the audience how many of them were victims of a ransomware attack and to my surprise a lot of hands were going up. That was really a shock to me that still so many user fall for these attacks. Looks like I need to do a session for my customers to create awareness for such attacks. The best of this session was that tips and tricks from current Veeam Vanguards like Shane Williford, Al Rasheed, Jim Jones, Matt Crape and more were included. I love the idea to include Vanguards/people of the community to share their experience and learnings from their own ransomware situations.

Summary

After 2 packed days VeeamOn was already over. Here are some statistical information about the conference:

  • Over 2050 attendees
  • Over 60 breakout sessions
  • Over 45 sponsors
  • 3 general sessions and 8 live demos

My favorite session of the day was the “Top 7 Worst Practices when Using Veeam Backup & Replication“. Use these session to define your best practices without making these mistakes. Overall VeeamOn was a great conference with great technical content. The only drawback I see is the duration. A 3 day conference where there is only 2 days of real content is for people based in Europe a little bit of a challenge. If you combine it with the pre-conference training it is a great deal but if you only attend the conference than the 10h+ flight back and forth is maybe not worth it. For me it was a great timing because I was on a 3 week vacation with the family and my wife was so kind to entertain the kids during my absent. For me conferences are a great way to meet friend and make new friend and I achieved both of it.
Finally I hope that most of the sessions will be available in the near future so I can check out sessions I wasn’t able to attend.

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