I write this aboard about the coolest painted plane I’ve had the pleasure of flying on, en route to Las Vegas, NV to attend and speak at the inaugural VeeamON conference being held at the Cosmopolitan. The conference is being held by Veeam Software, one of the leaders in virtualization backup, known best for its Veeam Backup & Replication product. The conference itself represents a pretty big milestone for a global company who in my opinion has done a very solid job of getting social right from the corporate standpoint. It is also going to time well due to the pending version 8 release of Backup & Replication.
I have been working with Veeam’s Backup & Replication software for a little over four years now and find it to be both powerful as well as easy to use, a nice combination when talking about the product responsible for the safety of your data. I will be speaking about my experiences with this software package from the small government organization standpoint and how it helps us deal with some of the particular challenges that come from being in that segment. My session will be on Wednesday at 8:30 AM.
This will be my first time speaking in this type of setting so we’ll see how it goes, but there will be no shortage of seasoned veterans providing sessions. Others speaking include a great deal of the staff from Veeam including Anton Gostev, Doug Hazelman, Rick Vanover, & Ben Milligan and those are just the ones that I’m personally familiar with. Further the virtualization industry will also be well represented by the likes of Chris Wahl, Symon Perriman, and Joep Piscaer. Finally Alexis Ohanian of Reddit will serve as the celebrity speaker. All in all for a first time event they seem to have brought some very strong speakers to the event, we’ll see if I can hold up my part.
What To Look For
One of the things that I really like about this conference is the variety of options they are providing attendees to make the most of their time. Monday is Partner day, open only to their partners, but at the same time they will be having a variety of community driven Veeam User Group sessions for the rest of us attending. Also from the community side of things there will be a few vBrownbag sessions sprinkled through Tuesday and Wednesday. These are generally much shorter, 15-20 minutes and are great for people to share little tips and tricks of the industry. I myself will be providing a session on Physical Backup Strategies on Tuesday at 8:20 talking about how we use the open source software product Areca Backup to handle the role of backing up the few physical machines I have left in my environment.
One of the biggest draws and one that will be of great importance to both me and my employer is the ability to take the Veeam Certified Engineer (VMCE) course while attending. This course, a prerequisite to being able to sit the VMCE exam, is typically $3000 US and last 5 days. At the conference they will be condensing it into 2.5 days and conference attendees are able to take the course for only $650.
Also going on as an aside to the sessions are the Lab Warz game and offsite tour of a Modern Datacenter. Registrants for Lab Warz will compete against each other to create the ultimate data protection scenario for cash and prizes. The offsite tour will take a group of attendees to the Cobalt Cheyenne datacenter to see how datacenter is done on the large scale.
Keynotes
Even f you are unable to attend yourself the Keynotes on both Tuesday and Wednesday will be streamed live. The big news most likely will be the announcement of the general release of version 8 of Veeam’s Availability Suite which includes the Backup & Replication product as well at the Veeam ONE virtualization infrastructure monitoring package. Both of these products have been in beta for the past few months and from my own personal experiences with them Veeam has done a very good job of making great software better. I wouldn’t be surprised if there weren’t a few surprises announcements there as well. It’s not everyday you get to host your own inaugural global event, might as well take advantage
Conclusion
I’m going to go ahead and sign out here for now. Be sure to check back later as I plan to update frequently through the week with news and information.
