Today’s the day, the beginning of Veeam Software’s annual conference, VeeamON for 2023! Just like the Blues Brothers sang before me I’m Goin’ Down to Miami to learn, connect, and this year speak at the Fountainebleau in Miami, Florida and I can’t be more excited. This year Veeam has made a marked return to the community focus of the event with a significant number of the nearly 50 in-person sessions having at least one community speaker.

What is VeeamON?

If the event is new to you this is the seventh edition of the event and marks the return to Miami where it was held in 2019. The conference itself is two days, Tuesday and Wednesday May 23-24 but with training and partner events stretches Saturday through Wednesday. To kick the weekend off attendees can choose to take a discounted, forward looking version of the Veeam Certified Engineer (VMCE) training which I highly recommend if you are new to the software or are looking to grow your skills and add credentials to your resume. I’ve been a VMCE since 2015 and it’s been a very well considered certification.

Today, Monday is both the partner day, where those of us in the Veeam Cloud Service Provider (VCSP) world gather as well as a welcome reception for all attendees in the evening. It’s worth noting there will also be a Kubernetes and Kasten K10 Workshop running through the afternoon. The next two days will be jam packed with many sessions that cover everything from getting started with their entire suite of products through exceptional deep dives in to how to make your backup and more importantly recovery needs go seamlessly. The event will wrap up with another one of Veeam’s legendary parties right on the resort’s grounds.

Throughout the event Veeam’s many partners such as my employer, 11:11 Systems, will be available in the Tech Festival area. I highly recommend spending time in this area as Veeam is a very ecosystem focused software company and there any number of capabilities that partners make possible that you may not even be considering yet but should.

Sessions You Say?

Did I mention sessions and community speakers earlier? Many of these sessions are being given by fellow Veeam Vanguards and wider Veeam 100, a group that I’m privileged to be a member of and in the spirit of full disclosure is taking care of our travel, lodging and conference attendance. There are quite a number that I’m going to make sure I check out myself this year that are both technical and career focused, these include:

• You’re Hit by a Ransomware Attack, What’s Next? (Julien Mousqueton, Christopher Glemot, and Eric Machabert)
• 10 Years Working with Veeam: How it Helped Shape Our Careers (Ian Sanderson, Dean Lewis, and Matt Crape)
• A-Z Automation Journey with Veeam’s Automation Desk (Maurice Kevenaar and Joe Houghes)
• Kubernetes for the Virtualization Admin (Dean Lewis and Michael Cade)
• Veeam Replication: The do’s and don’ts of BC/DR (Eric Kubla)
• There is a Hole in my Bucket! How to Plug Security Leaks (Nicolas Serrecchia and Olivier Rossi)
• Veeam Service Provider Console v7: What’s New (Tim Hudson and Ivan Kochemasov)

I am also going to be a part of a couple of sessions, both on Tuesday afternoon. Starting things off will be “Architecting Veeam Backup for Microsoft365 at Scale” with my friend and fellow Vanguard Falko Banaszak. This session will be a very technical brain dump from both Falko and myself on many lessons learned on how to make this protection work and work well when your are talking about tens of thousands of users.

Immediately following that will be “Lessons From the Field: Modernizing and Enhancing Your BaaS & DRaaS Infrastructure,” a joint session with Tim Hudson of the Veeam VCSP team and Ivan Kochemasov of Veeam’s Product Management group. Through my position at 11:11 Systems I work with these gentlemen constantly and we will be talking about how to make a good Partner to Veeam relationship great.

Wrapping up I expect it to be a great event as always. Veeam this year in particular seems to have picked up the mantle created by VMworld events where it very much so feels community focused and allows for learning through collaboration. If you will be at the event I would love for you to reach out so we can meet up. I can be found in most places social media @k00laidIT.

I’ve just completed watching the Veeam v12 Data Platform Launch Event keynote and one theme I feel is getting a lot of chatter is the new “Direct to object storage” capabilities of the release. What this means is that as I create backups of my production data the first copy that is made is written to object storage. I’ve written quite a bit about v12 and object storage before, both in how to setup and consume it in the performance tier of Scale Out Backup Repositories as well as comparing copy mode object storage and Veeam Cloud Connect Backup, but this is not that. Direct to object storage is the idea that you write your first backup copy of production data to object storage, rather than as a secondary copy.

Anton Gostev himself highlighted this as a favorite feature and outlined that there are limited uses cases where it should be used. As a long time Veeam administrator and of late an architect of their largest Service Provider partner I have some thoughts into what those use cases should and should not be that I’d like to share.

The Do’s

✅ On Premises Backup Repository

The first and in my opinion most exciting use case for direct to object storage capabilities is as a replacement for your old block based on premises backup repositories. Object storage has numerous benefits over traditional storage servers using NTFS, ReFS or even XFS. These include true object-lock backed immutability, real scalability in that you simply continue to add nodes to the cluster as needed and API first, automation driven provisioning.  All these things can combine to a scalable, secure, and durable on premises backup storage location.

✅ Distributed Workforce Agent Backups

As we find ourselves in the world of remote work in 2023 systems administrators have more concerns than in the past about protecting those laptops that our remote workers are using as critical company data further escapes the datacenter. By combining Veeam Backup and Replication v12, Veeam Service Provider Console v7 and public object storage services such as 11:11 Systems’ offering we can create a robust solution for managing these backups securely and at scale with self-service capabilities included.

✅ NAS Backups

As much as cloud-based storage services such as OneDrive, Google Drive and Dropbox have become prevalent in modern IT there are still a lot of traditional Network Attached Storage file servers around. The problem is these are usually measured in 100s of TBs and backups don’t scale well in any case. In this case I believe it’s appropriate to back these up via the NAS backup feature of VBR directly to immutable cloud-based object storage. Recoverability is in terms of files as opposed to needing to write Virtual Machines to a hypervisor so far more appropriate.

The Don’ts

Now that we’ve covered what are good use cases let’s talk about some things that should not be considered from a best practices point of view but are technically possible.

❌ Cloud-Based Object Storage for First Backup

There are going to be people who begin wanting to get rid of the on-premises backups all together and replace them with low-cost cloud object storage. While the immutability and ease of scale are tempting, don’t. Just don’t. Recovery from this for any backup platform would be painful at best, unsuccessful at worst. Further you lose so much of the power of Veeam Backup & Replication by doing this with capabilities such as Instant Recovery and SureBackup instantly going away.

❌ Remote Office/Branch Office (ROBO) Server Backups

One of the use cases specifically called out by Gostev for direct to object storage was the ROBO server. While I respect him very much, I do have to disagree with him here. As someone who’s had to restore this scenario in anger the pressure will be on in most if not all these situations to get that server back up and running as fast as possible, probably in your production datacenter with some creative networking setup, to get that remote location back up and in business as soon as possible. By and large direct to cloud-based backups for virtual machines or server grade agents should not in my opinion be considered as you quickly become limited in recoverability choices. If you cannot either back these up first to a small NAS unit at the ROBO or to storage available in your production location, then VCC-B may be interesting as a first write backup. While definitely not preferred at least things like Instant Recovery to Cloud Director can be an option to get these workloads available sooner.

Conclusion

While writing backups from Veeam Backup & Replication v12 directly to object storage is an exciting innovation to the platform it is a capability that should be given a great deal of consideration before putting into production grade use. Features such as immutability and scalability will drive adoption what you are using it for is far more important than the hype.

With the upcoming version 12 release of Veeam Backup & Replication the platform will start to support object storage as a primary location for backups. This is not a new idea, it feels like we’ve been talking about this forever, but it is a radical shift for the company and frankly one that for reasons many in the Veeam Certified Service Provider community have been dreading. While I believe object storage has its place, even within a VCSP, it should not in general practice be a replacement for Veeam Cloud Connect as VCC-B and VCC-R offer capabilities and enhancements that object storage services all by themselves will never be able to replicate.

What is Veeam Cloud Connect?

It’s appropriate to level set on the technologies at hand first. Veeam Cloud Connect was first announced at VeeamON 2014 and became available through partners shortly thereafter. There are two sides to today’s Cloud Connect Service: Veeam Cloud Connect Backup (VCC-B) and Veeam Cloud Connect Replication (VCC-R).

Veeam Cloud Connect Backup allows for a service provider to provision a slice of cloud storage and securely provision that a customer as a tenant. That storage can have further enhancements such as Immutability if on Linux repositories or with v12 object storage and Insider Protection, an out-of-band temporary storage location for deleted cloud backups as part of a ransomware mitigation strategy. Once the tenant is provisioned on the SP side a customer only needs to enter 3 pieces of information to add that storage as a repository or repositories to their backup infrastructure. Afterwards they can simply target that repo for backup copy or in some situations even direct backup jobs.

Veeam Cloud Connect Replication is the same general concept as VCC-B, but just with VMs being stored directly in IaaS. Your Service Provider would provision quotas in a VMware Cloud Director or vCenter environment in which powered off copies of the source VMs are copied. These replicas maintain a shorter maximum number of restore points which are stored as snapshots on the replica.  In conjunction with either a VPN connection or the Veeam Network Extension Appliance you can extend your on-prem environment into your replicated IaaS one and run those systems remotely for several reasons.

Object Storage Review

Veeam has been slowly building support for object storage over a few releases now. In short order the progression has been:

• 9.5u4 (2019): Support for the ability to archive or dehydrate older restore points to object storage, known as move mode. This functionality is powered by the Scale Out Backup Repository (SOBR) construct in VBR, defining performance tier (on-prem block storage) and cloud or archive tier (object storage). With this support cloud tier can only support a single bucket per SOBR which can cause scaling issues.
  
• 10.0 (2020): Copy mode is added which allows that same SOBR to make an immediate copy of any restore point that hits the performance tier to be immediately copied to the cloud tier. This is commonly seen as the capability that best competes with the VCC-B functionality. Support for Immutability and mounting backups regarding cloud tier happens in this release as well.
• 11.0 (2021): Addition of support for Google Cloud Platform (GCP) Storage.
• 12.0  (2023): Host of improvements to object storage support.
  • Object in the performance tier with multiple buckets supported as extents.
  • Support for multiple buckets of the same type in the cloud tier.
  • Reconfiguration of the bucket folder structure to allow for optimized performance especially around API calls.

In all there has been a steady line of improvement and innovation towards object storage making it the first-class citizen it will be with v12’s release.

Verdict

All that begs the question, should I as a Veeam Backup & Replication administrator be migrating my offsite backups from Cloud Connect Backup to object storage? In my opinion, probably not. The compelling use case today regarding offsite backups is the same that’s been around since v10; if you are only sending a copy of backups offsite for the purpose of compliance, checking the box if you will, then object storage may be a good fit for you. It is exceptional in how it supports Object Lock (Immutability). Further it is more efficient than anything else to date in how it writes data which makes it well suited for on-premises storage if available, but for cloud copy usage the capabilities quickly fall off.

In the end my biggest reason why I would still choose VCC-B today is the restore scenarios. With Object Storage unless you are utilizing a VCSP like 11:11 Systems you aren’t going to be able to have the object storage close enough to a VMware native compute to facilitate timely restore. Your other options are the opposite ends of the spectrum; low cost providers who have no compute capabilities and may have extra charges that may apply to your organization depending on deletion.Data egress or API calls along with hyperscalers that do have compute adjacent but are a completely different architecture to vSphere are other concerns. These scenarios require conversion of backups to instances and rely on your IT staff having the skillset to securely create an environment for these workloads to run from.

When you consider the tiered approach to Disaster Recovery, pairing a broad spectrum copy of backups to VCC-B with Tier 0 or 1 targeted VCC-R you gain 2 things by sticking to VCC-B:

1. Support for seeding replicas from VCC Backups
2. A defined DRaaS environment pre-created for your organization that in the event of on-prem not being available that you can boot replicas quickly and less quickly begin restoring backups into.

While not necessarily as important as restorability one other major difference to be aware of is the ability to control how much of your on-prem backups you keep off site. Keep in mind that copy mode works on the principle that you want to keep everything you have on-site in an offsite location, so if you want to have 30 days on prem and 7,14,60, or 90 days offsite there really isn’t a path besides Grandfather-Father-Son (GFS) to get there with just copy mode. Further it’s going to be everything that targets the given repository, if you have VMs you don’t necessarily want to keep off prem (think of like a door control system that does you no good anywhere but in the physical location) your only option is to create separate repositories and jobs. With VCC-B and backup copy all these things can be done in a very granular manner.

Finally, you have the issue of expertise. While many of us might be conversant in object storage and how it works you may not necessarily know the ins and outs of bucket policy, ACLs, versioning, etc. It’s a technology you do need to know but when it comes to backups and especially the need to restore them in anger using Veeam Cloud Connect not only gets you an easy path to restore. VCSP employs experts in Veeam software and access to this expertise with best practices for Veeam backups and replicas can be critical, ensuring a more seamless restoration of services when the pressure is already on.

Conclusion

While the promise and the capabilities of object storage are exciting as of the v12 release Veeam Cloud Connect Backup offers many more options when it comes to the restore and management of your backup data and for that reason should still be the go-to for offsite backup copies. If you are wanting to begin leveraging the technology an on-premises object storage platform for your local backups is a far better solution and can give you an out of the box upgrade to what you are using today.

In the time of ransomware and and cybersecurity attacks being in the news almost daily things like our disaster recovery applications have to start taking those protections very seriously. Often the easiest rung to reach in terms of good application security is having Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) required for logins. For most MFA is old hat but for those unfamiliar modern MFA can take various forms including:

• SMS One Time Passcode (OTP): codes that are pushed from the website to you via SMS text messages. Better than nothing but easily spoofable.
• OTP Apps: apps such as Google Authenticator, Authy or 1password that provide the codes based on scanning a QR code typically to setup then using your mobile device to generate the code
• Push MFA: apps such as Duo or Gmail that when you authenticate it triggers a push notification to a particular instance of a mobile app that is also authenticated

With Veeam’s upcoming v12 release of Veeam Backup and Replication they are now supporting OTP App MFA in their console application. This takes a little bit of setup and in my particular case is a little quirky to setup but it does definitely work. Let’s walk through how to put this in effect.

Enable MFA in VBR v12

1. Once you have v12 Console installed, either the local or remote version, open it and navigate to Users and Roles

2. MFA in VBR is not supported with any use of groups. By default members of the local Adminstrators group are given the Veeam Backup Administrator role so we need to start by adding your own login first. You can do this with the Add… button.

If you weren’t already aware you’ll notice that there are number of roles that can be selected. More information about what each of these can do is available in the helpcenter documentation.

Bug: One other thing I’ll add here is that I noticed a quirk in some of our setups. If you use the browse method and if for some reason the NetBIOS domain is not just the portion before the first dot in the FQDN domain (for example prem for prem.lab.internal) then by default the User or group in the blank above is filled in incorrectly. In a few of our test environments we use the full FQDN without the dots as the NetBIOS name and it led to some issues that were easily fixed by just typing the correct domain in the blank. This feedback has been shared and I imagine it will be fixed before GA.

2a. If by chance you do not remove the groups before enabling MFA and hitting OK you will be presented with an error. Again, simply remove the groups to get past this.

3. It is important to understand that once you protect an account with MFA you will not be able to use it with automation methods such as PowerShell. To allow for this you will need to create an automation specific user, preferably with a very robust and often changed password, and set it in VBR as a service account to disable MFA. Complete adding your needed users and check the “Require two-factor authentication for interactive logon” to complete the server setup portion.

4. Once you setup your accounts in Veeam Console you will need to close out and relaunch to get into the MFA registration wizard. You would do this as you normally would, either using Windows session authentication or filling in the username and password.

5. Once you hit Connect you will get the standard MFA QR code for registration. Simply open the app of your choice and add by scanning the QR code then supply an active confirmation code to complete setup.

And with that you have now enabled 2 factor authentication for your Veeam Backup and Replication Users. You can potentially increase this further by not giving permissions to the user’s Windows logon account but instead doing a secondary, application specific account making them type in a username and password in step 4 above. With that you would have to authenticate to Windows, authenticate to Veeam and then provide an MFA code. That would all just depend on your organization’s security needs.

Conclusion

At the end of the day security practices should be a part of everything we do as IT and Disaster Recovery administrators. Little things like requiring MFA for our critical backups add up to a well design, layered security model.

So yeah, I’m heading to an in-person tech conference next week. Not just any tech conference but arguably my favorite, VeeamON. The event is being held at the Aria Resort in Las Vegas May 16-19 for the in person aspect but like so many of conferences in the post-COVID era it will be a hybrid event with a free of charge, online aspect as well. If you have not registered for either in person or online there is still plenty of time to get involved.

It’s been since August of 2019 since I last did any event of real size and while I am absolutely excited to be able to hear about some wonderful technology and be back around friends, colleagues and fellow Vanguards, I’d be remiss to not acknowledge a healthy amount of hesitance about being around large groups of people again. That said at this point I’ve done everything that I can possibly do to protect myself and those around me from all the health concerns so it’s time to get at it.

On a personal note this time around is going to be a bit different for me as well as it is going to be the first event I’ve attended as part of a partner organization as opposed to just being there as a customer. In the lead up there is quite a bit of preparation involved when attending this way but a great deal to be interested in as well.

What’s Going On?

So a look at the full agenda tells you that Veeam Backup & Replication v12 is going to be a major focus of the conference this time around and for good reason; v12 from everything I’ve seen so far is going to be a MASSIVE release in terms of under the cover infrastructure. I’ve been working with the beta since release and honestly I’m rarely leaving the backup infrastructure tab because there’s so much different there. Layer in improvements to related products such as the Veeam Agents and the hyper scaler cloud backup products and I’ll be busy long after the event watching recordings.

While V12 will be a major focus it won’t be the only one. Support for backing up SaaS application will be there as well with further improvements to Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 and the upcoming release of Veeam Backup for Salesforce.

I’m personally going to have a couple of speaking sessions myself. The first will be with Josh Liebster as we discuss why “All Good Things Start at 11:11” Monday at 6pm on the partner stage in the expo hall. This quick session will be for my employer iland, an 11:11 Systems company and will talk about how we can help you with your disaster recover and cloud workload needs.

The second session I will be involved in will be with Mr. Liebster again as well as Sean Smith from VMware Tuesday at 10:15am titled “VCPP, VMware Cloud Director and Veeam — Bringing It All Together as a Full Stack.” In this session Sean will be talking about VMware Cloud Director and the overall VCPP program of which iland is an “all-in” member. Josh and I will talk about how iland takes what VMware provides and turns it into an award winning set of products.

All in all I’m expecting it to be an excellent as always. If you are going to be there please reach out to me through twitter and I’d love to meet up!

In my last post I worked through quite a few things I’ve learned recently about interacting with S3 Compatible storage via the CLI. Now that we know how to do all that fun stuff it’s time to put it into action with a significant Service Provider/Disaster Recovery slant. Starting with this post I’m going to highlight how to get started with some common use cases of object storage in Backup/DR scenarios. In this we’re going to look at a fairly mature use case, with it backing Veeam Backup for Office (now Microsoft) 365.

Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 v6, which was recently showcased at Cloud Field Day 12, has been leveraging object as a way to make it’s storage consumption more manageable since version 4. Object also provides a couple more advantages in relation to VBM, namely an increase in data compression as well as a method to enable encryption of the data. With the upcoming v6 release they will also support the offload of backups to AWS Glacier for a secondary copy of this data.

VBM exposes its use of object storage under the Object Storage Repositories section of Backup Infrastructure but it consumes it as a step of the Backup Repository configuration itself, which is nested within a given Backup Proxy. I personally like to at a minimum start with scaling out repositories by workload (Exchange, OneDrive, Sharepoint, and Teams) as each data type has a different footprint. When you really need to scale out VBM, say anything north of 5000 users in a single organization, you will want to use that a starting point for how you break down and customize the proxy servers.

Let’s start by going to the backup proxy server, in this case the VBM server itself, and create folder structure for our desired Backup Repositories.

Now that we have folders let’s go create some corresponding buckets to back them. We’ll do this via the AWS S3 CLI as I showed in my last post. At this point VBM does not support advanced object features such as Immutability so no need to be fancy and use the s3api, but I just prefer the command structure.

Ok so now we have folder and buckets, time to hop in to Veeam. First we need to add our object credentials to the server. This is a simple setup and most likely you will only need one set of credentials for all your buckets. Because in this example I will be consuming iland Secure Cloud Object Storage I need to choose the “S3 Compatible access key” under the “Add…” button in Cloud Credential Manager (menu> Cloud Credentials). These should be the access key and secret provided to you by your service provider.

Now we need to go to Backup Infrastructure > Object Storage Repositories to add our various buckets. Start by right clicking and choose “Add Object Storage.”

Now simply repeat the process above for any and all buckets you need for this task.

Now that we have all our object buckets added we need to pair these up with our on premises repository folders. It’s worth noting that the on-prem repo is a bit misleading, no backup data as long as you use the defaults will ever live locally in that repository. Rather it will hold a metadata file in the form of a single jetDB file that service as pointers to the objects that is the actual data. For this reason the storage consumption here is really really low and shouldn’t be part of your design constraints.

Under Backup Infrastructure > Backup Repositories we’re going to click “Add Repository..” and let the wizard guide us.

One note on that final step above. Often organization will take the “Keep Forever” option that is allowed here and I will say I highly advise against this. You should specify a retention policy that is agreed upon with your business/organization stakeholders as keeping any backup data longer than needed may have unintended consequences should a legal situation arise; data the organization believes to be long since gone is now discoverable through these backups.

Also worth noting item-level retention is great if you are using a service provider that does not charge you on egress fees because it gives you more granular control in terms of retention. If you use a hyperscaler such as Amazon S3 you may find this option will drive your AWS bill up because of a much higher load on egress each time the job runs.

Once you’ve got one added again, rinse and repeat for any other repositories you need to add.

Finally the only step left to do is create jobs targeting our newly created repositories. This is going to have way more variables based on your organization size, retention needs, and other factors than I can truly do justice in the space of this blog post but I will show how to create a simple, entire organization, single workload job.

You can start the process under Organizations > Your Organization > Add to backup job…

Once again you’d want to repeat the above steps for all your different workload types but that’s it! If we do a s3 ls on our s3://premlab-ilandproduct-vbm365-exch/Veeam/Backup365/ilandproduct-vbm365-exch/ full path we’ll see a full folder structure where it’s working with the backup data, proving that we’re doing what we tried to do!

In conclusion I went way into depth of what is needed here but in practice it isn’t that difficult considering the benefits you gain by using object storage for Veeam Backup for Microsoft365. These benefits include large scale storage, encryption and better data compression. Hope you find this helpful and check back soon for more!

I was honored to be selected to present at VeeamON again in 2015 with the same general concept of session but really highlighting some of the work I’d been doing with Windows Server deduplication and Veeam SureBackup. This was a much nice crowd, with 50 or so people, and I felt it went much better. Again there is no video this time around but as an aside watching the replay at the time this is when I first realized just how much of an accent I have, literally had never realized it before.

So this was immediately following the vBrownBag session. Again, now second shot at “public speaking” but this time I’m in a room for 200, in the hangover slot at a tech conference (8 am the morning after the party), there were a total of 3 people in the session. Probably not the worst thing but one thing I’ve found over the years is that crowds are good, they loosen you up. Just goes to show that we definitely all start somewhere.

Unfortunately I don’t have the video of these early session so you are just going to have to trust me that it was rough.

Slidedeck: https://www.slideshare.net/JimJones147/veeamon-2014-vbrownbag-physical-server-backup-strategies

This was actually my first public speaking presentation ever. Supposed to be a 15 minute time slot I believe I finished in under 8 minutes. What aided to my discomfort was that the whole purpose of this was to show a method I was using to backup physical servers in a Veeam world, something there was no answer to at the time. That morning it leaked that Veeam was announcing what is now known as Veeam Agent for Windows and my friend Rick Vanover was following me on the same stage to announce it. Talk about your topic becoming irrelevant in record time…

This year I was honored with the ability to attend Veeam Software’s Vanguard Summit. Summit comprises a meeting of 60-70 of world’s best Veeam Engineers, Architects, and Partners along with their own Product Strategy and Management groups in Prague, Czech Republic.

Often in talking about a subject we’ll float the old cliché of the good, the bad and ugly of it and frankly there is nothing negative I can say about this event. Because of that in this series of posts I’m going to cover the good (the event itself), the awesome (the people and content), the beautiful (the city of Prague itself), and as a bonus, the technical. This post will be the second in the series, covering the awesome people and content that comprise Vanguard Summit.

Community

There are many vendor community programs out there, most of which are much bigger than the Vanguards, and while they may have some nice intrinsic benefits such as licenses or hoodies, nobody does it better than Rick Vanover and his team. This is my 5th year in the program but due to the rules of my previous employer I’ve never been able to participate in person. The addition of being able to interact with seventy of the smartest people was invigorating and enjoyable. While I was happy to meet and spend time with everyone it was great to get to catch up with community stalwarts and friends such as Matt Crape, Craig Dalrymple, Brad Jervis, Dean Lewis and Al Rasheed.

There is nothing like being in a room with your peers, most of which leave me in awe with their abilities, hearing about what comes next from a company and have your feedback and thoughts sought out. In the process the attendees start collaborating on ideas that end up shaping things for years to come. I’ve said this before, but if you think the value of any program like this is measured monetarily, you are doing it wrong. The true value is the information that not only passes from the vendor to the program members but between the members itself and this group is in my mind the best of the best.

Content

I remember back when I began as a Veeam customer there was the free FastSCP product and Veeam Backup & Replication. After nine years it is amazing to see how the product line has grown and this week made that very apparent, with 2.5 days jam packed with content on current and future products. In a later post I’m going to be covering a lot of what’s coming in v10 of Veeam Backup & Replication but we were also treated to updates on Backup for O365, VeeamONE, Veeam Agents for Windows and Linux, as well as Veeam Availability Orchestrator. This doesn’t include the things we aren’t allowed to discuss but frankly are pretty exciting.

One of the ways that this content is vastly different from other vendor briefings you may have attended or seen maybe at a TechFieldDay (who Veeam will once again be attending for TFD #20) event or the like, besides the great Product Strategy staff many of these sessions were led or included the product management team for all of their products. The highlight to me of this even is the final session on Tuesday where we had Anton Gostev, Alec King, and others from the product management/development team in an “Ask Me Anything” style session where we were given the opportunity to ask all we wanted and as best I could tell were given no “BS” answers. In short the content was pretty amazingly done and consisted of far more access to information than I’ve seen from any other vendor.

Conclusion

Much like my last post rather than bore you with more of my opinions I’ll leave you with some pictures from the event.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.