Last month I was blessed to have been able to attend my 6th Veeam100 Summit. Since I started 1st attending in 2018 (2020 was a no-go, and 2021 was a hybrid event), the venue has been held in Prague, CZ, with the exception of last year where it was held in Berlin. Though I enjoyed Berlin last year since I'd never been, I was really looking forward to getting back to Prague. It's such a beautiful city and there is certainly no shortage of places to see & go. But of course, the main excitement for me was to be able to meet up with fellow Veeam100 Community members and be given the opportunity to chat with various Veeam Product Managers.
Like most years I've attended the Summit, I arrived in PRG on Sunday. Sadly, the weather wasn't too great (rainy), but no matter. First day arrivals are typically reserved for getting my bearings straight so to speak getting to my room, cleaning up, and meeting up with other Community attendees for a late lunch/early dinner and catch up on the past year's happenings since we last saw each other. And this is exactly what I did, meeting up with several Veeam100 members (Veeam Vanguards and Veeam Legends) for beers (Pilsner Urquel!) and dinner.
Before the Summit, we had the option to sign up for a pre-event training session if we so chose to do so. Several training options were given, and most of us selected the training option covering Veeam SureBackup (SB). So I attended this on Monday afternoon. The training was given by Veeam's Tim Smith, Solutions Architect and Wesley Martins, Systems Engineer. I really enjoyed not only going over some SureBackup issues they see most in the field, but also doing a bit of hands-on-lab. We talked not only about the traditional SB feature, but also discussed SureReplica (SR), and even Veeam Recovery Orchestrator (VRO). Since I've never used SR or VRO, those sections were very welcomed.
Monday evening, the event officially kicked off with a pre-Summit social, sponsored by both Wasabi and Object First. This is always one of my favorite events because all Veeam100 members have arrived by then and we all get the opportunity to network and catch up with each other, as well as get the opportunity to meet & greet 1st time attendees to the Summit.
Tuesday morning the Summit began in full swing. After event intros and the Summit agenda overview were given by
SureBackup Tips
- When troubleshooting SB, logs can be found in:
C:\ProgramData\Veeam\Backup\<SB-job-name> - Aside from the SB-Job-Name.log, the
ViLab-Name.Deployment.logcan be useful as well - Since SB uses vPower NFS to mount a NFS Datastore, make sure this is working (e.g. test run an IR job)
- On a security note, go into your Veeam Credentials area and modify the helper-appliance credentials
- When troubleshooting a SB job, run it and select the option to keep it running (i.e. not stop)
- Verify an IP Route is set for the Lab after creating
- Make sure various pings work outside the Lab
The above SB troubleshooting tips are certainly not an exhaustive list…others were shared, but these are the main ones to start with to get you going which I found most helpful. Refer to the SureBackup section for more information.
Hypervisor Support
Veeam has made a concerted effort to support lesser known hypervisors of late, mainly due to the significant (& dare I say detrimental) licensing & pricing choices made by Broadcom. Veeam has recently implemented hypervisor Plugins such as for Proxmox; and I hope they implement one for XCP-Ng (this has gone through both private and public beta phases, so hopefully only minimal tweaks are needed before a GA version is released). The major beneficial announcements I took from this session were the fact that Veeam wants to support as many hypervisors as possible. This gives the SMB customers especially a lot of flexibility. But, in instituting this policy, Veeam cannot accommodate each hypervisor's nuances. So, what Veeam has decided to do (yet to be official) is turn h/v implementation requirements back onto the h/v companies. In other words, if a company wants Veeam to support them, the company's must meet Veeam implementation requirements to be officially supported by Veeam. I love this idea! Veeam already has a implementation protocol in place since they've incorporated several (Nutanix, KVM, Proxmox, etc) the past few or so years.
Veeam Data Platform v13 Appliance
Some, or all, of the below VDP v13 new features you've probably heard about, but I'll share what was talked about at the Summit regardless:
- VSA HA feature
- VONE HA feature yes…you read that correctly, VONE will provide monitoring and failover capability of your VSA HA Cluster through Alarm remediation actions
- I mentioned above Veeam has incorporated new h/v's such as Proxmox recently. But, there has been some feature sets not fully supported from the get-go. With VDP v13, AAIP will now be supported for Proxmox as well as Nutanix (AHV)
- When you are ready to go to VDP v13 VSA, there is a migration utility you'll be able to use, but requires a migration key from Veeam Support
- And, if you weren't aware, the Restore Point Retention option is deprecated. Only the Days Retention option will be available. This will hurt those of us who have the need to backup workloads often (by minutes, for example), so be aware of this moving forward
Veeam University & Certification Changes
The last item I'll briefly talk about is something near and dear to my tech passions, and that is in regards to technology certifications; in this case, and more specifically, Veeam certifications. There are serveral changes coming on the horizon you really should be aware of if you're into, or require for your company, continued Veeam certification. Below is a summary of changes to come:
- I'll start with the biggee news: The VMCE is going away. This information was hot off the presses at the time of the Summit. Previously, holding the VMCE was a requirement in attaining the new Veeam certification the VMCSE (more on this in a bit). But, this is no longer the case. Now both the VMCE and VMCA are going away. If you still want to get your VMCE though, you can…but you only have a couple more weeks to do so, as the ability to take this exam ends 31 December
- Veeam University is unifying. Under this name umbrella will be 3 tiers: Veeam University Free; Veeam University Partner; and Veeam University Pro. Pricing for the Pro is still being worked out, but obviously the Free training has no cost, and Partner training generally has a cost (I believe) Veeam Partners (MSPs, etc) cover. Look for more information on this soon
- Segwaying back to the 1st bullet, since both the VMCE and VMCA are retiring, what certifications are replacing them? The VMCE-E and VMCSE, respectively. To attain the VMCE-E you must take 3 courses and pass the respective exams Veeam Backup & Replication Configure, Manage, & Recover; Veeam Monitor, Manage, & Analyze (VONE course); and Veeam Scale, Automate, & Secure (VRO course). To get your VMCSE, you must have a current VMCE-E certification, then take and pass the Veeam Enterprise Data Security course & exam. NOTE: All courses are required for v13, even if you have a valid current VMCE. Once your VMCE-E is attained, my guess is no future course will be required, though recommended, and only passing the current exam version is enough to attain the given certification. As details are being worked out, this may change, so keep an eye out for more info on this
There were of course many other things discussed worthy to note which I found quite beneficial, but I'll stop here to keep this post at a nominal length 😊. But, I will say…our last session on Wednesday is an AMA session where all the Veeam Product Managers are at the front of the room and all V100 attendees get an opportunity to ask the PMs anything. I'll go out on a limb here and speak for the V100 group and say this is probably each of our favorite session. Maybe not…but I know it's close to the favorite if not 😉
At the conclusion the last AMA session on Wednesday, we always gather up for a final Veeam100 Summit picture.
It’s always a bit sad to end the Summit. There’s so much fun and great learning during the event. And, because many of the V100 Community live far apart, we don’t get to see each other but once or twice a year. On the hand hand, by the week’s end, I’m always ready to get home and unwind from the week’s activities.
In the evening on the last day, Veeam and the above mentioned vendors, sponsor an after-event party. This year, it was at the infamous Prague Pilsner Urquell brewery. The food was great, the people of course were greater 😊; there was games, dancing, and an opportunity to get a fun picture with other attendees
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