VeeamON 2017 – Part 2 – Breakout Sessions

I’m still amazed Veeam and it’s partners squeezed in 85 break out sessions throughout the event. I had a tough decision most of the time on which session to attend as many sessions shared the same time slot. Fortunately, the schedule listed details for each session saying if it was business, partner, or technical. Then technical had a few levels so that helped to describe how deep the session will go.

My favorite session was How to Back Up and Restore VMware vCenter Server Appliance (vCSA) and Platform Controllers Properly. The session was hosted by a Emad Younis, Technical Marketing Engineer from VMware, and Mike White, Technical Evangelist from Veeam Software. They started off talking about VMware Platform Services Controller. The PSC was new to vSphere 6 so it’s been around for a little while now, but good to get a refresher. Then they went into backing up and restoring the vCSA and PSC. Backing up the vCSA in 6 is the same as previous versions. Do not bother backing up the vCSA’s databases. Use Veeam or another product to back up the vCSA and PSC VMs. Then restore the vCSA VM directly to a host. However, the PSC is a little different if using Enhanced Linked Mode, which means there will be more than one PSC. Deploy a new PSC and join to the existing SSO domain. Replication will simply kick in and bring the PSC up to speed. If only one PSC, then just restore it.

I thought there would have been more love for Veeam ONE. There were actually only two sessions! I know it’s the sidekick to Back and Replication, but more sessions on it would have been appreciated. I attended one of the two. The second one wasn’t relevant to me since it was about how to scale Veeam ONE. My Veeam ONE server is fine. The session I attended,  Take Out the Guesswork with Veeam ONE & Chargeback, went into some reports and alarms. A couple of the reports, powered off VMs and VMS with no archive copy are ones that I never looked. There are a great many of reports so nice to get some tips on others to look at outside of my routine ones. They talked about a useful tip on creating an alarm for a VM that has not be backed up for defined amount of time. This is good to catch a bug that sometime stops backing up VMs within a vApp with no warning or error.

VeeamON2017-breakout

The photo above was from What’s New in v10: A Deeper Dive, hosted by Anton Gostev. His sessions seemed to be the most popular by far. People were lining up for his sessions that were in the smaller rooms, but at least the deep dive was in the big hall.

The breakout sessions were hit and miss as some of the presenters did a better job than others with going through their topics. However, I certainly understand that every presenter puts in a lot of time and effort. I got something out of each session I went to. Perhaps one day I can think of an interesting topic to present and start small at a local VMUG.

VeeamON 2017 – Part 1

VeeamON2017-keynote

I had an amazing time attending VeeamON last week. The event during the day was packed with many presentations and nights were filled with parties. There was a lot going on from a company that doesn’t have many products. However, they are the best at what they do and have a strong following.

The keynote on Wednesday focused on availability. Peter McKay, co-CEO, described data being as valuable as oil was last century. I understand where he was going with the comparison, but hard to compare a natural resource to data. He talked about how Veeam has been growing at a steady rate since the company formed 10 years ago. Though, they added 1,000 employees in the last year and will add hundreds more the next year.

I always wondered how the name Veeam was created. Turns out it is basically how saying the letters V and M sound. I thought that was interesting for how simple it is. After all, they are, of course, all about virtual machines from backing up and monitoring so makes sense.

John Metzger, VP product marketing, made announcements for version 10 of Backup and Replication, which is the next major release. There will be a new feature called continuous data protection. RPO can be set to seconds if someone has the bandwidth for it. There will be native object storage support to take advantage of a service, such as AWS’s S3. There will be a new Veeam agent for Windows. Backing up to a NAS will be supported. He said that a lot of customers have requested it, which I didn’t realize. New APIs for storage vendors; IBM, Lenovo, and Infinidat. A Microsoft fail over cluster will now be able to be backed up. Check out Veeam’s official page on version 10 for more details.

I’ve never used VMware’s Log Insight, but I have always wanted to Implement it. Veeam will have integration with Log Insight. I’m sure customers with Back and Replication, and Log Insight will appreciate one place to review logs with products that work so closely together.

The keynote had a few live demos. Veeam had their engineers discussing and showing the audience some of the new features. One of the first things I noticed when the version 10 client was opened was finally a tab on the left of the client for history. In the current version, it was a gear with no label, which made it look like it was for some sort of settings. Anyway, just glad they finally made where to view the history more obvious as everyone I worked with surprised that’s the history button.

To be honest, I wasn’t too interested in the keynote on Thursday. The speakers focused  mostly on Azure. I have nothing against Azure. Looks better than AWS in many ways. Just something I haven’t worked with yet. Anyway, nice that everyone that attended received the book Zero Day: A Jeff Aiken Novel.

Everything still looks green to me as if I have a filter on my glasses. Veeam loves the color green and makes everything a shade of green. Some of the speakers even joked they must wear at least 3 things that are green. I’m still slowly catching up at home. I will make my next article on the breakout sessions.

VMware Certifications

I have not been a fan of VMware certifications since they decided to make the VCP expire after only two years of holding the certification. To top it off, the policy was even for past certification holders. Everyone had two years before they had to pass another exam! If not, an expensive class would be required again before taking an exam.

After that being said, I have kept up with the game and took my VMware skill set to the next level last year by passing the VCAP5-DCA. I studied more for that exam than I have ever done for any other exam. I learned a lot from the entire experience. I took the exam on the 5.5 objectives so I’m not sure how relevant my advice would be now. However, I decided to post what I said on the VCAP-DCA Study Group in case it may help others.

I passed with a score of 347. I took the exam on Saturday and received my results in about 3 hours.

I, of course, ran out of time during the exam. I worked nonstop. I don’t know what would have happened if I stepped away to use the bathroom. I completed everything I knew and went back to the few labs I wasn’t sure about.

I obtained a lot of great information in this group. I went back to the beginning of the group and read everything. Other places I learned from was the VMware Press VCAP book, Jason Nash’s Plural Sight videos, Paul Grevink’s study guide, Josh’s lab, and other various blogs. I spent about 4 months preparing for the exam going over all that material and practicing in my lab.

I’m so happy to pass the exam. I learned so much from the experience. I’m looking forward to taking a break for a while. Then take the design exam on 6.

The next VMware certification I go for will be the VCAP6-DCV Design. That will earn me the VCIX-DCV because my first VCAP basically counts as the deploy requirement. I may try to squeeze in upgrading my MCSA 2012 to 2016 before my next VCAP.

 

 

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