VeeamON Forum London 2017 – Afterthoughts

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Afterthoughts

I recently attended VeeamON Forum London which was a one day event put on by Veeam. The idea behind the event was for Veeam to update its audience on upcoming features and to provide some tips and tricks around improving the Veeam experience. I am looking at this from a techies point of view, there was also a separate breakout track for business leaders to get the latest info on how the markets moving etc.

For me the message was clear, Veeam can help address availability problems across on premises and public cloud infrastructure. There was some love for the Veeam Cloud Connect partners as well. Continuous Data Protection is one of the features that will be available in Veeam V10 in 2018. This allows for continues transport of data from a live virtual machine to a secondary copy of the virtual machine. This feature will be available in Cloud Connect Replication as well, IE a service provide offering DRaaS with Veeam Cloud Connect replication can have a near real time copy of a virtual machine running in your on premises cloud available in their public cloud offering. The possibilities around this to me at least mean that failover of a workload should be straight forward. It does not have to be a DR event.

There were other highlights that I had not seen announced at the main VeeamON event in New Orleans earlier this year. RMAN Oracle support was one that stood out for me. Part of me thinks this is to keep feature parity with some of Veeams competitors, but that’s not a bad thing. One thing that Veeam has done well in the past is deliver a product that solves a problem well. They have not gone out and created a Swiss army knife product that can do everything, but not great at anything.  I am confident that all new features will stick with this mantra. The product updates are released When It’s Ready, which to me suggests coding and QA testing is done correctly. I am sick of products of late coming to market with a major release update only to find it breaks something critical which you would have thought would have been caught in QA. Veeam is one of the few products I trust to not make this mistake. Anyway, I divulge. Most of the announcements at the VeeamON Forum where the same as at the VeeamON event. You can find my recap of that event here.

Not quite VeeamON

I also help to run the Veeam User Group UK which is an independent voice in the Veeam community, for users, by users. The events organisers at Veeam were kind enough to give us a stand at the event. There was a lot of interest in the user group with people ranging from those just starting out with Veeeam to the people who have been using it for years and know the product well. It was great to hear peoples stories on how they use the product and what they like and dislike.

The ubiquitous Vanny Vanguard was also there, check the bird out on Twitter.

Ian