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The last day of our Vanguard Summit in Prague is now in the history books. Another half day we had the pleasure to listen to several speakers and had many great discussions about products and features and where some when the cat bites his tail.

Day 3 Summary

How to become a community rockstar?

Christal and Dave Kawula from #TeamKawula are now on the stage, talking about how to become a community rockstar! Dave and Christal are the founders of the MVPDays which is the best IT conference by the IT community for the IT community. The MVPDays are currently an US-only event, but it’s planned to hold that conference worldwide. Looking forward to that! Both have written several books about things like PowerShell and Windows Server and are active in the IT community. With Dave, the Vanguards have a top speaker whose sessions are famous and were well awarded!

The title is king!

Christal and Dave showed us some stuff about getting motivated and staying motivated to do actual speaker sessions at a conference. First, the title is king! The event committee doesn’t have much time to evaluate the possible speakers and their sessions. If they see a good title, chances are high that they read also the abstract of your session, which makes it in turn more likely that they accept your session. Otherwise, you’re out already at that stage shortly after you’ve submitted your session for review.

Submit your session(s)

You should also submit more than one session. One point is that there are so many submissions, and if the committee is seeing several submissions with similar titles, your good title is more likely the one they will choose. And it is often the fact that event organizers are not allowed to have a single-session speaker. The more sessions you submit, the better your chances are to be selected.

Writing

Talking about your public persona/profile. Enhance it. A small website with all the relevant information about you isn’t that much effort. Conference committees often do research on speakers they don’t know before they finally accept them.

If you’re blogging, then you probably should think about using Grammarly. Especially if you’re not a native English speaking person, but you’re writing in English, it’s good to have a proper grammar. It looks more professional and it makes it easier to read and understand your blog posts. It’s free and you can even install it as a plugin for Google Chrome if you’re blogging with that browser. Why not giving it a chance?

Publish a book / several books!

Yes, that’s also a pro-tip! Write books! At least if you ever wrote a book, you know that it is a PITA. It takes a long time, you’re constantly in contact with the publisher and several other people, you send gazillions of drafts until they are happy. And probably the book is already outdated after release because the technology you were writing about was evolving during the write-up.

A great platform to publish your books is Leanpub. You can publish your book there even if it’s not yet finished! They only publish it as PDF documents. But that has one big advantage: you can constantly update your books and provide actual content to your readers! How cool is that?

if you fancy for the printed version of your book(s), then Amazon has a great service for you. With Amazon Create Space you can upload your book and let them print it for a bargain! And it is always a good idea to have some examples of your book with you if you’re attending a conference (where you probably also have a session…).

Create a good PowerPoint slide deck!

If you ever made a PowerPoint slide deck then you know that this can be frustrating sometimes. You’ve got the content ready (at least some), but you don’t know how to design the slides. The new PowerPoint version has some artificial intelligence (AI) in it which could help you with the design. This new feature is called PowerPoint Design Ideas.

PowerPoint Designer detects pictures, charts, or tables on your slides and gives you several suggestions for arranging them in a cohesive, attractive layout. The designer can also turn text such as lists, processes, or timelines into an easily readable SmartArt graphic. PowerPoint Designer watches also for key terms and concepts that it has illustrations for, and it shows you those illustrations in various layouts. The Illustrations are from the Office 365 icons library.

Now go out and become a community rockstar!

That’s it, folks!

That‘s it, folks! we‘re done! A huge thank you to RickVanover and his team for the organization of that awesome #VanguardSummit. A huge thank you as well to Veeam for your engagement with the community. #VeeamVanguard #VanguardTakeOver

And if you like to find out more about us and the Vanguard Summit 2018 in Prague, then just click the hashtags above to gather all the stuff on Twitter.

There is more to read about the Vanguard Summit:

• Vanguard Summit 2018 – Prague – Day 1 Summary
• Vanguard Summit 2018 – Prague – Day 2 Summary
• Vanguard Summit 2018 – Prague – Day 3 Summary

With Day 2 there’s another day into the history books. It was another awesome day with so much interesting information!

First I have to thank Craig Dalrymple and his friends for yesterday evening. He organized a good tasting of different whiskeys and other good spirits. Thank you, Craig!

Day 2 Summary

Staged Restore

Michael Cade and Dima P. are on the stage today morning to explain us some stuff about Staged Restore within Veeam Backup & Replication.

One use case of staged restore and probably one of the main reason is GDPR and Article 17 (right to erasure). “The Right to be forgotten” is one of many requirements of GDRP. That makes the backup and restore a little more complex. During a staged restore, the VM to be restored will be run directly from the backup files in an isolated data lab, where you can actually make changes to the guest OS or applications before the VM finally will be restored into the production environment. The backup files will remain untouched. The deletions necessary are done by an easy PowerShell script. You can delete users from Active Directory, delete Exchange mailboxes etc. You can develop scripts for each of your application.

The Vanguards had interesting ideas and thoughts on how to do the restore and delete things which should be forgotten, and how you could or should implement that.

When you have to do a Staged Restore, your VM will be run directly from backup files in an isolated data lab, so you can make changes to the guest OS or the application before you restore the data.

Veeam ONE

Kirsten Stoner and Nikita Shestakov are now on the stage to present us some news from the Veeam ONE coming up with update 4.

Veeam ONE has evolved in the most recent update. It’s not only a monitoring and reporting tool anymore. It will be also your management tool for Veeam backups. Depending on the reports of your VMs you can take automatic actions. For example, if Veeam ONE is reporting that some of your VMs are currently not protected by any backup job, you can define actions what you would like to do with these VMs. You can, for example, take the unprotected VMs and put them into an already existing backup job. How cool is that?

All the things which can run or happen automatically can also set to be approved. If you’re uncomfortable with automatic actions, you can set them all to be approved manually.

In Veeam ONE there are lots of improvements! Let’s just have a look at some of them here:

 

 

 

Veeam ONE doesn’t have just some automatic actions for your VMs which aren’t protected by any backup job. There’s also a new feature called…

Veeam Intelligent Diagnostics

This feature will help you find issues in your Veeam Backup & Replication environment and it will help you solve these issues.

Veeam Intelligent Diagnostics searches your Veeam logs for issues, like known exceptions and error messages. It will use signatures from Veeam to detect problems in your backup environment.

You install Veeam ONE on a service and one (or more) Veeam ONE agent on your backup servers.

Veeam ONE will then go and search your logs for issues, and it will try to compare issues found in your logs with the Veeam Knowledgebase upon the signatures delivered by Veeam. The signatures are downloaded automatically from Veeam. In case you don’t like an automatic download of signatures from Veeam, you can do that also manually.

For all of you waiting for some AWESOME news, I have to say that I’m sorry. That’s completely RED content here. I’d like to thank to [redacted] for the great insights into [redacted] and for an interesting outlook into [redactedaswell].

But let’s move on here…

Veeam Agent Management

Dima P. is now on the stage and he will tell us some stuff about the Veeam Agent management.

All newer Windows Server versions are supported, including Windows Server 2019 and Windows Server Core. Also included is the support of Windows 10 October Update. Microsoft Exchange DAG’s are supported as well.

The rescan logic has been reworked. Test credentials for individual computers protection groups are available. You can get granular email reports. Also, granular network throttling options are available. You will have control over FLR functionality. There will be a “Task-based” view. You can now also easily uninstall the installer service with a simple click on a button. It is no longer needed that the Agent “sees” the VBR server through DNS resolution. The reboot option is now hidden.

Managed by Agent

That means that the backup is completely managed by the agent. Schedules, repositories etc. are all managed by the agent, and not by the VBR console. The agent supports wildcard and system environment variables for the backup source. Also supported is now the functions of “Compact” and “Health Check”. Deleted Agent retention is now also a feature which helps you to clean up the backups. With granular email reports, you can get reports from your backup runs depending on the settings you’d like to have, for example only a mail when the jobs run into an error. The managed Agent can also grab the configuration from the VBR backup server before it was pushed from the server to the agent.

Managed by Backup Server

In addition to the above-mentioned features, Microsoft Exchange DAG support (including IP-less DAG’s) is now supported. You will get a single process manager for all agent tasks. There is now also the secondary target options for a job.

The Veeam Agent has added support for PowerShell and RESTful API. Also, it’s possible to use Archive Tiers, to do a Secure Restore and export the backup to VBK.

That’s it folks for today!

There is more to read about the Vanguard Summit:

• Vanguard Summit 2018 – Prague – Day 1 Summary
• Vanguard Summit 2018 – Prague – Day 2 Summary
• Vanguard Summit 2018 – Prague – Day 3 Summary

Today was our first day at the Veeam Vanguard Summit 2018 in Prague. All Vanguards were invited to join this special event. I can’t thank Veeam enough for this opportunity. I really appreciate your efforts to get all the Vanguards together, organize everything and sharing some real in-depth knowledge with us. Thank you very much!

Short intro about the Veeam Vanguard program

If you haven’t heard about the Veeam Vanguard program, then I can tell you something about it. There are a lot of expert and specialist programs in the tech community. Like VMware vExpert or Microsoft MVP to just name two of the bigger ones. All these programs are built on a strong and great community. People helping other people, learning, sharing knowledge. The Veeam Vanguard program goes in a similar direction, but from my personal point of view, this program is more exclusive. Currently, we’re roughly 60 people from all around the world, Australia, Germany, Liechtenstein, United States to just name a few countries. And chances are high that you might meet each Vanguard at least once in person. I really appreciate the time each one of the Vanguards is spending for the community, helping each other if there is an issue, or just having a nice chat.

But it’s not only the number of Vanguards. It’s also the way how a company like Veeam works together with the community, especially with the Vanguard community. We’ve got direct communication from the technologists at Veeam, we’re invited in several online conference calls to share knowledge and information about the product, some new and cool features. We’re also invited to give as much feedback as we like and as we can provide to probably make the product even better.

Veeam is sharing content and information with us Vanguards so that we are more or less on the same level of knowledge as their internal System Engineers. Sometimes we receive even a bit more information. But that’s highly NDA and we’re not allowed to share it. We have also the possibility to test some of the beta versions and give direct feedback to the team. And believe me when I say that Veeam is a company that listens to the customers and to the Vanguards!

But let’s now dive a little into the green content. There are three colors of content. Green which is fine to share, yellow which is embargoed (to be shared on a later date) and red which is highly NDA. I’m sorry folks, there’s only green content 😉

Day 1 summary

Rick Vanover welcomed us to the Vanguard Summit in Prague. He brought most of his team also to the summit so we can get the best information and many great discussions. There were many already known people in his team, but also some new members. Welcome at Veeam, ladies, and gentlemen!

As an icebreaker, Rick gave us a microphone to introduce our self to our Vanguard colleagues. There are so many great people here in this program, partners, customers, and vendors, all with an in-depth knowledge in the technical field of virtualization, storage, networking and so on.

Rick shortly mentioned some of the benefits (yes, there’s Vanguard swag too) of the program. Vanguards can get some NFR licenses of the Veeam products, but also other vendors like HPE and Nimble are offering some NFR stuff. That’s great if you’re running a home lab and you like to test some stuff (and perhaps blog about it).

After the icebreaker, we were searching a charter for our Vanguard program. How would you explain the program to others? That was the question. There were many great ideas and it’s now up to the Vanguard organizational team to put some of the best ideas together.

Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 356

Mike Resseler was presenting us some stuff about Veeam Backup for Office 365. To be honest, there was much red content, so I’m sorry again, here’s only green content for you 🙂

Version 2 of Veeam Backup for Office 365 is out and available. It supports OneDrive for Business, SharePoint Online and also Exchange Online. There are also new and improved Veeam Explorers integrated. It’s recommended that you install Veeam Backup & Replication and Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 not on the same backup server because the Veeam Explorers are a little bit different between these two products. That could probably cause issues.

What is an object and what is a user? A user is a combination of four objects:

• Mailbox
• Archive
• OneDrive for Business
• Personal SharePoint site

In case you’re planning to setup Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365, hopefully, these numbers will help you with the sizing of your backup infrastructure.

In case you need help to size for Exchange Online, probably that “formula” can help you to do that. Just provide the correct numbers:

(current primary mailbox total size) + ((daily ChangeRate * 2) * (days of retention))
+ (10% working area)

Veeam Availability Suite

One of the coolest things in my point of view, which will come with update 4 of Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 is the capacity tier. Yes, Veeam is soon able to auto-tier your backup files! How cool is that?

You can add any Azure Blob storage, Amazon S3 or other S3 compatible storage (for sure at Azure or Amazon or also on-premises) to Veeam as a capacity tier repository. That means that not all of your backups are stored on-premises, but you can offload them to Azure Blob storage or Amazon S3.

That, in turn, means that the Veeam Scale-out Backup Repository comes close to infinite storage space! You’ve got your small but very fast repositories onsite to have a fast restore option of the most recent version of a VM, for example. You’ve got probably also some slower repositories with more space with a little less performance. And you probably have also a deduplication appliance to have a long-term retention of (some of) your VMs.

And there’s the S3 capacity tier which will be introduced in update 4. This is a policy-driven repository where you can offload your backups for a long-term retention and also save costs. Just in case, it is possible to do an Instant VM Recovery directly from AWS to your infrastructure!

Conclusion

We received so much information today! At least some of my personal highlights are mentioned above, and I can’t wait to get my hands on the update as soon as it will be released. The support of Azure Blob storage or Amazon S3 is a great improvement. It can save you real money because you don’t have to buy a lot of (expensive) storage hardware, but you can just offload your backups to a nearly unlimited online storage.

I’m looking forward to the next two days, with many more great information and discussions within the community. Stay tuned!

There is more to read about the Vanguard Summit:

• Vanguard Summit 2018 – Prague – Day 1 Summary
• Vanguard Summit 2018 – Prague – Day 2 Summary
• Vanguard Summit 2018 – Prague – Day 3 Summary