Welcome Vanguards!
Nikola Pejkova and Rick Vanover welcome all new and renewed Vanguards here at Prague. As we know it from last year, and maybe also from other conferences, there are the famous traffic light signals. In the following days we will see and hear much of green, yellow and red stuff, which means that they are free to publish, embargoed (publish it somewhen) or even under NDA (don’t even think to publish it or talk about it).
Rick and Nikola explained some new things about the Vanguard program to us. Veeam likes to have more engagement with the Vanguards. There will be more recap movies like they did at VeeamON, helping to build up the profile of a Vanguard, not promoting Veeam especially. Rick guides us through the agenda. There are two rooms this year, with even more sessions for all kinds of tastes of technology and interests. For the official Vanguard Dinner on Tuesday we will have our own Veeam shuttles from the hotel to the venue and back. Awesome!
Rick shares some more program updates and priorities. Such an event, and also the Vanguard program is a great opportunity to get more information directly from the source. As a Vanguard, you’re also able to give your feedback directly to the responsible persons, like feedback for beta versions, or the program itself. These persons can push it into the right channels to make it probably happen.
Veeam Cloud & SaaS Backup Solutions
Mike Resseler is taking over the stage and we’re diving into a red segment, so that’s under NDA and I can’t tell you more. I’m sorry.
Veeam Instance Licensing Update
Products have expanded and will continue to expand to help you back up and recover everywhere! The licensing requirements are different. There’s no socket in the cloud as you have it on-premises. Different workloads are measured differently. More hybrid, less purely on-premises. There are still socket licenses available for the VMware and Hyper-V hypervisors which are on-premises (in a customer data center). All other products require a subscription and a universal license. The new universal license is very flexible in its usage. When you renew your socket licenses, you’ll get up to six universal licenses, which you can use for your Veeam Agents for example. At renewal, you can also convert your socket licenses to universal licenses. It all depends on your architecture and future usage of your infrastructure. Maybe you’ll expand to the cloud? Then universal licensing is your partner.
Veeam Linux Strategy & Updates
Michael Cade and Andrew Zhelezko are now on the stage to share information about the Linux Strategy and Updates with us.
Linux Proxies
There will be Linux proxies, but unfortunately, there won’t be any prebuilt Linux appliance. But yes, at least you can set up Linux to use it as a Veeam Backup Proxy. That means that you don’t have to spend a Windows license for a proxy. Most of the common Linux distribution like Ubuntu are supported to be used as a proxy. Michael and Andrew showed us a script created by Anthony Spiteri that deploys Linux VMs to a vSphere environment with some respect to the number of hosts. The reason for that is because currently, with Linux proxies only hot-add transport mode is possible. Using a proxy per host increases performance because the data of a VM which is being backed up doesn’t have to traverse the network when the proxy is not on the same host.
Fast Clone for XFS
Customers with Linux repositories can make use of the XFS file system, with similar functionality as with ReFS on Windows (fast clone, etc.), but this is feature is currently experimental. To use such a data store, it has to be formatted with «reflink=1» before.