The VeeamON week started early for me. When i did all the booking for VeeamON, i signed up for the VMCE-A course. This is the course required for the VMCE Advanced certification. If you’re already VMCE (Veeam Certified Engineer) you can go a little further, do the course, learn a little more and then get certified again. Engineers who complete both VMCE and VMCE-Advanced: Design & Optimization programs (courses + exams) will be granted with the “Veeam Certified Architect” (VMCA) title by Veeam.
Monday, 15th of May – First day of VMCE-A training
I got up early, heading for a breakfast and then walking to another hotel just around the corner, where all the courses were located. I registered there for VeeamON to receive my event badge, and then i registered for the classroom.
We were about 20 people in the class. Some very experienced people, from all kinds of IT, like storage professionals, server specialists and so on. Our teacher did very good. He knows the stuff, and he is anything but boring. We had some good laugh and very good discussions. People are sharing examples of their experiences, from the real world and real customers. During the morning we went through some theoretical things, numbers and calculations. And these numbers are another sign that SMB (Small and Medium-sized businesses) are in different size in different countries…
During the afternoon we had a case study. Some fictional company (no, not Contoso…) had its infrastructure and some requirements regarding RPO / RTO, backup, failover and all those things. Our task was to analyze the infrastructure, plan some optimizations and create a concept of how we could fulfill the customers requirements. That task was a group work.
Tuesday, 16th of May – Second day of VMCE-A training
Today i was up on time and heading directly to the class rooms. It’s great to have a Starbucks coffee right in the reception area of the hotel where the trainings and class rooms are located. I grabed a iced cold brew, something with coconut in it. Waiting there for my coffee a guy showed up and greeted me, and made compliments about my blog. The coffee tasted great and meeting this guy was a great start in the day 🙂
The morning began also with some theoretical things, numbers and a little math. We talked a lot about personal experiences and shared real life stories. Shortly before lunch we received the task to build groups again and check our design from Monday. The fictional company for which we planned our design on Monday was now operating for a year. We had again to analyze the actual situation and create a new concept how to backup, replicate and keep the data available.
For me those two days were really interesting and educational. I did not many design-things in my actual IT career. We had a great class, good discussions and a great teacher. Many thanks to Bart Pellegrino, you did a great job!
Follow up: