Oh boy was it hot in Florida…but what a great conference it was. After being back for a few weeks I decided to write down my impressions about VeeamOn
This was my second VeeamOn to attend. I’m forever grateful being a Veeam Vanguard member and being invite by Veeam to attend. What a great opportunity! If you are curious about Veeam Vanguard and the Veeam 100 program, please follow this link to learn more.
This year’s VeeamOn took place at the beautifully Fontainebleau hotel in Miami from May 22nd to May 25th. I hadn’t been in Miami for more than 20 years, and I had never stayed at such a hotel. A fun fact about this hotel, many popular movies took place there, like Goldfinger, Scarface, or War Dogs. The even have a special website where all the movies are listed.
I arrived in Miami on Sunday around noon after an uneventful flight (just how I like it). My room was not ready, so I dropped my luggage off and explored the hotel a bit. This is a big hotel, with several main buildings, 10 pools I counted, and numerous bars and restaurants. I decided to wait at the pool bar, wearing my green Veeam Vanguard hat. This quickly led to conversations from participating vendors and some good discussions about cybersecurity, disaster recover, and ransomware. A few hours went fast and my room was ready. When checking in, the front desk told me we upgraded you, you have a king bed now. Ok I thought, sure. What she didn’t mention I was upgraded to a full suite on the 33rd floor! I usually don’t get that lucky, so my mind was completely blown away when I got there. Off to a great start!
As more and more fellow attendees arrived it was great to catch up. After some shopping trips to get the basics, a good amount of walking, and dinner the day concluded.
Monday was check in time and time to explore the venue. I spent a good amount of time in the community playground (I think we need to change the name), which consisted of some play areas with games, LabWarz, Swag Store, and the community booth, where a lot of us volunteered to talk about Veeam community to anyone who wanted to hear it 😉 It became the central meeting point for many of the Veeam100 members.
Upstairs was the Tech Festival, where Veeam’s partners were displaying their solutions. I had some good discussion and learned about products I wasn’t aware of.
Tuesday and Wednesday was packed with sessions. Starting off with the keynote session, which had just the right mix of announcements, entertainment and information to seeing so many of the Veeam100 members presenting. It was also great to hear a shout out from CEO Anand Eswaran to the community members. Moving between sessions was challenging though; the app was somewhat helpful, but a lot of sessions ran over and there was not enough buffer scheduled, so you would end up in the next session 10 minutes late. Definitely something to improve for 2024 .
I found the content of sessions better than last year. 2022 was the first VeeamOn conference back in person after covid, which I’m sure was challenging to organize. I was very happy with the quality of all session I attended. I was also happy to hear some upcoming features like inline malware scanning for VBR. Can’t wait for it to be released.
Another highlight session / demo was on hardened Veeam Repository. This was made public during the session, Rick sitting at his laptop actually releasing in on Veeam’s website. It’s a great automated deployment build on Ubuntu. I highly suggest taking a look at it. Also runs great in the homelab 😉 All information and software can be found here.
I myself had a TechTalk on Wednesday in the community playground on Sure Backup and Veeam Agent integration into Windows Bootmanger. The turnout for these sessions was lower than we hoped for due to not being advertised properly. This was the first year and we already provided feedback. It do like the idea of TechTalks and think with proper publicity these could really take off. Looking forward to do it again in 2024.
Tuesday evening was a reception in a neighboring hotel (Ratmir’s Vodka Party 😉 Was great to meet with people there too and catch up. When we were about to leave a Thunderstorm was flooding the streets. I was wearing my Veeam sneakers and was already taking them off and about to start running, but thankful an uber arrived. The rain in Miami is no joke!
Wednesday night concluded with the legendary Veeam party. This party was fantastic, it took place in the hotel with 80/90 vibe. The food was amazing, and the live band was playing music from the 80 and 90s! I think everyone had a lot of fun.
Thursday was traveling time for most. Unfortunately also for most, we were running into some major delays. Nearby Fort Lauderdale airport was shut down due to weather. BA in the UK had IT issues and had to shut down most of their flights. My 21/2 hours flight was delayed 5 1/2 hours! The most entertaining part was hours and hours of chatting on Signal with each other and my upgrade to First Class!
In conclusion, I can honestly say this was a great conference. From location to content and entertainment I would highly recommend attending next year. Many thanks again to Veeam, especially Rick, Nikola, Safiya, Aubrey, and Madalina!
Some more pictures from the event….
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