VeeamON 2024 Day 2 is a wrap. And while I had originally planned on attending in-person, work and family commitments changed those plans just over a week ago and I had to make the decision to attend remotely. Last year I was able to attend in-person with “most” expenses paid by Veeam due to my Legends status. The previous 2 or 3 years I attended remotely (as did most due to COVID restrictions), so last year was a whirlwind of excitement, but also had my head spinning as I moved from session to session quickly, while trying to keep up with product announcements, tips, tricks, network with like-minded partners, vendors, and Veeam staff. To say that attending virtually this year was already a setup for disappointment in comparison, but how does online attendance of the actual event compare with attending in-person?

Let’s dig in.

Day 1 (Partner Day):

Huge disappointment here. As a Veeam ProPartner (Reseller) and Veeam Cloud Service Provider (VCSP), I was looking forward to attending this session. Last year it was only a couple hours long and I gave feedback that we needed more. I get the feeling I wasn’t alone, and it appears that Veeam listened. The Partner day this year was nearly 4 hours. However, it wasn’t livestreamed. I am waiting to hear if it was recorded and might be posted later. Huge letdown for me though, because topics of discussion included changed coming to VeeamONE and the Veeam Service Provider Console. While I don’t heavily use Veeam ONE, the VSPC is the bread and butter that a CSP needs for managing remote VBR and Veeam Agent deployments, provides Veeam Cloud Connect services both locally or direct to object, can manage Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 instances and provides general reporting, job and license management. It appears there are a lot of great changes/feature additions coming, but I missed out. I can’t really overstate my disappointment here. If you’re a ProPartner, be there in-person next year.

Day 2 (Opening General and Regular Session Day)

The General Session
Veeam has a lot of prerecorded sessions for remote attendees, but has always made the wise decision to livestream the opening and closing General Sessions. Which is brilliant, because it just wouldn’t be the same without it. While the opening and some of the skits/interviews always seem a little cringy, the content itself was fantastic.

Anand Eswaran, Veeam’s CEO however opened up the session in usual fashion. He ran through the usual statistics on Veeam’s marketspace, product information, as well as giving credit, several times, to the Veeam Legends, Vanguards and MVP’s. Love the recognition that we get. But as an interesting statistic, Anand noted that 99.4% of all questions asked in the Veeam Community are answered by the Community. And I agree, that is indeed an amazing number, and a testament to the community the Veeam has created, and just how much Veeam’s users love and utilize these products!

Anand also discussed just how important data is today. Just a few of the items I noted from the key-note with a bit of my own context:

• The explosion of data is the currency of the modern era. Every company is now in the software business. Many companies these days happen to have products that use their software. For instance, many companies today are software companies that just happen to also manufacture products that use their software and generate huge sums of data.
• Infrastructure is getting increasingly complex, including multiple cloud environment. Third, vendor lock-in is an increasing problem. As Anand noted, “if you wanted to move from from vSphere to Hyper-V or Nutanix or Proxmox which I’m sure no one is thinking of…” due to “a common refresh, or aggressive price increases” you need to be able to move your data. And Veeam not only can work with most of those environments, but can also help to facilitate that move.
• 75% of companies experienced at least one ransomware attack in the past 12 months. 27% paid the ransom and never received their data back data.
• Veeam, after 17 years on the market, this year has surpassed Dell and become as the undisputed leader (by market share) in Data Resilience.
• Anton Gostev is back! After 5 years absent from VeeamON, he’s back in-person.
• Veeam is introducing hypervisor support for two new hypervisors:
  • Oracle Linux Virtualization Managers (oVirt) KVM-based virtualization for Enterprise (Available now)
  • Proxmox VE KVM-based Virtualization Platform for SMB and Service Providers (Available Q3 2024)
    • Note that Anton stated that without any optimizations, Veeam was 3-times faster to backup Proxmox VM’s than the native backup solution
• New product versions have been or are being released
  • Veeam Backup for Kubernetes v7 is (available now)
    • FIPS-Enabled Clusters
    • Azure Blob Immutability
  • Veeam Backup for Microsoft 365 v8 will be (Available Q3 2024) with new enhancements
    • Immutability for Primary Backups
    • Linux Proxy Pools
    • MFA for Console
  • Veeam Backup for AWS v8
  • Veeam Backup for Azure v7
    • Azure CosmosDB Support
  • Veeam Backup for Salesforce v3
    • Data Encryption
• New Workload Support
  • MongoDB
  • Microsoft EntraID (fornerly Azure Active Directory)
    • Protect Objects as well as Sign-In and Audit Logging
• Veeam Data Cloud is present, and the interface works great. It’s incredibly granular if needed and easy to use.
• Veeam Backup & Replication v13 (2025) – On Linux!
  • Running VBR on Linux has been requested for YEARS and it is finally here.
  • Multiple delivery options including installable software, virtual appliances,
  • Hardened, locked-down Linux servers
  • Zero-Trust Architecture
  • High Availability (HA) – another VERY requested feature
  • VBR on Windows is here to stay for forseeable future
• Coveware acquisition
  • Works with in-line malware detection, analyzes VM’s and helps to facilitate data recovery
• Veeam/Microsoft Copilot integration
  • Appears to work really well in evaluating your environment, making recommendations, and even starting tasks for you (such as a restore) using context-based information. Can also provide information when something looks suspicious such as an unusual number of files suddenly being changed.

Takeaways

• Just the keynote is a lot – I’ll have to create a separate post for the other items.
• While there were multiple sessions of various technical levels, the online experience only contains 100 and 200 level sessions, and no 300 level sessions.
• There is a significant difference in the number of sessions available in-person vs online. I didn’t personally find the online sessions all that appealing to me, but that is probably largely due to the lack of the 300-level sessions. Once I go through them though, we’ll see what I find as I’m sure there are still some great nuggets in there somewhere.
• VBR on Linux! And HA! Probably the single biggest items for me, but we’ll see what is announced/demo’d in just a few minutes with the closing keynote!

For those of you who made it all the way through Day 1&2, visit my summary of the Day 3 closing keynote!