Announcements

The opening keynote was really exciting to hear, the aquisition of CloudHealth was great. I have been following these guys for a while and the tech they bring or will bring to the VMware portfolio is really exciting. With CloudHealth, you gain visibility into cost, usage and performance across your physical infrastructure and virtual machines.

The second exciting announcement was around Amazon RDS and the ability to set up, operate, and scale databases on-premises and in hybrid environments as it is in AWS. That’s a huge thing for those customers that have gone already into the AWS realms and migrated their databases in, this to me though completes the gap around making that database function more available. Prior to this how would you have ever got that RDS instance out of AWS and functioning elsewhere if there was an outage or a reason that AWS was not available?

Veeam also made a couple of announcements during the week, the major one was Veeam Intelligent Data Management Combines with Cisco HyperFlex to Deliver New High Availability Solution

Veeam also announced the release of some deployment automation for customers wanting the easy button for deploying Veeam when using VMware on AWS.

Veeam Session – Automation & Orchestration

For me personally there was also lots of great things to list at the event. Myself and @AnthonySpiteri had the responsibility of the first Veeam session of the week. You can find the QR code to get going with the Terraform scripts we created for the Veeam end to end deployment.

You can also pick up the session here.

vBrownBag / VMTN Session

Following the Veeam session I had the chance to go a little deeper into the CHEF element of how we are using Desired State and Configuration Management to deploy a dynamic Veeam deployment within any vSphere environment.

Cooking up some Veeam Deployment with CHEF automation

Community

It was another great week for engagement within the IT Community, the events aside from the main conference that continue to be a major success. The people get more helpful I think, I have such a good time chatting to everyone at this conference and sharing views and ideas.

Another shout out I have to give around the community is to the Virtually Speaking podcast guys, they are constantly busy over there capturing content. We managed to get some time on there to talk about the week.

Wrap Up

Now it’s time to head home and then before we know it we will be over in Barcelona for the European show. We will be enhancing the script and code that we used to potentially add even more detail and functionality but with the same premise of deploying a portable set of code for all to use in any vSphere environment which gives you a dynamic and scalable way of delivering your Veeam infrastructure.

I have lots of ideas that have come out of this week around content but also about other areas that we can transition the Veeam platform to continue to be the number one choice for availability for your data. Expect to see some of this in whitepaper or blog format.

Safe Travels everyone.

This screen has been taken from beta testing.

To summarise what this means is, for the Veeam customers that have taken the steps to leverage VMware on AWS by giving those customers the same simple, easy to use and seamlessly easy to get thing protected from a backup and replication point of view, using the same toolset that we know from our on-premises vSphere environment.

Yesterday I spoke about automation and we also shared this information in our session about this feature also coming available, both this and the chef and terraform we spoke about yesterday are both types of automation but for possibly different end users and prospects.

The beauty of what we discussed of the CHEF deployment is it allows for us to be more distributed and dynamic, this offering is going to get things up and running as fast as possible and start protecting workloads. There will also be some customers that don’t want to explore the open source community of our CHEF cookbook.

It’s as simple as deploying to your SDDC and then choosing the CloudFormation template. The template will use the VPC that is linked to your VMware on AWS instance. The CloudFormation template will be executed on the VMware on AWS instance.

This template from CloudFormation will then run through the creation of the stack required.

When that CloudFormation template has been ran it’s then time to start the environment configuration, resource pools, network configuration etc.

Then is the summary screen to show you all the configuration you are about to commit.

This will then continue the deployment with your configuration and you will be able to see the Veeam server deployed within your SDDC.

When you first login to the newly created Veeam server you will see that the repository server has been added down to the stack configuration of the CloudFormation template. It has also added your vSphere vCenter server. You can now see the VMs within your SDDC and can begin protecting those instances.

The final thing I wanted to share was the capabilities, it’s not just backup, you also have the ability to replicate these virtual machines from this vSphere environment to any other environment including an on-premises environment, a Cloud Connect Service Provider offering replication as a service or to another vSphere environment anywhere.

Our session this year is focusing on the automation and orchestration around Veeam and VMware. But what does that mean? The point of our session to highlight the flexibility of the Veeam Hyper-Availability Platform, some people just want the simple, easy to use wizard driven approach to install their Veeam components within their environments but some will want that little bit more and this is where APIs come in and allow us to drive a more streamlined and automated approach to delivering Veeam components.

We also highlighted this by running through everything live, I will get to the nuts and bolts of that shortly.

With there being a strong focus this year’s event, we wanted to highlight the capabilities by using VMware on AWS. Veeam were one of the first vendors highlighted as a supported data protection platform that could protect workloads within VMware on AWS that was 1 year ago and we wanted to highlight those features and capabilities within Veeam.

Veeam Availability Orchestrator – “Replication on Steroids”

The first thing we will touch on is Veeam Availability Orchestrator released this year, this provides a “Replication on Steroids” option for your vSphere environment, this environment can be on premises or leveraging any other vSphere environment, maybe say VMware on AWS where maybe you would still like to keep your DR location on premises and send those replicas down in case of any service disruption within the AWS cloud. The replication concentrates on the application over just sending a VM from site to site, what this also enables is the ability to run automated testing against these replicas to simulate disaster recovery scenarios. Oh and the other large part of this is the automated documentation. Ever had to create your own DR Run Book? I have this does the majority for you whilst being dynamic to any changes in configuration.

Veeam DataLabs

The we wanted to highlight some more automation goodness around Veeam DataLabs, what this gives alongside that Backup and Replication capability is the ability to have an automated way of testing that your backups, replicas or storage snapshots are in a good recoverable state. It also provides the ability to get more leverage from those sources to provide isolated environments for other ways of gaining insight or improving better business outcomes.

I plan to follow up on this as this is one of my passions within our technology stack the ability to leverage Veeam DataLabs from many of the products in the platform to drive different outcomes is really where I see us differentiating in the market.

The Bulk of the session

As you can see we are already cramming quite a bit into the session. But this is the main focus point of the day for us, it’s about delivering a fully configured Veeam environment from the ground up, all live whilst we are on stage. Oh and because we can we are doing this on VMware on AWS.

The driving use case for this was around the Veeam proof of concept process, I mean it was fast, deploy one windows server and 7 clicks later you have Veeam configured, perfect. But the issue wasn’t the Veeam installation, what if we could take an automated approach and be able to understand the customer pain points and needs and then in the background automate out the process of building the Veeam components and automatically start protecting a sub set of data all in the first hour of that meeting?

The beauty of this is, is you do not need to be a DevOps engineer skilled in configuration management or a developer in Ruby. The hard work has been done already and is available for free on GitHub and in the CHEF Supermarket.

I have listed the tools below that we used to get things up and running and to be honest if you were to pull this down when we make this available you will only really need PowerShell, PowerCLI and Terraform installed on your workstation.

The steps we went through live was deploying that Veeam Backup & Replication server along with multiple proxy servers to deal with the load appropriately. Because of the location of the Veeam components and our production environment we chose to also leverage the native AWS services and we deployed an EC2 instance for our backup repository but this could be any storage in any location as per our repository best practices, we also added a Veeam cloud connect service provider to show a different media type and location for your backup or replication requirements. Finally we automated the provisioning of vSphere tags and then created backup jobs based on those.

By the end of the session we had the following built out, over on the right you can see we have a Veeam Backup & Replication server and some additional proxies. On the left at the top we have our Veeam cloud connect backup as a service offering and at the bottom left we also have our on-premises vSphere environment where we could send further backup files or even as a target for those replication jobs. Underneath the VMware on AWS you can see the Amazon EC2 instance where we will store our initial backup files for fast recovery.

As I know some of you will be catching this whilst at the show I want to give a shameless plug out for the next session which goes into more detail around the Chef element of this dynamic deployment so you can find those details below.

I also want to give a huge shoutout to @VirtPirate aka Jeremy Goodrum of Exosphere who helped make the terraform and chef peice happen he also has an article over here diving into the latest version of the cookbook and some other code releases he has made that are related.

Veeam Cookbook 2.1.1 released and Sample vSphere Terraform Templates

Expect to see much more content about this in the form of a whitepaper and more blogs to consume.

I wanted to put a short post together just highlighting some of the things that Veeam and I will be doing at this year’s event.

For the official Veeam at VMworld page you can get that here.

Veeam Official Sponsored Sessions

Every year Veeam has at least two sponsored sessions, it is our team’s responsibility to create and deliver at least one of these sessions, this year it is our team delivering the sessions. It is very important that we make these sessions as informative as possible and engaging, we don’t want them to be the run of the mill sponsored sessions and you will see that mine and Anthony’s session is very much showing the art of the possible.

Personally, and this was the case before I even joined Veeam. The what’s new session that is always on the agenda and normally delivered by Anton Gostev but for the last year it has been delivered by Danny and Rick. This is my favourite session, it really sets out the lay of the land and where Veeam are and where they are going. Highlighting the new features and functionality that is coming over the next few months.

For our session we will be diving into VMware on AWS and how Veeam just works there. But we will be taking things to the next level and showing how as we move into the world of automation, how we can easily spin up our Veeam environment in any location to help drive the availability regardless of where that data resides. We will also be touching on how Veeam Availability Orchestrator can be used between VMware on AWS to provide disaster recovery and business continuity. We also just got a room upgrade because the amount of registrations was shooting up so expect a large room. Oh, and the last thing to mention is the live demos… much of this session will be backed by many live demos.

Sponsored Community Sessions

I also have the pleasure of returning to the vBrownBag for a VMTN TechTalk, this year I have taken both slots and combined them up for a 30-minute session on how CHEF can be used to dynamically build out your Veeam environment from a single all in one system to a complete scaled out distributed architecture in a large enterprise. That bit is not the hard bit, the best thing about this is the ability to dynamically provision or tear down these resources so they are only up and running as and when you need them. I will try and squeeze that into the 30-minute window.

Free ticket giveaway

Now this has always been a thing with Veeam, but I don’t recall the number of free passes being so high! 10 passes are up for grabs and if you are one of the lucky winners then you can choose which event you would like to attend.

The few things I ask though if you are one of the lucky winners, obviously attend our sessions but also make the most of it, you probably entered because you didn’t get the chance from your employee and if you are that winner then make the most of it. Yes, I said that twice. I never got the chance in my previous roles to attend but already last year I can see the power of community at this event, the out of hours is where that networking happens. Yes, the technical side of things is interesting for us but it’s the conversations the ideas within the community that make it what it is.

My second ask is write about it, write about your experiences during VMworld and carry that on after.

Veeam Party

The next important matter to mention is the legendary Veeam party, I got to experience both the US and the European parties, and they are different, but the event is special. Not only that the locations are special as well, Hakkasan was great last year but it is so last year. This year we have Omnia and from what I have heard it’s a cool place for a party. You will find the details below, you can also click the image below if you would like to register.

A VMworld 2018 Badge is required for entrance and will be scanned at the door. Must be 21+ years of age with proper ID. Passport required for International guests. Each Attendee Must Register Separately.

Finally, please come and speak to us at the Veeam booth #1412, there will be great prizes up for grabs every day and the failsafe Veeam t-shirts being given out.