Veeam On 2025 - The Journey
Day Zero - Travel Day
I am sitting here in the Toronto airport after completing my first two-hour flight on the way to sunny San Diego for Veeam ON 2025. I am staring down the barrel of two more legs (Toronto to Denver, and then Denver to San Diego), before I arrive at the San Diego Marriott Marquis property. This is where I will be learning everything there is to know about Veeam in three days. Right. Like that's going to happen.
A total distance travelled of 5064KM in a little over 16 hours.
Day One - Pre Conference Workshops
Day one at Veeam On 2025 did not have much on the agenda besides badge pickup and some hands-on workshops. Badge pickup was uneventful. I signed in at the kiosk, and my badge was printed, hung on a lanyard, and presented to me by a very friendly Veeam representative. Next stop was the swag station - I mean, is it a conference if there is no swag? I picked up a nice little co-branded Veeam and Microsoft water bottle, which I will surely use. From there, I did some mingling amongst the registrants and picked up some pretty awesome stickers that were lying around the registration area. Then onto the workshop!
As I was here to fill my brain with knowledge, it's off to the workshop I go.
It's worth mentioning that Veeam provides a dedicated iOS or Android app to help you pick your sessions, so I reserved most of my sessions before I even left Canada. With that in mind, the only lab session that was available to me was 'Workshop: Veeam Recovery and Orchestrator Workshop', so I reserved my slot as the other workshops were full. This would not have been my first choice for a workshop (looking at you, Getting Started with Veeam Cloud Data Vault).
Protip for anyone for Veeam who might be reading, please, please add a 'join waitlist' option or let attendees know that walkups are an option.
Anyway, rant over - onto the workshop. For those of you who know me, know that automation is key to scaling any enterprise, so I was interested in learning more about the Veeam Orchestrator solution, as admittedly, I knew very little about it. I arrived at the Workshop about 10 minutes early to secure my spot, but there was no need, as there were at least a dozen empty seats (in a room that had maybe 60 workstation spots). Great! Let's dig into the lab, to see what this is all about.
Unfortunately, there was an issue with the lab environment, where I, along with several other lab attendees, were presented with the above screen when attempting to access the lab. I felt bad for the folks overseeing the lab, as this was something outside their control, but they had to answer to the mob; well, not a mob, we were all very understanding - we are IT folks, so know things don't always go as planned when you 'push to prod'. This outage went on until breaktime (probably an hour into the session), where we were offered soda, chips, and candy - awesome!!!
Once breaktime wrapped up, I had hoped that the backend issue with the workshop had been resolved, however, the issue persisted, so I decided to leave the workshop after approximately. 70 minutes without actually doing a single task in the workshop. Yikes!
After leaving the workshop, I did some more mingling at the first-timers reception. As my body is still running on Atlantic time, I realized it was way past dinner time for me, so I had to go track down some food. Quick stop at the room to answer some emails, change, and head out the door to get some chow. The curious side of me got the better, and I logged into the lab from my room to see if the issue had been resolved, and sure enough, in the words of Borat - Great Success.
As you can see from the screenshot below, the workshop worked as expected, and I have to say, the performance of the remote environment was very,very quick. Kudos to the team who built the backend!
I completed a module or two before hunger got the best of me, so I had to figure out where to get some chow. After asking some of the locals, they pointed me to Kansas City Barbeque which was about a 1km walk away from the hotel.
Protip #2. We all see blog posts reminding us to wear comfortable shoes at conferences, Veeam ON is no different. Almost 20,000 steps before the event even started. For all of those blogs out there reminding you to wear comfortable shoes when going to conferences - please listen to them.
The BBQ joint that I went to had a claim to fame that I did not realize until I got there. This is the place where some of the original Top Gun movie was filmed. I will add some pics of the inside of the location at the end of this post. Below is a short clip from Top Gun - compare it with the pics posted at the end of this post.
So, to end day zero of Veeam On 2025, I filled my belly with Brisket, beans, and some French fries.
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