I must say… it was good to be back at the Mascone Center and San Francisco for VMware Explore 2022. Some people might question my excitement at getting back in person in that city for that event, but as I sit here on the Tuesday after to reflect… all I can express is how good it was to be back! The event its self was built as a major reset for VMware as they move into the Broadcom era, but I have to say that for good or bad… it felt like the VMware/VMworld of old.

From a personal point of view, being able to reconnect with a lot of the community that I have gotten to know so well over the last ten years was a highlight. Reconnecting with friends and colleagues was a highlight, but also obviously just being there in the Mascone with it buzzing again was a good thing. The Expo floor… while noticeably smaller than VMware of olds still contained the charm and feel of booth halls gone and I didn’t miss out on the opportunity to walk around and check out what was what.

From a Veeam point of view, we had a very successful show with a lot of booth traffic, great in booth presentations, excellent partner meetings and a very successful Explore Party.

Sessions

Michael Cade and myself delivered a session on Tuesday and it was brilliant to be back together with Michael talking data protection with Veeam and Kasten. We presented on Veeam Backup & Replication v12 where I focused on a couple of big ticket features and enhancements around Direct to Object Storage Support and CDP coming to Veeam Cloud Connect Replication for DRaaS which is something a lot of people have been waiting for for a long time now. Michael presented on Kasten K10 and how we protect an application and data deployed as a Kubernetes microservice. The cool thing which we did, this time around was use the same example application across a number of different platforms and had them protected with Veeam and Kasten a number of different ways… the idea being that it doesn’t matter where you run your application… Veeam has you covered.

You can view the session here on demand

Rick Vanover and Kisten Stoner also delivered a couple sessions around Ransomware and Oracle VMware Cloud which where also well received.

On a different note, Michael and I appeared on the Virtually Speaking Podcast again which was right after the main keynote on the Tuesday. This year they had a prime location in the Hang Space with the episodes broadcast live there, and also over the internet on Twitch. Was great to get back behind the mic with Pete and John.

To VMware’s credit, they recorded all sessions and quickly made them On-Demand here. You will need a VMware Explore account, but it’s worth it to get access to all the sessions throughout the week. I’ve listed the William Lam GitHub Repo below that scrapes the content catalog and provides links to each session directly.


https://github.com/lamw/vmware-explore-2022-session-urls
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Booth and Show

As usual the events team know how to rock a booth, and we haven’t been able to show off the Veeam 2019 booth setup much over the past three years, but it was out in force in prime location for this years event. We always draw a crowd and during the times I was around the booth there was a lot of great conversations happening, demos and giveaways. Booths remain a critical part of these in person events and having a real presence is important. Veeam takes its commitment to VMware very seriously and it is reflected in the effort we go to to make it successful and the booth is central to that. Add to it Kasten by Veeam and we delivered amazing presence!

https://twitter.com/kastenhq/status/1565053578401775616?s=20&t=hsaqfluzutv0Xbdn3R_vAQ

The Recap Video that myself and Kirsten Stoner did is below… these are also lots of fun to get done… it doesn’t just happen 🙂

Veeam Legendary Party

It’s hard to keep on calling these parties legendary for the simple fact that we have had some absolute killer parties over the past ten years… specifically the epic ones in Vegas pre-pandemic, however this years party was brilliantly executed and without questions was the most hotly contested ticket in town on the Tuesday night… as you can see before from the line that stretched around the venue… we had to turn a number of people away. Walk The Moon (a band who I had never heard of specifically) delivered an amazing one and a half hour show and while the drinks where hard to keep flowing due to a bar bottleneck, I know that everyone who was there has a really good time.