I had to opportunity to attend the VeeamON conference again this year which was held in San Diego, California. The venue itself was excellent – the Marriot Marquis hotel is in a great location, close to the downtown area of the city with fantastic conference facilities onsite.
As a member of the V100 community, I was excited to attend the inaugural V100 Underground event the day prior to the conference starting. The event was led by members of the V100 who presented some insightful content relating to various Veeam related topics. It was also a great opportunity to catch up with everyone in the community. Big shout out to everyone involved in organising the event!
Day 1
The first day of the conference started with the Welcome Keynote, where Veeam sets the scene for what is to come over the next few days including product updates and announcements.
Probably the biggest talking point this year was around V13. Veeam first teased VBR running on Linux at VeeamON last year followed by a Technical Preview giving us a taste of what was to come. As we edge closer the release date we now have some more details around what it will look like.
Veeam Software Appliance
Pre-Built
The next generation of the Veeam Data Platform will have the ability to run as a software appliance running a pre-packaged OS either on physical hardware or as a virtual machine. A software defined, hardware agnostic appliance should make deployment simple and incredibly flexible.
Pre-Hardened
Designed with security in mind, the appliance is configured to align with DISA STIG guidelines. In addition, the attack surface will be reduced by ensuring commonly exploited services such as SSH are disabled by default.
Predictable
Operating a zero trust model, the appliance is designed around minimum privilege requirements. It also includes new features like SAML, bringing single sign-on to the console as well as a new Security Officer role used to approve sensitive configuration changes.
Timeline
- Beta available now
- Supported Preview Q3 25
- GA Q4 25
Other Announcements
There were also several other key announcements for features that will likely release alongside V13.
Universal CDP
Taking Veeam’s existing CDP concept to the next level, Universal CDP adds support to protect any machine including physical workloads with the introduction of an agent at the OS level.
Instant Cloud Recovery from Veeam Vault
A great new capability for those utilising Veeam Vault for backups, with the ability to perform Instant Recovery of any Veeam backup into Azure within 5 minutes! A very bold statement but equally compelling especially in a DR event.
RBAC Enhancements
Additional capabilities have been added to RBAC allowing the creation of custom roles within VBR. The ability to define new roles with granular permissions outside of the built-in presets is a welcome addition.
Artifical Intelligence
Veeam spent some time walking through their AI roadmap and how it can enhance the overall user experience across their product sets.
One area I found particularly interesting was the Data Intelligence category where MCP support was announced within the Veeam ecosystem, providing Veeam context to AI applications.
We were also given a glimpse into how Veeam and AI will function in the future. Although Veeam Guardian is currently a concept, the value of having an assistant manage the end to end process surrounding data protection, availability and resiliency has the potential to be invaluable.
High Availability
Having the ability to failover to a secondary VBR node is something that the product has needed for some time and it’s great to see it will be implemented in the next release. The process to failover is said to be manual initially but will become automated in the near future.
New Web UI & Console UI Refresh
It’s great to see a new sleek, modern web UI coming in the next release. Although not all features will be present in the web UI from the beginning, an iterative approach is planned over the coming releases to ensure parity with the console.
Speaking of the console, that is getting a makeover as well.
Performance Improvements
- Up to 100% improved workload processing speed
- Up to 50% improved backup performance
- 10x faster, 10x cheaper restores to cloud
Outside of the keynote, the remainder of my first day was partner focused with some exclusive and insightful sessions relating to the VCSP and VAR programs.
Day 2
The second day kicked off with the much anticipated Technology Keynote where Veeam’s tech evangelists demoed many of the anouncements from the day before live on stage.
The Veeam ONE demo was heavily AI focused showing some of the improvements made in this area that we can expect to see in the next release. For example, the ability to easily determine the status of malware activity across an environment using Veeam ONE’s Veeam Intelligence bot. Interacting with the bot using natural language makes light work in finding and filtering the information you need quickly.
We also saw a demo showcasing the power of MCP when combined with LLMs to provide NLP Search and eDiscovery functionality.
The demo certainly was eye opening, showing what can be achieved when using these emerging technologies. In this instance, it makes tasks such as searching for specific information within backup repositories seem almost effortless. It was impressive to see how quickly a natural language search query was able to return results in ways we haven’t seen before with Veeam.
In this example, the search algorithm uses the capabilities of AI to search the text inside documents with the ability to return contextual results along with the page number, confidence rating, and search relevancy. Really cool stuff!
The second half of the day consisted of a variety of breakout sessions. I attended some of the V13 focused sessions which looked at how to deploy the new software appliance as well as a deeper dive session into the new features announced across VDP including VBR, Veeam ONE and VRO.
The conference wrapped up in style with the closing party – a great way to sign off a busy few days and catch up with some fellow Veeamers.
Wrap Up
It was another great VeeamON experience this year for me with some fantastic content and exciting announcements. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on the new V13 beta and put it through its paces in the lab – watch out for a new blog post coming soon to cover this.
Perhaps unsurprisingly AI featured heavily throughout the conference. It feels like we are only beginning to scratch the surface on something that has such huge potential and I’m looking forward to see where Veeam takes things next.
Although it feels like a whirlwind of a trip, it always feels incredibly worthwhile and is one of the highlights of the year. Despite being tight on time, I did manage to get outside and explore some of the city.
benharmer.blog 