Veeam Vanguard 2017 announced, 3rd year with TinkerTry friends!

Veeam Vanguard Definition:

These individuals have been nominated as Veeam Vanguards. A Veeam Vanguard represents our brand to the highest level in many of the different technology communities in which we engage. These individuals are chosen for their acumen, engagement and style in their activities on and offline.

Monday, Jan 30 2017, my day started with my flight from home to Las Vegas getting delayed. Re-booked everything. Next, my ride to the airport was late, causing me to nearly miss my flight. Quite relieved and a little weary when I finally got to Las Vegas for an internal VMware kickoff event this week. Time to stand in a long hotel check-in line, with a moment to check my phone. What a nice surprise, a warm and welcoming email from Veeam's Rick Vanover, aka Rickatron, aka @RickVanover. Yes, it's my honor to have been accepted into the Veeam Vanguard Program, for the 3rd year now!

One of the things that really makes the program special is the way it connected me directly to the people behind the company. This includes time to talk about product feedback. Even Anton tolerates my various bleeding edge VEB beta test articles about Windows Server 2016 and Windows 10, and Veeam support actually likes my detailed database reset procedure that I use myself, when moving SSDs from one machine to another, wishing to start VEB from scratch.

Vanguards also receive:

• quality swag
• access to pre-release and GA code
• a special Slack channel
• special webinars
• travel and pass to VeeamON!
  (I was not able to attend).

Home Labs

Recently, two exciting Veeam releases arrived!

• Update 1 for Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 is here, bringing full support for VMware vSphere 6.5

  Update 1 for Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 is here, bringing full support for VMware vSphere 6.5 and several enhancements for Veeam Backup & Replication and Veeam ONE 9.5! Here are all the details >> http://vee.am/wieAJw

• Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows
  Formerly known as Veeam Endpoint Backup, it's good to note that I've already done a backup and restore using this just-released Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows, as I was working out a Samsung 960 M.2 NVMe issue. Yep, worked great!

Now let's talk about the Veeam Vanguards I know, starting with the founder, then listed alphabetically.

Rick Vanover

• Veeam Blog at veeam.com/blog
• Director of Technical Product Marketing & Evangelism at Veeam.
• @RickVanover

The guy who launched the Veeam Vanguard Program back in 2015, see more about Rick here, and my many Veeam articles that relate to home lab use cases.

I've also gotten to know both Clint Wycoff and Mike Resseler pretty well too, and it's always fun talking to any of these guys. Folks like us enjoy giving some of our time back, including product feedback for our readership's benefit.

Don't miss Rick's Rickatron Blog, including this gem, Put these in your dictionaries: 5 Travel Terms from Rickatron.

Here's the Vanguards who have been great friends to TinkerTry, alphabetically. Blogging is a labor of love. Realize all these folks volunteer their own time to give back to their beloved virtualization community!

Matt Crepe

• Matt that IT Guy at 42u.ca
• IT Manager at C3 Group
• @MattThatITGuy

Super helpful guy who kindly offered to help me in the blogger area of VMworld 2016. He even hung out with my Xeon D SuperServer rig while I stepped away to do some video interviews. The same Matt who actually seems to enjoy my "Moon and Venus at the Venetian" tweet, full resolution unedited original here.

Don't miss Matt's definitive article:

• Insight into the Veeam Vanguard program
  Nov 05 2016 by Matt Crape at 42u.ca "Racking & Stacking in a Cloud-based World"

Manfred Hofer

• Austrian Virtualization Power at vBrain.info
• Senior Technical Account Manager at VMware
• @Fred_vBrain

Does he really need an intro? Just have a look at his list of certifications:

VCAP-DCA/DCD/CIA/CID/DTA/DTD, VCP-DCV/DT/Cloud, VTSP-DCV/DT/IaaS/BC/VBCA/MGMT, VSP-DCV/DT/IaaS/BC/VBCA/MGMT, CCA, CCAA, CCEE, CCE-V, CCE-N, MCITP Virtualization, MCSE-Private Cloud, MCSA-212 and Veeam VMCE

John Nicholson

• Virtual Ramblings at thenicholson.com
• Senior Technical Marketing Architect at VMware
• @Lost_Signal
• Co-host of the always funny and fantastic Virtually Speaking Podcast, with Pete Fletcha @vPedroArrow, a wildly irreverent look at the industry, and certainly not just about VMware

Late last night was my only photo opportunity with John, and not my best pose. But hey, it's really cool that he spent time with me geeking out over NVMe, and I even had the honor of attending a vSAN session he delivered with Duncan Epping! Earlier in the week, I failed to grab a picture of John in his sandals, looking a bit more Cody Bunch, who is known to take things even further.

Joep Piscaer

• Virtual Lifestyle at virtuallifestyle.nl
• CTO at OGD ict-diensten
• @jpiscaer

A big Intel Xeon D-1500 fan, and VMUG leader from The Netherlands. Joep is the creator of the Open HomeLab Project, with all sorts of detailed information on putting together your own Xeon D-1500 based system:
openhomelab.org/index.php?title=Supermicro_Xeon_D-1500

Oh, and he wrote this game-changing post:

• Running a virtual gaming rig using a Xeon D server, a GFX 750Ti, PCI passthrough and a Windows 10 VM
  Nov 19 2016 by Joep Piscaer

Tim Smith

• Tim's Tech Thoughts at tsmith.co
• Senior Data Center Consultant at Lumenate.
• @tsmith_co

Super nice guy, got to hang out with him at a VMworld 2015 where I knew pretty much nobody. Always insightful with his posts and tweets, and a wonderfully infectious positive demeanor.

Anthony Spiteri

• Virtualization is Life! at anthonyspiteri.net
• Technical Evangelist at Veeam.
• @anthonyspiteri

Recent Veeam hire who resolved an issue that some Intel Xeon D owners were initially seeing with vSphere 6.5. Now that he's with Veeam, I'm not sure if his listing here will remain, but wanted to be sure to grab it while I could!

Feb 03 2017 Update

• Why to go to VeeamON 2017?
  Feb 03 2017 by Michael White at Notes from MWhite

See also at TinkerTry

• All articles featuring Veeam software

• Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 NFR license now available to certified IT Pros, vSphere 6.5 support coming soon
  -Nov 22 2016

Disclosure
TinkerTry takes extreme care to protect visitors by using only one ad network, BuySellAds, which has never had a security issue to date, and are very commonly used in the virtualization community. Their CEO seems to get what's going on with ad blockers, evident in his recent post. I regularly receive lucrative offers from various companies looking to have me inject javascript trackers into TinkerTry, which I of course turn down.

Veeam has been an advertiser on many virtualization sites for years now, and Veeam is currently running a BuySellAds-purchased advertisement along the top of TinkerTry as well. All TinkerTry advertisement goes through third party BuySellAds. None of my articles are sponsored posts, and note that there are currently no affiliate links for Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE, or any of their other products. TinkerTry.com, LLC is not a Veeam Pro Partner, but I am a Veeam Vanguard Program member who receives no goods or services, only briefings and occasional early access. There are no commissions for any Veeam products folks buy after reading one of my articles.

I reserve and exercise the right to freely write about topics that I choose, whenever I choose to, an essential part of what makes blogging about home virtualization labs, storage, and backup so much fun for me. I tend to feature stuff I actually use, not just write about.