The last week of January for me, was spent taking some annual leave, and attending a special invite only edition of the Veeam VMCE 2020 course, at their offices in Bucharest.

The 3-day course, or event (as I’ll explain), was hosted by Rasmus Haslund and Bart Pellegrino. Several Veeam Solution Architects, Systems Engineers and Channel enablement were present, and finally 8 of the Veeam Vanguard community, which is how I got my ticket into the room. You can follow those members Below;

Craig Dalrymple – Twitter – Blog

Ian Sanderson – Twitter – Blog

James Kilby – Twitter – Blog

Eugene Elizarov – Blog

Karel Novak – Twitter – Blog

Florian Raack – Twitter – Blog

Mike Conjoice – Twitter – Blog

Vanny Vanguard – Twitter – Blog

Myself

The course/event

This was run along the lines of “train the trainer” with a large focus on active feedback about the course content, what the current VMCE trainers in the room see the in classroom, and what we see in the field itself during implementation. So, I’d refer to my 3 days as an event rather than a course.

It was refreshing to sit down with a vendor and see them actively take feedback and make immediate changes. The VMCE 2020 course is still under active development now, and being external Veeam, it was fantastic to see how the course was created, the reasons behind it, and feed into the process myself. Bart did a great job hosting and curating feedback, and he is so passionate about the course and its development.

This version of the VMCE has undergone a rethink and redesign, especially with Veeam v10 on its way soon! Unfortunately, I cannot delve into any details about the course. However, it’s clear that thee more feedback Veeam receives from trainers and students attending the course, the more information that Veeam has to improve it going forward. In the room sitting with members of the Veeam family, no comment, question or challenge to the status quo was disregarded.

A large part of the three days was also running through the new v10 labs. Was the allotted time enough, did the workflows work correctly? Did the lab sync up to the course modules before them? For me most of the labs ran fine, and it’s clear that a lot of thought behind the self-paced lab modules has been put in. I also get the impression they have been heavily tested as well, as my labs ran through fine in the documented order.

I also learnt that for VMCE courses ran by partners, the Labs can be delivered by the VMCE providers themselves, under guidance of the training material create their own lab environments, so long as they track to the course objectives. I guess this is an important distinction if you were to attend the course with a third-party provider.

The exam

Again, I can’t really give too much away about this. This VMCE 2020 beta class were some of the first to sit this new exam and set of questions. Again, it’s still under heavily development now, and I hope the feedback I provided will have an impact on the final GA exam.

What is clear, the course is not meant to enable you to simply sit the exam. The course is to enable you with the right skills as a backup administrator, and the exam is for those who have taken the course and gained experience with the Veeam product set as well.

It was clear to me taking the exam that I am not as in-depth with thee product as much as I was a year ago, something which I will mark as a goal to change.

Final thoughts

I think it’s amazing that Veeam opened up this beta to external members to provide feedback, ultimately it will be Veeam’s end users and potential customers who will sit the course, and now reading this, you know part of the development was also thanks to end users and customers and partners.

Feedback is key, even if you are not working for Veeam or part of this year’s Veeam Vanguard program, there are still many ways you can put your point across. (Direct to Veeam Staff or through training providers).

I’d like to say thank you to all the Veeam team who made this week possible. It was great in the course, but also outside of the classroom we had chance to catch up, discuss technology and other things, and sums up the vCommunity beautifully. And I even got to see a little bit of Romania too!

Regards

Dean

Follow @Saintdle

Found this useful? Then share: Twitter

LinkedIn

Email

Facebook

Reddit

Print



Like this: Like Loading...