How great the year started as mentioned in my previous blog it also declined to a terrible year due to personal circumstances. After a few months in which I invested in my family to support them through a hard time I’m finally back on track. I will try to let this come back into my blogs!
My start with Veeam
As I started working with Veeam last year I was impressed about the progress made by Veeam. In the years before I mostly used the NetApp SnapManager suite and Commvault to perform data protection for our customers. Ofcourse I kept looking at vendors like Veeam but wasn’t very impressed by the possibilities for backup. It always felt like a premature backup tool for vSphere environments only. Due to a great deal we could make at a customer I came in contact with a local Territory Manager and System Engineer about Veeam Backup & Replication. During this meeting my skepticism about Veeam was turned quickly with all possibilities the solution offers at the moment. I’m positive Veeam B&R offers enough possibilities for 99% of our customers. Unless the customer has very exotic databases or applications in house, Veeam will be able to do the job without unnecessary complexity.
VMCE training
After acquiring some hands-on experience the wish to become Veeam certified grow. Although my job mostly includes design and architecture work I like to have enough technical expertise to know what I’m talking about. This is also how the Veeam certification path is set up.
To become Veeam Architect it’s required to pass the VMCE exam first. To be able to do the VMCE exam the training is a mandatory prerequisite. I attended the training in March which was provided by Copaco. One week before I got a phone call if it would be a problem to do the training through Virtual Learning due to a lot of cancellations. As I didn’t wanted to postpone the training I accepted and was welcomed by Eric Francois during the training. The training itself had a nice pace through the theoretical information about the Veeam B&R and Veeam ONE products. The online labs provided during the training provided a lot of possibilities and gave the opportunity to work on features not used often. If you work a lot with Veeam B&R I think the course will be pretty useless but for me it gave a solid base for the VMCE exam.
Preparing for the VMCE Exam
After the training we got some more preparation materials for the exam from the trainer. The first thing I did was a read through the textbook of the course. In this textbook all product and features mentioned in the exam are mentioned in a total of 269 pages. There is really a lot of information which is also useful for operational and design work. During the booking of the exam it was possible to choose which version and I chose the latest v9 update 4 release. To know the features f this release I read through Release Notes for v9.5U4. Although the User Guides are nice reads in case you want to check something it’s simply too much to remember for the exam. Instead I read to the What’s New in v9.5U4 PDF. As the exam was supposed to have questions about features supported in certain Product editions I memorized mostly the comparison table. To get a feeling about the type of questions I checked with two practice exams. The first one was the Official exam which is nowadays only available for Veeam Partners. The second one is a Community exam. Both exams will not have actual exam questions but will resemble the exam questions. As the practice exams showed pretty hard questions I also used the Unoffical studyguide by Rhys Hammond for a extra check on my knowledge.
The exam
I scheduled the exam for Friday October 25th and sat the exam at the TSTC exam location in Veenendaal(NL). As English isn’t my first language I had 90 minutes instead of the standard 60 minutes to answer the 50 selected exam questions. Most of the questions were pretty straightforward based on training and experience. During the exam I answered all question directly on first guess but marked the ones I wasn’t sure about. The most difficult questions for me were the questions where multiple answers were needed and there were a lot of them in the exam. Some of those answers were so closely formulated I could miss the complete question with a tick in the wrong box. During my review of the questions I marked I changed my mind on 2 questions and the moment came to end the exam and see what the score was. I was very happy when the message “PASSED” was shown on the screen.
What’s next
For now I really look forward to version 10 of Veeam Backup & Replication. It will not only include a really good NAS backup solution but also a lot of other cool features.
My plan is to continue my certification path with Veeam up to the Architect level. I also heard the advanced training is a very interesting training as it isn’t a textbook training but more a design workshop in which it’s case to design the best possible solutions for different use cases. I put it on my goals for 2020 to to this training and in the mean time gain experience with the Veeam products. Especially the combination with AWS and Azure clouds have my attention. I hope this blog will help a few of you during your path to Veeam certification. Let me know if I can help you somehow!
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