Yes more Veeam Holiday Goodness Giveaways

Full disclosure, I have many friends who work at Veeam, I have also been a guest of theirs as a customer reference in 2011. That said, I’ve written a bit about Veeam in the past on this blog. I’ve also used their products since 2009 for my own production and lab environments. My personal preference when it comes to using tools for monitoring, as well as backup and replication is to keep it simple; design to meet SLA’s and ensure the ability to meet RPO/RTO. On the monitoring front, I want agent-less if possible, with the bonus of having historical metrics that can go back at least one year,

My move to the Veeam suite was reached in tandem with my growth in understanding of VMware and virtualization in general. In our first true ESX  deployment came the recommendations from the VAR we were working with to use the vRanger and vFoglight products. Suffice it to say, I didn’t know what I didn’t know and what at first glance appeared to be solid products that provided the kind of functionality we were looking for, turned out to be less than what we expected.  That said, when the time came to build out more advanced production clusters, and with the knowledge gained over the previous years endeavors  I was armed with a greater understanding of what the environment called for and we moved to  using the Veeam suite of products for Backup/Recovery and Monitoring.

So theres some history, but the true thrust of this post is to highlight the New Years Gift that Veeam is presenting which is a wicked home lab.

• TWO HP ProLiant ML 310e G8 Servers
• NETGEAR ReadyNAS storage system with 4 SSDs drives
• HP V1410-16G Ethernet switch
• TechNet Plus subscription for 1 year
• Online course, books and test from
  VMware Education Services or Microsoft Learning
• …and a MICROSOFT SURFACE!

Pretty sweet setup. I shall say that I wouldn’t mind winning that rig myself and thus, increasing my ever growing power bill in the process. So do yourself a favor, head over and register at the Veeam site for your chance to win. I’m in the process of a new lab build out myself so as soon as I get it up and running I’ll be checking out the new Veeam Enterprise class products and write up a review to share.