WOW! It feels like almost 3 years since we started talking about Veeam Availability Suite v10! That’s because it was, but that doesn’t mean we have not been releasing mammoth updates since then.

There were 5 things announced at that infamous New Orleans convention centre in May 2017. Can you remember what they were?

  • Centralised Agent Management
  • Universal Storage API
  • Cloud Tier
  • NAS Backup
  • Continuous Data Protection

Let’s clear up this first before we move on, Centralised Agent Management arrived at the back end of 2017 along with the Universal Storage API. The release which you can see below was Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 3 and this update release was not what you would typically find as an update release.

Next up we released Cloud Tier at the beginning of 2019, The update 3a release that came out in 2018 was a significant platform update release, concentrating on VMware’s hefty release around vSphere 6.7 and their VMware on AWS platform as well as this release also covering the Microsoft haul of releases as well.

These release notes show the depth of features and functionality that have been delivered because we have the ability to move with our customers and market. enabling us to prioritise and develop what is needed. Such as things like Direct Restore to Microsoft Azure and AWS two things we didn’t announce but they are significant features within the product today.

Resources

So here we are… Veeam Availability Suite v10, from when first announced I have not counted the amount of new features and functionality and not to mention the platform support and enhancements that have been made, but I know that it’s a lot.

Lots of new stuff in this release as you would expect and across the community you are going to see so much content going into this, I myself will likely focus on NAS backup, Data Integration API, Nutanix AHV and our storage enhancements.

Below I have picked out what I believe are the big talking points in this release and why they are important.

NAS Backup

There is so much to say about our new NAS backup functionality, the key points are that this is completely software defined. No need to go out and buy those shiny new storage appliances to be able to back up more data faster.

Focusing on the challenges of today with NAS backup means we focused on staying agnostic to protecting SMB, NFS, Windows File Servers and Linux File Servers. Our Changed File Tracking engine that needs a post of its own but this is what makes our incremental backups super fast and adds to the differentiator of NAS backup against a lot of the competition out there. Finally the ability to leverage storage snapshots as a source.

The other thing I will mention is the File Proxy, this can be a physical windows or virtual machine it can also be Server Core in fact why wouldn’t it be. This file proxy can also act and be the same proxy being used for your VMware based backups. That’s it, to increase concurrent tasks and throughput add more proxies maybe for the first backup, after that scale them down to the required amount to look after the changed increments.

Portability

Portability is not a new feature in v10 in fact the VBK format has been around for some time. Giving our Veeam customers the ability to restore their workloads from somewhere to somewhere different, this means we can take our physical agents for Windows and Linux or any of our virtualisation backups from VMware, Hyper-V or Nutanix AHV and restore them to AWS or Azure. During the last few releases we also introduced the ability to Instantly recover those workloads to Microsoft Hyper-V.

With v10 that instant recovery capability is also here for VMware vSphere, we had before Instant VM recovery for vSphere workloads and even before we had the ability to export disks as VMDK and VHD but to take those physical backups or other virtualisation platforms and instantly recover those to vSphere is a pretty smart way of improving recovery times.

On top of that there is a been some great work done by R&D to improve the overall performance of the Instant Recovery engine, a good test is to perform an instant recovery in 9.5 update 4 and compare that with v10. Also the ability to select multiple workloads for instant recovery to vSphere.

Cloud Tier

Cloud Tier was first released in 9.5 update 4 at the beginning of 2019, I covered a lot of this in this post. But in essence Cloud Tier in update 4 was the ability to tier off older backups into Object Storage be it on premises S3 compatible storage or AWS S3 storage or Microsoft Azure Blob Storage.

In v10 the Cloud Tier enhancements are around Copy Mode, meaning that when the backup file lands in the performance tier it is also copied to object storage. Also in this release we are able to support the object lock within AWS S3 and we are also working closely with some of the major on premises S3 compatible object Storage vendors. There are lots of other really cool things that are happening here.

Data Integration API

One of my favourite capabilities with Veeam is the ability to do more with that data or “Activating that data” to achieve something with that backup data without affecting the production data set.

In v10 there will be an addition to this leveraging of data, which enables you to take the disks from the backed up source workloads and present just the disk to a third party software which could be used for data classification or just understanding something within the dataset. Without having to spin up the workload instance removing the requirement for CPU and Memory resources.

Linux Proxies

This is one of my favourites, the ability to leverage Linux for our Veeam backup proxies, in v10 this will enable hot-add (virtual appliance) mode to leverage linux os VMs rather than a Windows OS. If you think of VMware vSAN this plays into that scalability and proxy footprint.

What this also enables even further is the level of automation with Linux, the ability to quickly deploy a much smaller footprint. I am looking forward already to where this goes next.

Veeam ONE – Monitoring & Analytics

Veeam ONE part of the Veeam Availability Suite is one our Monitoring & Analytics product giving you insight into your production environment as well as your backup environment.

v10 sees some additional features added around NAS and Nutanix AHV visibility but for the most part Veeam ONE got its v10 release in 9.5 update 4 at the beginning of 2019, the leading feature there was the intelligent diagnostics engine.

How many products got the update?

Veeam has massively broadened the platform over the last two years so it’s worth mentioning that this release is not just the traditional Veeam Backup & Replication and Veeam ONE release it consists of a lot more, 10 things in fact.

  • Veeam Backup & Replication v10
  • Veeam ONE v10
  • Veeam Agent for Windows v4
  • Veeam Agent for Linux v4
  • Veeam Plug-in for Oracle RMAN (Windows x86) v2
  • Veeam Plug-in for Oracle RMAN (Linux x86) v2
  • Veeam Plug-in for Oracle RMAN (Solaris x86) NEW
  • Veeam Plug-in for Oracle RMAN (Solaris SPARC) NEW
  • Veeam Plug-in for SAP HANA (Linux x86) v2
  • Veeam Availability for Nutanix AHV v2

Anton went into some more detail about v10 here in his LinkedIn article.

What’s next?

Well…. now we have v10 out it’s onto the next things, planning meetings about the next release and everything in between, Veeam has a large portfolio of products that make up the Cloud Data Management platform so it’s not going to be a countdown to another year before we see another release from Veeam.

In fact next in the hopper is going to be our Veeam Backup for Azure.

Additional Resources

v10 Release Notes

v10 What’s New

7 Comments



  1. I cannot express how disappointed I am that CDP did not make the cut for v10 release day.
    I watched the live stream of the “infamous New Orleans convention centre in May 2017”. Off the back of that I put my faith in Veeam entirely and cancelled contracts for Zerto. CDP was meant to be live in Q4 2017. Here we are in 2020 and still not there and according to this article Azure is your next focus.

    Even as recently as Nov 2019 (Tech Field Day 20 in Silicon Valley, CA on November 13, 2019) CDP is demonstrated but on big v10 release day, no mention.

    I’ve been a “flag waving” Veeam fan for years but do really feel let down by this.

    There is rumour that the code IS ready but you are holding it back a few months to get make sure customers renew support to stay qualified rather than get scared off by the VUL licencing.

    Can you confirm what the current position is for Veeams CDP offering ?

    1. Author

      Hi Andy, sorry to hear this. In the recent Tech Field Day we did demo CDP but we were clear that this would not be part of the v10 release. The honest truth on this, this is something that has to be 100% right and it has to be 100% right at scale for our customers, can you imagine releasing a product or feature that does not work or even worse did something to that data. CDP is coming and it will be in the next release. Our focus has not moved to Azure this is a different team working on the other platform options we have where as we have dedicated people working with the CDP solution today and have been since we first showed this concept in New Orleans. I do understand the frustration, we are not holding back any features and functionality that is not a Veeam thing to do.

      1. OK – So what’s the position now ?

        The first scheduled delivery dates (Q4 2017) are obviously long gone but there must be a current target.

        I’m not looking for a promise/guarantee – just an honest estimate of when CDP will be released to customers that have been loyally paying Veeam every year expecting it “soon”.

        You say in the “next release” – by that you mean v10 Update 1 or is it so far behind its now not likely to be ready until v11 ?

        1. Author

          The position now is that it is being worked on actively. I am not aware that it was stated that this would be available Q4 2017 all be it was demonstrated at VeeamON 2017.

          However I understand the frustration. With no promise or guarantee I would expect to see CDP before the end of the year. Another thing to note is that we have been working on a 12 month release cycle this is something we are looking at to change and make more releases or at least shorten the time to release. The next biggest priority at Veeam is getting CDP out as General Availability. This needs to work and protect our customers data in the best possible way.

          In regards to where we are today, we have a Technical Preview build 3 this is available via your System Engineer at Veeam. If you don’t have their contact details, drop me an email at Michael.Cade@veeam.com and I will put you in touch.


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