The releases just keep coming from Veeam this year, we have seen releases to the flagship products within the Veeam Availability Suite which consist of Veeam Backup & Replication and Veeam ONE, releases for your Cloud IaaS backup requirements with offerings for both AWS and Azure. SaaS backup aimed at Microsoft Office 365. Business continuity and disaster recovery with Veeam Availability Orchestrator and that’s just the big releases. There have also been some updates.

10a released today, and this release concentrates on and addresses issues reported by customers, but it wouldn’t be a Veeam release if it did not contain some new features and functionality.

Platform Support

I mentioned earlier that we have been releasing at some pace new products and new versions of products and that included Veeam Backup for AWS. I have done covered this product in this YouTube playlist. Very much released as a standalone product but also allowed for the new Veeam Universal License so you had the flexible way of being able to move workloads around your environments whilst always ensuring Veeam would be able to protect your workloads and data.

The new feature in 10a addresses that standalone management of Veeam Backup & Replication and Veeam Backup for AWS, this new plug in also released today enables you to unlock some more centralised management for the Veeam Backup for AWS product. The ability to connect to an existing or deploy a new appliance. Then being able to configure your S3 Backup repository for the appliance also known as your external repository which was already there from v10 of the release earlier in the year, but you had to create that manually in the AWS management console and add to both Veeam Backup & Replication and Veeam Backup for AWS.

But that’s not all you also can create, edit, start and stop your AWS backup policies from within Veeam Backup & Replication. Amongst some more pretty cool features. You can download this plugin from here.

• Monitor session statistics.
• View created snapshots and image-level backups.
• Restore entire EC2 instances as Amazon EC2 instances or Microsoft Azure VMs.
• Instantly restore EC2 instances as VMs into VMware vSphere or Hyper-V environment.
• Export EC2 instance volumes as virtual disks.

Ok that was probably the biggest thing for 10a, but there is also support for many new operating system versions, taken from the linked KB article above.

• Microsoft Windows 10 version 2004 and Microsoft Windows Server SAC version 2004 support as guest OS, as Hyper-V servers, for the installation of Veeam Backup & Replication components, and for agent-based backup with the Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows 4.0.1 (included in the update).
• Linux Kernel version 5.7 support for guest VMs, for the installation of Veeam Backup & Replication components, and for agent-based backup with the Veeam Agent for Linux 4.0.1 (included in the update).
• RHEL 8.2, CentOS 8.2, Oracle Linux 8.2 (RHCK) and VMware Photon OS support for guest processing functionality in host-based backup jobs.
• RHEL 8.2, CentOS 8.2, Oracle Linux 8.2 (RHCK), Ubuntu 20.04, Debian 10.4, openSUSE Leap 15.2, Oracle Linux 8 (up to UEK R6) and Fedora 32 (up to kernel 5.7.7) distributions support in the Veeam Backup & Replication agent management functionality.
• VMware vCloud Director 10.1 support and better handling of deployments without network access to vCD cells.
• Recent Azure Stack versions support. Please refer to the documentation for additional registry settings required depending on your version.

There was also some storage enhancement support around primary storage integrations with HPE Primera, secondary storage system support for Dell EMC Data Domain all this detail can be found in the KB article linked above.

NAS Backup

The noticeable new enhancement around NAS backup is the ability to support Azure File Sync, for those not familiar with Azure File Sync it enables the following

• Synchronise file shares between offices
• Fix problems with full file servers by using tiered storage in the cloud
• Use online backup
• Get a DR solution for file servers, e.g. small business or branch office

The issue with Veeam Backup & Replication prior to this 10a release is we were not aware of the cloud tiering but now files not present in the local cache will be backed up directly from Azure. I am going to try and set this up and create a video demo, I think this might be useful for all, let me know if you are interested in the comments below.

Ah yes, another thing added in 10a related to NAS backup is for the first 250GB of NAS data it will be protected for FREE!

Restore

It wouldn’t be a Veeam release if there was not some focus on restore and restore speed and performance, the one I have picked from the notes is the enhancements around Direct Restore to Azure. I have spent a lot of time in testing out restore scenarios from either backup locations or if using a proxy within Azure would make a difference.

I will have to jump back on this testing and confirm how much quicker this same process is with the new enhancements. The below image shows the testing prior to this new 10a release.

Another massive release and we are just calling it an update. I have seen the list of what else we can expect for the rest of the year and it will not disappoint.