Just another dot release at the end of a busy year… the second dot release this year and as I review the 12.3 what’s new document that for Veeam Backup & Replication so minus Veeam ONE we are looking at 14 pages!
I want this post to be a quick look at some of the features and hopefully I can get into some of these areas in more dedicated posts.
Platform Support (Windows Server 2025)
It’s a very standard thing for Veeam to include platform support updates in these releases. Microsoft ignite only happened a few weeks back where Windows Server 2025 was announced and released.
This will provide the ability for Veeam to be installed on Windows 2025 but also protect this operating system including Hyper-V 2025 and SCVMM for those virtual machine environments.
Cloudy Authentication Protection (Entra ID)
Probably the biggest ticket item we have in this release is the ability to protect, restore and compare Microsoft Entra ID. Entra ID is fast becoming the defacto authentication engine across the industry.
It’s not just for the Azure and Microsoft 365 workloads, its being adopted across multiple clouds and applications.
This is one of those big-ticket items that I cannot do it justice here in these summary post.
Hypervisor Hunger Games – Season 2 (Nutanix AHV)
It’s been another year of Hypervisor hunger games, and we have customers moving to the cloud, sticking with their current licensing dilemma, moving to another hypervisor or even considering Virtual Machines on Kubernetes.
We have had the ability to protect Nutanix AHV VMs for a while now, I wrote about this when we first launched this capability. In 12.3 we are releasing the ability to provide application consistency in an experimental mode.
Database Support
Having been over on the cloud and cloud native train for a few years, in coming back it was the database support and the breadth that Veeam had continued to innovate and provide more options when it comes to protecting critical databases in your environments.
One of the first areas I explored was around the integration with Microsoft SQL Server with the enterprise application plugin, this goes straight into SQL management studio providing the DBA the freedom to still control their backups, but it puts some control and visibility on the data protection and security teams. 12.3 brings the ability to use SMSS version 20.
There were also some more version updates as per below:
- MongoDB 8
- Postgres 17
- Oracle 23ai
- SAP HANA – SLES 15 SP6 and RHEL 8.10 support
If you have not had chance to read in more detail my posts covering some of these database protection areas here are some posts on them.
MongoDB ReplicaSets + Pac-Man – Mission Critical High Scores
The SQL continues…. Automating the deployment of the homelab
Agents Updates
Another area that always gets a list of new features in every release is the protection of agents. I think we do a very good job of talking about protecting Windows and Linux physical servers and then also for the hypervisors we do not have native support for, but we also have a handful of other agents that are covered in this release.
I was really impressed with the latest update of agent for MacOS, my work laptop is a Mac, so I need a good way to protect things here. The 12.3 release enables me to move to MacOS 15 (Sequoia) and still get things protected.
The other noticeable addition is the Veeam Agent for Linux being able to support the IBM Power Architecture. Something that has been an ask in the Kubernetes landscape as well.
Cyber, Cyber, Cyber
I think it’s also fair to say that Veeam are not a security company but over the last 18 months we have a lot of smart people focused on data security, both left and right of the bang.
We have always been hot on the right of bang, the remediation of workloads and data when bad things happen but these last few releases have focused on left of bang regarding prevention.
IoC (Indicators of Compromise) also known as the hacker’s toolbox, could be the same tools we have all been using for years but in the wrong hands provide the ability to extract data out of a network. My favourite example here is FileZilla. We have likely all used it, but if this is on your mission critical servers then you potentially have a concern or an indicator that something is afoot. This feature in VBR is going to bring in the recon scanner from Coveware by Veeam to provide this within the backup phase.
Veeam Threat Hunter is another area I want to touch on, this is an evolution of the malware and YARA scanning features added in previous versions. Threat Hunter will provide the ability to use the most up to date signatures from a built-in virus scanning tool set. Have a read of the what’s new to get a better understanding of how this whole feature compliments the story so far.
Veeam Data Cloud Vault
The first party backup target, hosted by Veeam since early 2024 will now have an easy route within Veeam Backup & Replication to add in the backup repository for both your primary backups but also your longer-term retention.
I am very excited to see the overall Veeam Data Cloud story in 2025 continue to grow.
Veeam Intelligence
It would not be a bit of content in 2024 without the mention of AI, but this is not your 2023 AI chatbot but a way to interact with your backup resources and gain valuable insight into what’s going on without having to navigate through all jobs and potentially many different servers.
This is more focused on the data that Veeam ONE can gather across your environment, be sure to look at that what new as its packed with new stuff as well.
NAS Backup
Another area of my focus a few years back was bringing to market our NAS backup feature. I have had a blog related to the snapdiff integration for those 4 years and we can finally go back and update things as this is now available after some communications with NetApp on the licensing.
Another topic close to my heart is the ability to protect FSx in AWS, in particular this is NetApp FSx other FSx offerings in AWS can be protected with the Veeam backup for AWS appliance already. This completes the FSx list though.
It will be good to cover some NetApp & Veeam content again…
Rest API
Finally, I wanted to touch on APIs. It’s been a journey when it comes to APIs, public APIs just were not a thing 18 years when Veeam came to market and each release we are striving towards more and more public API functionality.
In this release the notable candidates that I am intrigued to investigate are the Entra ID APIs and the Data Integration API.
