Welcome back to this 2 part blog covering the session I did in Manchester for the UK Veeam User Group.
vSphere Web Client
The Veeam vSphere Web Client is for sure a hidden little gem, it allows vSphere administrators to really see the level of Availability of their vSphere environment. Providing a cool dashboard showing an overview of virtual machiens, processed VMs, backup repositories and job statistics. I suggest anybody out there with a vSphere environment and Veeam to get this installed and have a play. It does require Enterprise Manager for the deployment as you will see in the video along with the great information it provides.
The following features all arrived at the back end of 2015 when Veeam Backup & Application was released, it really does amaze me how we include so many great features into our releases but equally amazes me the amount of customers that are not taking advantage of some of these features.
Per-VM File Chains
Previously and by default backup jobs would write all virtual machines as one write stream to a full backup file or incremental. This is fine for a large amount of repositories apart from those disk targets that thrive from multiple write threads such as deduplication devices. Some of those devices can achieve much better performance when using per-vm file chains. This setting is configured on the repository itself, a quick demo below of how easy it is to configure. If you convert existing jobs to per-vm you will need a full backup to take place for the per-vm to begin after which the oldest full backup files that are non per-vm will be aged out with the retention policy.
Scale Out Backup Repository
A grouping of several simple backup repositories. With the scale out backup repository you basically pool those simple repositories together as one. This can be expanded to as growth requirements desire. The beauty of this is that if a simple repository was to fill up on space, you would have to provision new and larger repositories and then migrate those backups to continue working, with the scale out option you don’t have to do that it just adds the additional capacity to the pool and backup jobs can continue.
These pools can consist of all the same disk type simple repositories (Locality Profile) or it can include different disk tiers (Performance Profile) with the Performance Profile you are able to determine which backup type lands on which tier of storage, for example if you happen to have an SSD tier then incrementals would thrive there and then the full backup files would be best suited to capacity disks or even deduplication devices.
Changing the traditional Veeam Colour Scheme within the Interface
I hope that was useful and hopefully I have uncovered and brought to your attention some of the great features that keep coming from Veeam.