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Today Veeam made generally available 4 new updates for 4 of the major components of the Veeam Availability Platform.

Veeam Availability Suite that consists of both Veeam Backup & Replication and Veeam ONE both have their 9.5 update 3 update that I will touch on further down in the post. The agents for both Windows and Linux also get an update release. This shortly after the GA of the Veeam Availability Console release a couple of weeks back.

Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 3

Touted as the “biggest release” in Veeam’s history, and it’s just an update release,

Built-In Agent Management

The much anticipated Built in Agent management, giving the ability to manage your virtual infrastructure and agent based infrastructure using the same easy to use Veeam Backup & Replication interface.

  • Centralised Deployment and Management
  • Single Interface / familiar interface for both Virtual, Physical and Cloud instances
  • Advanced Backup and Restore functionality
  • Microsoft Failover Cluster Support

Storage Integrations

This is nothing major nor new, unless you have any of the IBM StorWize family storage systems, IBM Spectrum Virtulize specifically the SVC (IBM SAN Volume Controller) or the Lenovo V Series. This is going to allow you to reduce performance impact on your production VMware estate when taking a backup by offloading and leveraging the storage snapshot reducing the time open on the VMware snapshot. You will also gain the ability to

  • Snapshot Orchestration, create application consistent snapshots to tighten RPOs further.
  • OnDemand SandBox for Storage Snapshots, Leverage those snapshots for lab use cases on production efficient storage. gaining more from that storage investment.
  • Veeam Explorers for Storage Snapshots, the ability to go inside those historically created snapshots and be able to perform a level of recovery against them when they have not even been created by Veeam.

VMware Cloud on AWS

I have written quite a bit and kept as much in the know as possible around this latest release from AWS and VMware and luckily for Veeam customers if you were looking at migrating or looking to use the VMware on AWS then Veeam can still keep your workloads available.

  • Create backup jobs
  • Backup data to Veeam Cloud Connect (egress charges need to be considered)
  • Using Veeam replication technologies, migrate or replicate workloads from on-premises or VMware based infrastructure to VMware on AWS and vice versa.

More information can be found here – https://www.veeam.com/kb2353

Veeam ONE 9.5 Update 3

Agent Monitoring & Reporting

As you would probably expect Veeam are extending the monitoring and reporting functionality to also cover those agents that are being managed by Veeam Backup & Replication. Bringing this is ultimatly going to save time for backup admins, all info for both agents and virtual workloads in one place, understand what is protected and what is not.

Backup Compliance Reporting

2018 is going to be the year of “Compliance” with GDPR kicking in at the end of May, people will be required to ensure compliance across their data. Veeam ONE is not an easy button for the compliance issue but it can help by providing additional reports. The ability to define geolocation within Business View to understand where backup data is residing. Reporting on this same location category. Finally a list of all data sources that have one or more copies where the location is different from the production data.

More information can be found here – https://www.veeam.com/kb2354

Veeam Agent for Linux 2.0

Version 1.0 was released around 12 months ago and now we have the 2.0 version which brings things up to parity with the agent for Windows.

Scale out backup repository

Scale-Out Backup Repositories will be supported in the 2.0 version of VAL, the ability to create a logical entry, grouping several simple backup repositories together. A way of taking different pools of storage from different devices and systems and seeing them as one aggregated capacity.

Direct Backup Veeam Cloud Connect

This feature appeared in VAW 2.0 and now appears in VAL 2.0, the ability to store your data in the cloud, the ability to connect to a Veeam Cloud Connect Service Provider and send backups directly into their service.

Source Side Encryption

Security has always been very important but seems to be even more so in this day and age, protecting data from unauthorised access. VAL 2.0 will bring the ability to transform backup data to an unreadable, scrambled format with a cryptographic algorithm and key.

More information can be found here – https://www.veeam.com/veeam_agent_linux_2_0_release_notes_rn.pdf

Veeam Agent for Windows 2.1

Windows Failover Cluster

All of them Physical, Virtual or Cloud instances where customers are running a Windows Failover Cluster with Raw Device Mappings in the virtual world, and the idea of moving to the SQL Always On or Exchange Database Availability Groups were not appealing enough, well now the VAW 2.1 will be able to protect those workloads as well as those physical and cloud instances of SQL AlwaysON clusters.

Change Block Tracking driver

The ability to take much faster incremental backups of your Windows machines, much like snapshot differentials or delta differential for those of you more familiar with the storage world, it will basically only backup the blocks that have changed since the last backup run. This means time is dramatically reduced and not all blocks need to be backed up on a regular basis.

Microsoft OneDrive Support as a backup target.

The ability to store my Windows backups in my OneDrive folder that is synced up into the Microsoft Public Cloud when online is a pretty cool feature. At least that’s the case for home users or road warriors (Workstation Users)

More information can be found here – https://www.veeam.com/veeam_agent_windows_2_1_release_notes_rn.pdf

It’s a big day for releases at Veeam.com and with the Xmas season and New Year fast approaching I need to get these versions installed in the lab and see what other goodies our Development guys would have got into the releases. There are lots more to the updates than what I have mentioned and the KB articles are the detailed release notes for the updates.

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