So, Veeam one of the industry leaders in virtualization backup and data protection seem to be getting closer to the release of there anticipated version 6 of the Veeam Backup and Replication. They've released the official What's New document outlining a slew of enhancements and new functionality that will be included with the version 6 of their flagship Backup and Replication product. It's nothing new, as Veeam have been promoting the functionality of v6 with a series of webinars and sessions in the last few months, but its still nice to have all of these enhancements all combined together in one document.
Needless to say one of the biggest features of Veeam v6 is the Multi-Hypervisor support. As of version 6 Veeam will now support both VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V all from the same interface. Since I'm not a Hyper-V user I'll leave it to you to read up on the supported functionality yourself, but I'll touch on a few other of my favorite features below…Keep in mind, I've yet to use to use or see the product, so my opinions are purely based upon what I have seen in the webinars or read, so the final product could differ from what I think it will be like…
Scalability – Veeam has completely redesigned their backup architecture in v6. With that they have the addition of backup proxy servers which offload the backup and replication traffic to the proxy server instead of the actual backup target. This will allow for the use of a load balancing algorithm that splits the load amongst proxy servers, and in turn, allows for more concurrent jobs to run and faster backup speeds. In terms of replication, the on-site backup proxy server can now send data directly to the target backup proxy server, completely bypassing the Veeam server itself.
1-Click Happiness – Veeam has simplified a lot of their processes by creating a bunch of 1-click functionality. Veeam has added 1 click events to their Instant Level File Recovery, Failover, Failback, VM Restore, and Automated Upgrades. Perhaps the most useful '1-click' event will be with the Instant Level File Recovery. Prior to v6 I found this to be a monotonous task involving many steps and approvals to restore a file to a VM. It will be nice to be able to do this with 1 click.
Backup Targets – Along with the Linux Backup Target, you can now set a Windows box as your backup target.
Traffic Throttling – In essence this allows you to do just that…throttle the Veeam Backup traffic. This can be done via time based or day based as well. This way we can guarantee what bandwidth will be used for Veeam traffic, and guarantee that we are not interfering with other traffic that might be flowing across a WAN link.
Wan Optimizations – There has been a lot of work done with WAN optimization, it appears in quite a few of the enhancements on the What's New document. Essentially they have improved and optimized the protocol used to transfer data across a wan, allowed for multiple TCP/IP connections per job, and with the addition of the the traffic throttling, proxy architecture and windows targets you have no excuse to not get your data off-site.
Parallel Backup and Replication – An individual VM can now be processed by both a backup job and a replication job at the same time. This eliminates the need to put your replication jobs on hold in order to satisfy a backup window. 🙂
Replica Termination – In v5 and below, when a job was terminated, it would leave your latest restore point unusable until the next time the job ran. In v6, this will roll back immediately, always leaving your latest restore point in a good state and able to power on.
1-click permanent Failover – This is something that was manual in previous versions which I documented here. Now this all can be done with one click, to permanently failover to your replica.
Active Rollbacks – The restore points of a replica are now stored as native VMware Snapshots, leaving you with the ability to revert to a previous point in time without using the Veeam Backup and Replication server.
Improved Seeding – You can now use previous VMs located at your target site, or backups at your target site as the seed for your replica job, allowing you to start replication in an incremental fashion, rather than waiting for the first big initial seed of your VM.
Re-IP – one of the biggest and coolest enhancements in my book. The ability to automatically re-ip your VMs at a DR site to align with your networks there. Very cool.
Cluster Targets – Hey, we can now replicate to a cluster as well as a host. Basically, if your replica target is a cluster and you lose a specific host, your replica job can continue to run as it's pointing to a cluster…
VM Migration – I'm not to sure what this is, as it seems to be new to v6. In essence, it looks very similar to Storage vMotion in the way it will copy a running VM, and then copy just deltas that have changed during the first initial copy. This could be very beneficial to those SMB's or ROBO offices that do not have Storage vMotion licensed.
VM Restores – There have been a number of enhancements in the line of restores. Again, more 1 click options, the ability to restore multiple VMs at once, more options around the use of attaching the restores to Networks, as well as the Unique VM identifier will now remain unchanged when restoring the VM overtop of itself.
NTFS Permission Preservation – The permissions and ownership of files and folders restored to a Windows server can now be preserved during the restore 🙂
UI Enhancements – The real-time stats window will now show more counters. The job reports will now show the amount of changed data as well as compression and de-duplication ratios.
VM Ordering – You can now specify the order in which the VMs will be processed. This is a small but nice thing to have.
Multi-User access – Multiple users can now access the Veeam server through RDP. Before, if you left the Veeam application running, you would have to kill the old process before you could get into the application.
Again, I want to stress that I haven't tested or seen any of these enhancements and I hope I got them all correct. Be sure to comment if I got anything wrong…
IMO, Veeam continues to release quality software that is incredibly intuitive and easy to use. The ability to take the complex tasks of performing all of these functions and wrapping them up into '1 clicks' surely is amazing, and Veeam is doing a great job at doing so… The functionality that v5 of Backup and Replication brought to the table was truly amazing, and i didn't know how they were going to top it with v6, but according to this document and what I have seen so far, it appears they have done so… Good Work and Can't Wait!
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