It’s that special, magical time again, time for yet another sweet release from Veeam. Now, it’s nothing new and shouldn’t be surprising to anyone that I just love Veeam releases and this one is no exception. Although a minor release they have squeezed a couple sets of new awesome functionality into the core product that can only continue to get more and more awesomesauce as time goes on. So with that said let’s have a look at a few of the features and enhancements that I find are crazy cool… Keep your eyes pealed as we should see this release come to life sometime this quarter!
vSphere 5.1 Support
First and foremost support for VMware’s recent release of vSphere 5.1 From what I’ve heard the platform and architecture inside of ESXi 5.1 has changed significantly making it quite the challenge for backup and replication vendors to get to the point where they can say their products are supported. It’s nice to see Veeam as one of those first supporters of vSphere 5.1
Full Support on Windows Server 2012 and Windows 8
Support for both backing up and running on Windows Server 2012! Meaning you can now take advantage of some of the new Windows Server 2012 features with your Veeam Server/Repositories on top. Think about it, you can now place your backups on the new deduped file system of Win 2012 and obtain deduplication across your Veeam jobs…pretty cool!
Veeam Explorer for Exchange
Although this was released to beta earlier as a separate application it’s now bundled into Veeam 6.5 as a feature set. Meaning you will see this crazy one-click mailbox item level restore awesomesauce inside of the core Veeam Backup and Replication. Oh, guess what? It’s also included in ALL Veeam B&R Editions – Including the free version! Apart from the inclusion of this in the core product they have also made a number of enhancements to it such as mailbox datastores are now auto detected and mounted and the ability to restore directly back to the original location is now available within the Enterprise version of Veeam B&R. On top of that, there is support for any offline edb file, meaning it could be used with existing backups or SAN snapshots. Nice!
Veeam Explorer for SAN Snapshots
I’m seeing a trend here with the Veeam Explorer for ___ ____ title! Although right now this is only supported with certain HP arrays and VSA’s containing the SANiQ storage functionality, this technology is pretty cool and I’m sure you will see the vendor array support expanded in the future. The ability to restore/run VMs directly from SAN Snapshots as well as restoring individual files is pretty crazy! Kudo’s to Veeam for building this in…and again, across all editions, including the free one!
The Core Product Enhancements
- Veeam ONE integration – The release of B&R 6.5 is coupled with a release of the Veeam ONE product as well. With this they have added a tight integration between the two products allowing you to monitor and report on the health of your B&R infrastructure and jobs from with Veeam ONE. Don’t be surprised if you see a nice little ‘suite’ containing both products.
- DR for your DR – Finally this is here! The ability to schedule, automate and run backups of the Veeam Backup server itself. You can now easily create backups of your Veeam configuration (containing infrastructure and job information) and restore them back to the same or another server. So when disaster hits it’s now easy to recover your disaster recovery solutions.
- Engine Enhancements – the core has been updated to provide further enhancements to your deduplication and compression as well as performance gains when it comes to reverse incremental s and large files.
- Recovery Enhancements – You can now do that ever so awesome 1 click file level recovery, but this time direct it right back to it’s original location. Suweeet!
- Scheduling – ability to chain scripts is now available.
- Management – More powershell cmdlets have been developed to support failover and failback for replicas as well as perform the new VeeamZip functionality!
So that’s all for now (all I know about) 🙂 Don’t delay, head on over to veeam.com and read up for yourself and check it out! Be sure to include your Exchange Admin on the Explorer for Exchange functionality – It’ll drive them crazy!!!! In a good way!
Thanks for the rundown! Just upgraded my Veeam setups to 6.5. My exchange guys will love this.