During their first inaugural VeeamON conference last October Veeam announced the beta of Veeam Endpoint Backup. I wrote a little overview in regards to Endpoint Backup in case you need a refresher. Now, Veeam’s Backup and Replication has long been infamous for being purpose built for the virtual data center, and Endpoint Backup is the companies answer to bringing the same great Veeamy-tech to your physical laptops and desktops. Today, that announced beta has ended and Veeam Endpoint Backup is now generally available.
So what’s changed since the beginning of the beta?
A lot actually! Being in beta for 6 months has really helped Veeam to ensure that they are releasing a genuinely, tried and tested, rock solid product into the market. In fact, throughout the beta many of the new features now included in Endpoint Backup were suggested by users just like you and me on the community forums surrounding the beta. Veeam, like always have done a great job taking into account user feedback and delivering a product that’s packed full of useful features and “just works”. There are a lot of features to VEB and you can see them all here – but, I’d like to go over a few of my favorites.
Integration between VEB and VBR
Coupling Patch #2 of Veeam Backup and Replication (released later this month) alongside the GA of Veeam Endpoint Backup brings some awesome functionality of being able to monitor, control and restore endpoint backups within VBR. By backing our endpoints up directly inside a Veeam backup repository we are now able to take advantage of many of the traditional VBR restore goodies with our physical backups. Aside from simply file level recovery, application items, such as being able to restore SQL tables, Exchange and Active Directory objects – they can all be performed on our physical backups now as well. Although the product is geared towards endpoints, meaning desktops and laptops, I see no reason why you couldn’t install it on some of those last physical servers you have laying around. In fact, Veeam says themselves that although it isn’t built for servers it will work on Server 2008 and above.
Veeam has added the ability to export our physical disks from the backups directly into a vmdk, vhd, or vhdx file as well. Now this isn’t a true P2V process, they aren’t removing any drivers or services or preparing the disk to be virtual in any way – this isn’t their intention. This is simply another way to recover, another way to get the data you need – and honestly, if you wanted to try and build a VM out of these exported disks I’m sure there will be posts around the process out there in the next few months on how to do so.
In terms of security Veeam has added the ability for administrators to set access restrictions on their backup repositories. What this does is allows us to grant access to certain repositories to certain users, while restricting access to others.
Aside from the new integration, Veeam Endpoint Backups which are stored in a Veeam backup repository can also take advantage of existing VBR features, such as encrypting your backups, traffic throttling, monitoring incoming backups, email status alerts and support for Backup Copy and Tape jobs to get those backups offsite.
It’s not just about B&R
Sure, the integration’s with VBR are pretty cool but they aren’t the only thing that’s included. Yeah, we have all of the traditional endpoint backup features like incremental’s, multiple target options, and scheduling but it wouldn’t be a Veeam product without a few extra goodies baked in. I’m not going to go in depth about them all, but listed below are a few of my favorites
Full support for Bitlocker drive encryption – This gives you the ability to de-encrypt your Bitlocker backups before restoring, directly from with the Endpoint GUI.
Ability to control the power state of computer post backup – If you have your computer set to backup at the end of your work day, you can leave knowing that once your backup has completed Veeam will, in true green fashion, power down your workstation.
Backup triggers such as “When backup target is connected” – Veeam will monitor for when you plug in that external USB drive or connect to the network that you have setup as your backup target and can trigger the backup process immediately there after.
Support for rotated USB drives – If you want to rotate your backups on one USB drive one week and another the next, Veeam Endpoint Backup can handle this for you, allowing you to backup to one drive while the other goes offsite.
On-battery detection – Backups can be automatically prevented from starting when Veeam detects that your laptop is running on-battery and contains less than 20% run time – ensuring VEB doesn’t chew up valuable power in your time of need 🙂
So what hasn’t changed?
We talked about what has changed since the beta bits were first shipped in November but perhaps the most important and most cared about feature lands in the “What hasn’t changed?” category. What hasn’t changed is that Veeam Endpoint Backup was put into beta as a free product and will remain free now that it is generally available. Veeam has a long history of providing free tools for the community, they have Backup and Replication Free, SQL/Active Directory, Exchange Explorers are free, the old FastSCP which was free and now Veeam Endpoint Backup Free! There should be no barrier to stopping you from going and checking out VBR for yourself.
Now in my VeeamON post I tried to determine the future of this product, where it would fit in, what features Veeam would add to it – and honestly I was way off on a lot of them – but one I was sure would come would be the integration with Backup and Replication – and it’s here now! Do I think Veeam are done innovating in this area? Absolutely not! From my experiences Veeam is a company that never stops moving. I’m excited to see Veeam Endpoint Backup go GA, and I’m excited to see what the future holds.
