Top 5 features in Veeam Backup and Replication v9

Veeam have recently released v9 of their Availability Suite and this is a free upgrade to all customers with an active support contract. I’ve chosen five new features that are of particular interest to me and I’ll explore these in more detail below.

Veeam Cloud Connect Replication

With v8 Cloud Connect allowed you to store copies of your backup data offsite with a service provider. In v9 we now have a cloud based disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) offering where you can replicate business critical virtual machines to a service provider. A key component of this service is the cloud host which provides CPU, RAM, storage and networking resources and will allow replicated VM’s to be recovered in the event of a disaster at the production site. The recovery process can be configured with 1-click failover orchestration along with full testing that doesn’t disrupt production workloads. This is all managed through a secure web portal with single port connectivity using a secure SSL/TLS connection.

Admin Console

RDP connections to the Veeam server will now be a thing of the past. You can now install a standalone console to your workstation allowing you to manage Veeam remotely. You can even run multiple sessions if you have more than one Veeam server.

Scale-out Backup Repository & Per-VM Backup Chains

For those of you who have multiple backup repositories you will now have the ability to group extents together and present them as a single target called a global pool. Typically as environments grow additional repositories are added to Veeam and it becomes difficult to utilise capacity efficiently. A lot of time is spent working out where best to locate backup files and making sure the repository doesn’t run out of space. With a Scale-out repository you can just point each job at the single global pool and add additional extents as the environment grows.

You can also create policies that determine which backup files are allowed to be stored on each extent. For example you may want to use faster disks for incremental backups and larger capacity slower disks for full backups. This is referred to as storage aware placement has the potential to improve backup performance.

Scale-out Backup Repositories work alongside another new feature in v9, per-VM backup chains. Grouping similar virtual machines into the same job has always been a best practice from Veeam but this can result in backup files becoming very large over time. Each repository will contain some free space and using per-VM backup chains with smaller files will make it easier to fill this space. The end result being a more efficient use of backup storage.

The per-VM backup files option is set per repository and is the recommended setting if using a deduplicating storage appliance.

Veeam Explorers

It’s great to see Veeam adding brand new explorers along with additional functionality to the current explorers. These tools make application restores quick and easy and are one of the best reasons to use Veeam to back up your virtual datacenter.

Veeam Explorer for Oracle is new to v9 and allow protection of Oracle databases running versions 11 and 12 on Windows or Linux, with support for Oracle Automatic Storage Management (ASM)

Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Active Directory now includes the ability to recover GPO’s, AD integrated DNS records and individual configuration partitions.

Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange now fully supports Exchange 2016 along with several eDiscovery enhancements.

Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SQL Server allows table level recovery, database object level recovery and remote staging SQL server support.

Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SharePoint now has the functionality to complete full site restores along with list and item permission restores.

To sum up Veeam have made some excellent improvements to an already impressive suite of products and they have put some great work into making backup and DR more efficient.

If you would like to know more about Veeam Availability Suite v9 please get in touch with your Computerworld account manager.

Further information on all the new features can be found in the following whitepapers.

https://www.veeam.com/veeam_backup_9_0_whats_new_en_wn.pdf

https://www.veeam.com/veeam_one_9_0_whats_new_en_wn.pdf