Jessee Drew – [Senior Consultant]
Veeam Availability Suite version 9 was officially released to the public on January 12th, 2016, after an early release in December to manufacturers and partners. Veeam Availability Suite combines the industry-leading backup, restore and replication capabilities of Veeam Backup & Replication with the advanced monitoring, reporting and capacity planning functionality of Veeam ONE. This article will focus on the new features available in Veeam Backup & Replication. Below is a list of some of the major new features in the latest software release.
- Scale-Out Backup Repository – Scale-Out Backup Repository is perhaps the most significant new feature of Veeam Backup & Replication v9 and will provide the greatest benefit to many businesses. This feature allows multiple disk repositories from any backup target supported by Veeam to be grouped into a single pool for maximum scale-out capabilities. Backup targets can be Windows or Linux servers with local or direct attached storage, or even NAS or SAN storage volumes with compression and/or deduplication technologies. Any of these various sources can now be combined into one big backup destination pool for Veeam backups. This not only benefits scale-out for backups, but also allows new storage sources to be added and old storage sources to be removed on the fly over time, without disrupting backup operations. Also, the combination of multiple disk sources can dramatically improve backup performance.
- Per-VM Backup Chains – Per-VM backup chains will allow a single backup job, which in v8 was a single-threaded task, to become a multi-threaded task. For example, a backup job with 20 VMs can now create 20 threads on the underlying storage. This will result in faster backup completion times by allowing each disk resource to reach its full performance level. This feature in combination with the Scale-Out Repository feature will greatly improve backup performance.
- Stand-alone Console – The previous Veeam versions could only be managed by directly accessing the Veeam management server via RDP or console and opening the local client that was installed as part of the Veeam server installation. In the new Veeam Backup & Replication v9, there is now a separate stand-alone thick client that can be installed on any workstation or server, providing more convenient & secure access to Veeam management.
- Storage Snapshot Integration with EMC – Veeam Backup & Replication v9 has also added the ability to leverage storage based snapshots from EMC storage, just as it has done in previous versions with HP & NetApp storage. These storage snapshots can be accessed from “Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots”. Just like Veeam’s other client specific Explorer utilities (Exchange, SQL, Oracle, etc.), the snapshot backups can be searched and item level data can be recovered directly from the Veeam Explorer GUI.
- Direct Backup from Network File System (NFS) – Veeam Backup & Replication v9 can now directly backup any NFS storage target attached to a vSphere ESXi host. This new version of Veeam will also support the NFS 4.1 protocol on vSphere 6. This is a great additional feature, as until now, only select vendor’s NFS storage targets were supported.
To learn more about these and other new features, please check out Veeam’s website at the following link: https://www.veeam.com or contact your Keller Schroeder Account Manager.
