Matt That IT Guy

Racking And Stacking In A Cloud-Based World

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Veeam V9 Preview @ VMWorld 2015

2015-09-01 16.49.10One of the sessions I attended at VMWorld was a Veeam V9 technical deep dive. As a Veeam customer for about 5 years now I have seen quite a few improvements, but I think V9 will be one of their biggest updates to date. Some of the features that were introduced were:

  • Veeam Cloud Connect Replication – Currently Veeam Cloud Connect is a baked-in extension that allows you to automatically backup to hosted 3rd party repositories. This was implemented as an easy way to get your backups offsite, but with the replication feature there is a fail-over component. It is no longer just a backup repository, but a way to have your VMs running in the cloud in the event of a failure. No VPN is require – all traffic is sent over SSL / TLS;
  • Direct NFS Access – This feature allows Veeam to talk directly to NFS storage, bypassing the need to talk to the hypervisor. This should cut down on the amount of ‘chatter’ required during backups and should result in quicker backup times. This is one feature I am looking forward to testing;
  • NetAppĀ SnapMirror and SnapVault integration – Although I no longer run NetApp in production, I thought this was a cool feature. Veeam already has NetApp snapshot integration (i.e. It backs up the machines via a snapshot on the filer instead of running a snapshot against the VM), but this could allow you to run backups from your secondary storage, thus decreasing storage IO demands even more (and possibly allowing you to do your remote backups from a remote snapshot);
  • Per-VM backup file chain – In order to get better dedupe rates, this option (available via a checkbox) will store each VM in a backup job as its own file. This might make managing backup files easier as well;
  • Veeam Explorer for Oracle – I don’t use Oracle, but it is interesting to see a new Explorer being added to the family. Also of note is that this works for the Windows & Linux versions;
  • Veeam Explorer for Active Directory – You can now recover GPOs (yay!), AD Integrated DNS records (yay!), and an ‘experts only’ feature to recovery configuration partition records;
  • Veeam Explorer for MS SQL – You can now do table level recovery (assuming there are no dependencies), SQL Objects (e.g. Triggers, stored procedures, etc.) as well as the ability to use a remote SQL Server for staging;
  • Standalone Console – The console can now run on a Windows desktop – no longer need to RDP to the Veeam server;
  • Direct File Restore – If the Veeam server is located in site A, but the repository and destination server are in site B, Veeam will now restore the file without the need to send all the traffic back to site A. This could have a huge impact with regards to remote file restores;
  • BitLooker – Suppose you have a 1 TB VMDK and you delete 500 GB. Because those files still exist in the OS, your backup files won’t shrink. This feature goes through and analyzes the NTFS MFT to identify deleted data and exempt it from the backup and/or replication;
  • Useless Data – The ability to exempt folders and files from backups. A good use case is a general purpose share where folks dump scans from photocopiers;
  • Scale-out Backup Repository – This will be a huge feature in some environments as it introduces the ability to make storage pools out of various islands of storage. It is designed to scale out in terms of storage, as well as performance (i.e. write to multiple nodes at once).

Overall the Veeam session was probably one of the highlights for me. Seeing all of these new features that are coming down the pipeline shortly has definitely caught my eye for a quick upgrade.

You can sign up to find out more by visiting http://go.veeam.com/v9

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