Veeam v8 – It’s not just about the Headline acts.

After months of betas and testing, Veeam recently released their highly anticipated Veeam V8 Availability Suite. Such was the demand for the new product the website struggled at first.

One of the 1st documents recommended to read is the ‘What’s New in v8?’ http://www.veeam.com/veeam_backup_8_whats_new_en_wn.pdf , where 150+ additions/changes are well documented.

Most people may know about one or two of  the main ‘headline’ acts :-

  • End to End encryption
  • Backup I/O Control
  • Veeam Explorers for Active Directory, Microsoft SQL and Microsoft Exchange
  • Veeam Cloud Connect 

But what I want to do is highlight a couple of the the smaller, and just as important changes/features ( well to me anyway), compared to the ‘headline’ acts

  • Preferred networks selection: Enables the selection of preferred networks for multi-homed backup proxy and backup repository servers. This helps to ensure the backup and replication traffic is transferred over dedicated backup networks, without impacting the production network. No longer having to rely on local host entries to send traffic over the required network interface.
  • Multi-streaming of restores: Veeam Data Movers now leverage multiple TCP/IP streams when performing restores, in addition to backups. This helps to improve performance by more fully leveraging available network bandwidth of high latency links. Anything to speed up restores is a good thing in my book
  • Linux indexing: Support for Linux guest file system indexing has been added. This feature requires that the Linux server has mlocate (which is standard for the vast majority of Linux distributions). This has been asked for on several occasions, and good to see Veeam continue to their customer’s requests.
  • Overwrite/keep options: When restoring to the original location, users performing restores can now choose whether the original file should be overwritten or renamed and preserved. This functionality is available in both Windows UI and Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager web UI. Good move offering a choice, users always unsure whether they really wanted to overwrite
  • Inactive IFLR session shutdown: After 30 minutes of inactivity, an Instant File-Level Recovery (IFLR) session will be considered abandoned, and will be automatically closed after displaying the corresponding. Always was a pain when forgetful admins leave the session running, and backups failed.
  • Backup server connectivity: The backup server no longer requires connection to source and target ESX(i) host on port 902, as the operation requiring this connection is now performed by the source and target backup proxies respectively. This requirement was causing issues in environments with high network isolation, such as in service provider environments. Simplifies the networking requirements, always a good thing.
  • Shared VHDX support: Backup jobs can now back up shared VHDX virtual disks in a crash-consistent state. The full VM restore wizard has also been enhanced to account for shared VHDX restore specifics. Hurrah! The Hyper-V peeps will be happy.
  • Remote tape server: This enables leveraging tape libraries and standalone drives connected to any Windows server in the environment, as opposed to the requirement of attaching them directly to the backup server. Adding multiple tape devices connected to different servers is supported. Brilliant news, no longer a requirement to have tape drives attached to backup server.
  • Guest account testing: Guest accounts used for application-aware processing and guest file system indexing can now be automatically tested on the corresponding job wizard step. Testing is performed building the list of all VMs added to the job, and attempting to connect to each guest using the provided guest credentials settings (including any overrides in the advanced guest credentials settings dialog). This is one of my favourite additions. No longer have to run jobs to see them fail with incorrect credentials. I saw this in a v8 preview at a recent Veeam Technical Workshop, and we very excited to hear of it’s inclusiion.
  • VM snapshot removal progress: The VM snapshot removal progress percentage is now included in the job statistics to provide users with a better idea of how much longer the process will take. Yay, no more “how long will it take” 
  • Guest OS details: Guest OS details are now displayed in the Virtual Machines view as an additional column. Handy to have.
  • Capacity details: Backup repository capacity is now displayed in the Backup Repositories view. Another handy to have.

Those were just some of my highlights plucked from the ‘What’s New in v8?’ , and I’m very much looking to trying them out. Haven’t had the chance to play with v8 yet , as it was only released yesterday (6/11/14).

So grab a cup of tea (it’s 12 pages long!), and  have a read through the document http://www.veeam.com/veeam_backup_8_whats_new_en_wn.pdf , and see if there is anything that grabs your attention.

Lots of little changes makes for a big improvement

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