2014 11 07 12 37 58

Veeam v8 is here – New Features and Upgrade Process

So Veeam’s High Availability Suite is here!!!! Basically v8.

So in this post we are looking at Features and the upgrade of the program, and using the program when updated.

New Features
Backup and Replication

My favourite feature which doesn’t seem to be in the documentation online, is Snapshot Hunter, where Veeam actively looks for and removes any snapshots which havent deleted properly, i.e where vCenter said snapshot removed, and it hasn’t!!!

High-Speed Recovery
• Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, SQL Server and
Active Directory: Granular-level recovery and low recovery time objectives (RTOs)
• Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots (HP and NetApp): Use Veeam
Explorer technology for quick, efficient item-level recovery from storage
snapshots

Data Loss Avoidance
• Backup from Storage Snapshots (HP and NetApp): Leverage storage
snapshot capabilities to create ultra-fast backups from storage snapshots
• EMC Data Domain Boost integration: 50% faster backups and 10x
faster synthetic full backup file creation and transformation
•  Veeam Cloud Connect: Avoid the risk of catastrophic data loss without
the upfront investment in a second site
• End-to-end encryption: Secure your data during backup, in flight and
at rest
• Replication enhancements: Improve your offsite recovery with WAN accelerated
replication, replication from backup, and 1-click site failover with
support for planned failover

Veeam One

Veeam ONE v8 adds new features designed to provide complete visibility of your entire virtual and backup environment for proactive monitoring and alerting of issues before operational impact, including:

  • Infrastructure Assessment Reporting for Backup
  • Multi-tenant reporting and monitoring
  • Advanced Capacity Planning and “what-if” deployment scenarios
  • Custom Report Builder
  • Change Tracking for VMware

Infrastructure Assessment:  help monitor repository requirements for your VMs and backup readiness, simplifying deployment and management. The report provides VM configuration analysis reporting on all unsupported configurations and possible issues that may occur during backup jobs.

Advanced Capacity Planning and “what-if” deployment scenarios; takes the guesswork out of capacity planning. Heterogeneous capacity planning helps you safely add or remove VMs or hosts from your infrastructure during deployment projects by forever replacing risky manual calculations with fully automated “what-if” planning, making for worry-free system changes and upgrades.

Change Tracking for VMware: Virtual infrastructures are dynamic and changes impacting performance can come from administrators or even the hypervisor. Veeam ONE provides complete change tracking for VMware— to make change auditing and forensic analysis totally transparent, so you are aware of every change.

Upgrading Veeam

Pretty simple, download the new version, mount ISO, and run.

However my Backup Enterprise Manager has screwed up on the upgrade, it displayed the following error and then when it rolled back, my v7 of Ent mgr has disappeared.

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So I proceeded to upgrade just B+R, which told me its been managed by a v7 BE mgr, so I’ll log a call with Veeam and let you know whats going on there.

The upgrade process is pretty painless, apart from the above, and when you load Veeam you get a new splash screen,

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Using the Application

So lets have a look at the changes in the GUI.

  • Main GUI, a Failover plan option, where by you can schedule failover to your DR sites, a great feature for testing your DR on a periodic basis

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  • In the Backup Infrastructure Section, we have a service providers option, so we can link to different cloud repositories for backup

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  • Storage Infrastructure, we have HP 3Par, HP StoreVirtual, and NetAPP ONTAP, which I believe was all available in v7. I do know more storage vendors are on their way too!!!

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  • Tape Infrastructure, has a small redesign, showing servers with tape drives, this means your tape drive can be added to another Veeam proxy, and not on your actual B+R server!!! fantastic, also within the media pool, you know have the option to use encryption

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  • Looking at the Backup Job Settings
    • We have a save as default option on each page!!!

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  • Ability to exclude VM swap files from backup, you don’t need them anyway
  • Enable encryption on the backup

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  • Enable integrity checks on the backup files once completed

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  • New Options for Application processing, including SQL, such as copying or truncating logs.
    • Backing logs up periodically, better than having transactional shipping maybe????
    • Ability to run scripts before and after snapshots on both Windows and Linux VM’s.

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  • Options for guest indexing on windows and Linux VMs

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  • Options for application and guest indexing authentication, for both Windows and Linux VMs

 

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  • Add different credentials for different VM’s within the same backup!!! Yay this was a feature I wanted.

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  • When running a backup, clearly states what resource it is waiting for (which backup proxy), rather than just, waiting for infrastructure resources.

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  • Under Licence information, a support ID is present, which can be used when logging support calls to get a better idea of your support level and to verify your company quicker

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  • Finally, in the configuration backup, you are able to encrypt this too.

 

I’ll do a separate post on Veeam One changes in the UI etc in the next few days.

Regards

 

Dean

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