Veeam has always got me thrilled by how innovative they are when it come to virtual infrastructure backup & replication solutions. Every time they release a product, I think alright they have left nothing to surprise us with next release but each time they prove me wrong and here they do it again with Veeam Backup & Replication 6.5. Their new release make it sound that all the amazing backup features they had in earlier releases were not enough. Below just few of their earlier releases features that were amazingly valuable, but were not enough to stop Veeam from innovating more features:
– Instant VM Recovery: It gave Veeam’s customers the ability to power on VMs from backup directly without needing to wait to restore them. This has cut recovering VMs from hours to minutes.
– U-AIR® (Universal Application-Item Recovery): Recover individual objects from ANY virtualized application without agents, additional backups or software tools.
– On-Demand Sandbox: Run VMs from a backup in an isolated Virtual Lab for testing or troubleshooting.
– Universal File-Level Recovery: Recover a file from any guest OS and file system directly from an image-level backup—without booting the VM. vPower extends Veeam Instant File-Level Recovery with support for ANY guest file system.
– SureBackup: Verify the recoverability of every backup, every time. Automatically test backups by running VMs from them in an isolated Virtual Lab. This one is worth watching their demo, as I still have not seen any one else offer an equivalent to it. You can see the demo video below.
As crazy as it seems these are not new features, but those Veeam 6.0 features. As many of you I was curious how much innovative could Veeam go with their Veeam Backup & Replication 6.5 release, and I can tell you they never disappointed me as usual. Below are few of the most innovative features I liked in their new release:
– Restore from SAN snapshots: Veeam Backup & Replication 6.5 introduces Veeam Explorer for SAN Snapshots, which provides granular VMware recovery from HP StoreVirtual VSA and LeftHand snapshots. Co-developed with HP, Explorer for SAN Snapshots lets you perform Veeam restores (Instant VM Recovery, Instant File-Level Recovery and Explorer for Exchange item recovery) of VMware VMs directly from array-based snapshots. This feature is giving a new dimension to SAN snapshots where now you can have as granular restore approach as you can have from any backup. Though its important to remember that storage snapshot should never replace your backup, but complement it. I would really love to see Veeam expanding this feature to more storage boxes from vendors like EMC/NetApp/IBM & so on. You might want to watch a demonstration of the restore from SAN Snapshots functionality by watching the below video.
– E-discovery and item recovery for Exchange: Version 6.5 introduces Veeam Explorer™ for Microsoft Exchange, which provides instant visibility into backups of Exchange Server 2010 virtual machines (VMs). Browse, search and selectively restore items (emails, notes, contacts, etc.) directly from Veeam backups, replicas, and HP StoreVirtual VSA and LeftHand snapshots. This features will excite many customers who run Exchange Server 2010 in a VM. If you are one of those, then the below video should get you even more excited.
– Advanced monitoring, reporting and capacity planning for Backup: Veeam Management Suite™ 6.5 includes new functionality for Veeam Backup & Replication—namely, advanced monitoring, reporting and capacity planning for the backup infrastructure. This will help customers better size their backup infrastructure to match their environment continuous growth.
In this post I have decided to touch on the major interesting functionality of Veeam Backup & Replication 6.5, though if you need more details then you should visit the Veeam Backup & Replication 6.5 page at: http://www.veeam.com/vm-