As a loyal Veeam customer, and a lucky attendee at VeeamOn 2019, it’d be a shame not spend some of my spare time watching their keynotes and breakout sessions this time round. So it’s time to don some green, and watch some Veeam*

*This is not Veeam’s slogan, but it totally should be!

This time round, much like everyone else, Veeam made this conference online and free for everyone, and as usual had a cracking keynote on the Wednesday, with all the juicy tech new features and demos coming on the Thursday. This is going to be a brief post of the headline new features being released by Veeam over the next few months.

Veeam Backup for AWS v2

The v1 of this was released at the tail end of 2019 and although a little light on features was Veeam going fully web 2.0 (is that still a thing?), in other words – not requiring a full-fat Windows box running all the Veeamy goodness.

Its now gained the AWS Storage Competancy status, and is a very slick tool for hands-off backups, Veeam’s strength. It can be deployed using the AWS Marketplace, licensing can be part of the BYOL universal subscription model that Veeam have had for a couple of years now and looks like a doddle to deploy.

Requirements are pretty small, it runs Ubuntu under the hood, and a t2.medium is recommended to get you up and running – $20 per month to run. Essentially it uses AWS’ native EBS snapshots (I know not unique), but allows you to do to click restores and file level restores too.

Whats nice and unique (although a v1 feature) is the cross-account backups, just set up the correct IAM roles, and you’re good to go. Whats is new though, is the ability to backup to a different region (cross region data charges do apply though) or even a different account. Think of this not just for AWS outages for a region, but also your accounts being attacked too.

A super-simple GUI for the protection schedule of your workloads is provided, hopefully this will make its way over to the other Veeam products. You get the choice of creating a policy for daily, weekly, monthly or yearly protection, and within each policy deciding when you want snapshots, replicas or backups taking. After that, it asks you how long you want to retain them baring in mind cost – which it kindly tells you on the top right of the screen so you can get a balance between adaquate protection vs cost.

It also uses the newly released AWS change block tracking API to keep your costs down further. A very solid release by Veeam is this.

Michael Cade does a cracking demo of the new features, well worth 15-20 mins of your time here.

Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 v5

Some will say this is a minor update, but for those who are heavy users of O365 will know the frustrations of restoring Teams data. Veeam has always backed it up, but identifying what you want to restore has been difficult. They’ve now released an explorer for Teams, so you can granularly restore what you want whether that be a channel, a file, a post, a tab or what not. You can even search too – certainly saves a lot of effort. This has been heavily requested by the community, so its really good to see them listening to their customers.

I don’t have a demo of this at the moment I can link you to, but its due in Q3 of this year and will be welcomed I’m sure.

Veeam Availability Suite

Last but not least is the core of what we all know as Veeam. A majority of these features will come out last in the year as part of their v11 product – lets hope we don’t wait as long as we did for v10!

Veeam Continuous Data Protection (CDP)

I think this is the headline coming out of VeeamON this year. For customers who won’t accept long RPO for their workloads, comes CDP. Without going into masses of detail it essentially gives you RPO of seconds, as opposed to minutes for your most critical systems. This is available for anyone on Enterprise Plus licensing, or those using their universal license subscription

Archive Tier

So we’ve had SOBR tiering since last year, those of you familiar will be aware of the performance tier (on-site storage), capacity tier (Azure Blob or AWS S3), and now we have Archive tier. If you’re a cloudy kinda person, you’ll know this means AWS Glacier, Glacier Deep Archive and Azure Blob Storage Archive. Essentially, if you have a requirement for long term retention, maybe those yearly backups, or 1-off backups – then throw them in there. Cheap as chips and far better than a manky old tape.

Google Cloud Support

I can imagine this was a very sought-after feature – but now Veeam supports Google Cloud Storage for the capacity tier, meaning just like VMware – Veeam now support the big three cloud providers (and IBM Cloud). Same functionality, different provider – win win.

Database Instant Recovery

This was a nice little bonus thrown in, but essentially you can perform an Instant restore of Microsoft SQL or Oracle DBs. This has been available for the VMs for a long time, but doing so restores every DB on that server – a little bit overkill, and could increase the time to restore.

From my understanding, it restores the DB (latest state or point in time) immediately onto secondary storage to get it available for your application or users, and then in the background puts it on to the production storage whilst keeping them in sync. You can then switch over manually or automatically, or schedule it at a quieter time. Hugely nderrated feature.

Summary

A polished online conference, they’ve obviously learnt from others over the past couple of months. Some fantastic demos, even if the quality of the stream was poor, but I’m sure the demos will be available online shortly.

I was hoping they’d announce that Veeam Availability Suite was going fully web, rather than the full-fat Windows client, but I’d imagine that will happen soon given that the Orchestrator and AWS Backups are now in that format. Hopefully the v11 release date will be announced soon, as I’m sure there are thousands of their customers desperate to get hold of these new features.

Well done Veeam