Veeam v10 is live! This long awaited update was officially released on Feb 18 and proves to be the biggest Veeam release to date. There is a lot of info posted around the web that dives deep into this release, and you can even watch the the official launch live on Veeam’s website. Below is a quick run down of the flashiest new features in the v10 release:
NAS Backup
The new feature that has possibly been the longest wait for many customers is NAS backup. I’ve personally seen customers either pass on Veeam entirely or run a different solution specifically to protect file shares in parallel to Veeam because of this feature. It has been a long time coming, but NAS backup is finally here in v10. On top of that, this isn’t your legacy NDMP backup, rather a new solution that has been “Veeam-ified” in v10. Veeam created their own proprietary changed file tracking that promises extremely high performance. Users have the ability to back up SMB or NFS file shares, as well as Windows and Linux file servers.
For enterprise storage that currently has Veeam integration, NAS backup also works with storage snapshots. Given the Veeam ecosystem, the flexibility to restore to different systems or tier off to object storage is also a possibility. Check out more detail from Gary Williams – File share backups.
Cloud Tier Copy Mode
The most recent versions of Veeam prior to v10 brought scale out backup repositories (SOBR) and later updates added the capacity tier which leverages public or private object storage as an archive tier. With v10 the ability to perform an immediate copy of that data to object storage is now available. While this isn’t necessarily a backup direct to something like AWS S3 or Azure Blob, Veeam is still serious about the 3-2-1 rule. It probably doesn’t make sense to leverage public cloud for your primary backup storage, but with v10 you don’t have to wait for a specified amount of time before your backup data lands in the cloud.
Veeam v10 also brings immutability for compatible object storage. In the case of AWS S3, a feature called object lock is available directly within Veeam to protect your off-site data from malicious deletion or ransomware. Having recent copies of your backup data in the cloud provides for some great DR use cases, especially with new mount options for object storage, which allows new Veeam installs to connect right up to any cloud repository and pull down data. This makes the possibility of something like on demand DR with VMC on AWS extremely interesting.
Linux Backup Proxy
The v10 release also brings a really cool new feature in Linux backup proxies. No longer do you need to leverage Windows machines, including the licenses and installs that go along with them. This also unlocks some interesting possibilities from an automation standpoint. Who knows, maybe the future will be running Veeam as a container with proxy auto-scaling? Check out the specifics from Steven Onofaro – Linux Proxies Have Arrived.
There are also a slew of other new Linux features in v10 that you can check out on the Veeam website – Bring On the Linux Love!
Instant Recovery
One of the biggest hitters in v10 includes enhancements to instant recovery. Veeam now brings the ability to instantly restore any type of backup (phyiscal, VM, or public cloud instance) into a vSphere VM. A new Instant Recovery Engine 2.0 makes more efficient use of memory to enhance instant recovery. This means the possibility of faster P2Vs. It means quicker and easier cloud repatriation, which is now becoming a very real thing for customers who don’t realize the true TCO until well after a cloud migration. It means the flexibility to move your data around quickly in a multi-cloud world with an easy to use tool that is already at many customers fingertips.
The new instant recovery also allows for restoring multiple VMs at a time, so think instant application recovery. It also introduces the ability to instantly restore an individual VM disk, getting more granular than just the VM itself.
Whats next for Veeam?
These are just a handful of what I find to be the most important features highlighted in the recent v10 release. You can find a whole bunch more over at Veeam’s official v10 new features site.
One feature that is noticeably missing from the immediate release of v10 is Continuous Data Protection (CDP). This feature, similar to NAS backup, has been promised for quite a while. CDP uses VMware’s vSphere API for I/O filtering (VAIO) to provide near zero RPO without VMware snapshots and certainly is a very powerful feature for customers with critical tier 1 workloads. One thing that I learned at the Vanguard Summit in 2019 is that Veeam will not rush a product to market just to stay ahead of the competition. Veeam releases a product to market when it meets the Veeam standard of quality that is expected by their large customer base.
Veeam did not want to rush the release of a technically challenging product like CDP. They also did not want to hold back all of these great v10 enhancements solely because of CDP. My guess is that customers will realize the benefits of waiting for something like NAS backup with this release of v10. That will also provide Veeam the ability to make another splash (hopefully) in 2020 with a new feature release once the early hype of v10 wears off.
