Few minutes ago Veeam released its new Veeam Backup & Replication 6.1
For those among you going to install it or upgrading from 6.0, there are some important news.
New Console
For sure the most notable news is the renewed console, completely redesigned following Microsoft UX (User eXperience) guidelines to streamline user interactions and seamlessly blend with other Windows management tools. For example, the ribbon toolbar helps you quickly see all possible actions associated with the currently selected object. And multiple task-focused management trees allow you to find things easily—for example, you can use the VM tree to quickly find and add new VMs to an existing job.
Dynamic nodes now only show relevant management tree nodes, hiding those not used. You are not using replica jobs? This node of the console will be hidden until you will create your first replica job.
This new design is really different from the previous versions, but since I used the Beta for more than a month, I can tell you it will take only some minutes to get used to it. Also, this change was needed in order to provide real estate for new functionality planned for the next major release.
Instant search is another cool feature, now you can search any object like VMs, jobs, backup proxy servers or other objects, even if you have thousands of them.
Veeam Backup Free Edition
Version 6.1 introduces a new free mode, and I’m sure this will be a big hit in the backup market!
The free mode, called Veeam Backup Free Edition, provides a subset of the functionality in the full (paid) editions of Veeam Backup & Replication, including VM and file recovery. So if you ever need to perform a restore but don’t have access to a Veeam backup server, you can simply download and install Veeam Backup Free Edition. You don’t need a license key, and you can recover VMs, VM files and guest files.
The free Edition can only run full backups of running VMs, restore whole VM/VM File/Guest File, and only uses compression features. It’s dereived from the VeeamZIP feature of the paid version (see below) and it can be a perfect fit for really small environemt where a full backup of few VM is what’s needed.
VeeamZIP
This new feature allows the performing of ad-hoc backup without having to create a full job whit all its settings. If you need to extract a single VM from your virtual infrastructure quickly and for once, it’s the best way to do it, even if that VM is included in other scheduled jobs. You can imagine many possible uses of this tool, for example extracting a last copy of a VM before deleting it, exporting a VM for later reuse or to pass to another infrastructure…
vPower for Hyper-V
Even if my blog and my working activity is focused on VMware vSphere, it’ worth noting that version 6.1 extends Veeam’s vPower technology—as well as Instant VM Recovery— to Hyper-V. So, now you can run a VM from any restore point (full or incremental), without changing the backup.
Under the Hood
Apart from the new visible features, there are so many enhancements and fixes that are not visible in the interface, but that cuncur in offering a better experience with the software. To list a few of my favorites:
– Backup proxy server selection: Intelligent load balancing now uses a Network access mode backup proxy server only when there is no backup proxy server available that can process the VM in Direct SAN or Hot Add access mode. This prevents autodetect from picking a Network access mode backup proxy server from another site.
– Transformation tasks: The transform process is now accounted for as an active backup repository task. This prevents multiple transform operations from overloading backup storage.
– System cache tuning. The backup proxy server setup now adjusts low-level Windows system cache settings to avoid a gradual decrease in processing speeds with large backup jobs. In the past there has been some reports of backup jobs slowing down as they were proceding, and now also this problem seems solved.
– Concurrent job limit. The maximum of 64 concurrent jobs per backup server has been removed. This is a great improvement for managing even larger environments, where we can now deploy several proxies and run many many cuncurrent jobs, if the underlying hardware can afford them.
– Backup proxy server replication Added the ability for the backup proxy server to replicate itself.
– Edit source VM hardware. You can now edit source VM hardware settings (for example, add a new vNIC) without having to restart the replication cycle.
– Continue replication after failback. You can now resume replication after failback without having to replicate the full VM.
– Hot add. If a VM has multiple disks, hot add is performed once for the entire VM, instead of once for each processed disk, which speeds up VM processing.
You can read in the What’s new in 6.1 PDF all the new features and enhancements in this new version.
Kudos to the Veeam guys for another great work!!!