Today, Veeam has announced the latest version of its flagship product, Veeam Backup & Replication 6.5.
As usual, Veeam has put a lot of effort in its product and the new release is really full of new and awesome features, as also many improvements to existing ones.
Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange
This functionality has been around for some time and I talked about it in a dedicated post here. The final release has some differences from public beta code:
• VEX is now fully integrated into B&R, removing multi-step restore process of launching the tool, starting FLR session, etc. – and now supports recoveries from both backups and replicas.
• User experience has been much streamlined: ese.dll file, as well as all existing mailbox datastores are detected and mounted automatically when you start the recovery.
• New ability to restore selected mailbox items directly back to the original Exchange (available only with the Enterprise Edition license).
Veeam Explorer for SAN Snapshots
This is the new and official name of the previously called SanSnap Restore. I described this feature in this post, and I’m going to publish in the next weeks a series of posts about its configuration and usage.
This feature is I think a real milestone in B&R, but also more in general in virtualized backups. We have always been able to snapshot LUNs and recover data from it, but the process has always been complex and cumbersome. On the other hand, vSphere backup on large VMs has always been problematic because of the snapshot commit. VESS is the beginning of a new way of doing backups, combining the best from storage possibilities and virtualized environments. Right now it works only with HP Lefthand storage, but I think we will see other supported storages in the future (my guess, I have no official reply about this from Veeam).
Veeam ONE Integration
The new Management Suite feature allow now for advanced monitoring and reporting on Veeam Backup & Replication, like real time monitoring of backups, proxies and repositories status, and much more. Thinking about the Essentials Suite where both products are bundled, this is a great addon.
There will be also really tons of improvements in this release. We all need some more patience to get the GA version out in some weeks.