Veeam has released today the official “What’s New” document for the upcoming version 6.5 of Backup & Replication.
Veeam guys has filled their new release with tons of new features, improvements and fixes. Among the most interesting, there are for sure the two “Explorer” modules, for Exchange and San Snapshots. They are so great that they would have done dedicated version only for them, but the decided to put both in this release.
The two new hypervisors from both VMware (vSphere 5.1) and Microsoft (Hyper-V 3) are supported, so now you can safely upgrade your environment and still be protected by Veeam. But there are as I said even more new features in 6.5, here are some:
Global data deduplication: Leverage data deduplication in Windows Server 2012 to minimize the size of backup repositories. This includes deduplicating data between backup files produced by different backup jobs, something not available on Veeam alone. This opens a completely new scenario for disk backups: some customers would probably avoid deduplication appliance, and instead create servers with large disk capacity, install Windows 2012 on it, and use it as a deduplicated repository.
Network traffic verification engine. New network traffic verification engine detects and automatically recovers from in-flight data corruption caused by malfunctioning network equipment and similar issues. This is an awesome features, since a packet can become corrupted during wan transmission, and the receiving component of the software has no way to verify the data in the packet. Now Veeam is able to do even this!
Configuration backup. Automatically (and periodically) backup the Veeam product configuration to a specified backup repository. Useful when your backup server is physical and cannot protect itself, and when migrating a backup server to another computer. Configuration restore automatically rescans all backup repositories and replica hosts to register any additional restore points that were created after the configuration backup took place.
Dynamic disks. Extended support for file-level restores from dynamic disks to include spanned, striped, mirrored and RAID-5 volumes. Now you can restore files from a dynamic disk using the Windows Restore, and avoid the “Other OS” procedure.
Replica VMs. To save disk space, replica VMs are created by default with thin-provisioned virtual disks, regardless of the source VM disk type. This is a quick and cool addition, helping even careless sysadmins to save on disk space during replicas. Oh, and is also something to take care of if you need to have thick disks on destination.
For the complete list, go and get the official PDF file here.
You will also see a quote from me in the document; this makes me really proud and humble at the same time.