While everybody was busy hitting the refresh button on the VMware webpage to finally download vSphere 5 :-), today Veeam started to leak first info about their flagship product Veeam Backup and Replication v6.
This article is the result of a kind phone call, and several emails between me and Gianluca Mazzotta from Veeam Italy.
For those of you who knows Veeam, chances are you already know this is a milestone release for them, and it has already created rumors even before it has been released: from some time we know this version will support another virtualization platform, that is Microsoft Hyper-V. It’s the first time going to other platforms for Veeam since its foundation in 2006.
Here Veeam will offer a function well known to VMware users but non-existent before on Hyper-V: Changed Block Tracking. They claim a 20x improvement on backup performances… and many more features to come. Everything is offered through the same console: this will allow to have a virtual datacenter with VMware and Hyper-V at the same time, and manage all backups from the same Veeam installation.
Anyway, V6 has not lost its focus on VMware; here we still have the most interesting news:
– Enterprise scalability: Enhanced distributed architecture streamlines deployment and maintenance of remote office/branch office (ROBO) and large installations. Also speeds up backup, replication and restore over WANs.
– Advanced replication: replica has become more reliable with also 10x increase in performance. Replica engine has been completely rewritten: for example, they do not use nfc protocol anymore for ESXi replicas. I think in this way we will see better performance right here where Veeam has shown in the past not so good performances (compared to other type of backup it can do). Finally there is some degree of automation for failover VMs (“kind of SRM”), and there is now a real replica “failback” with “delta sync” so alignment between replicas is way shorter; this allow to move a VM from one datacenter to another or from one site to another.
– 1-Click-Restore: file level recovery invoked directly from Enterprise Manager web console; you seek for a file, right click on it, and the file is back!And as usual for Veeam, still in agentless mode. There is also a role-based access in place (users that can restore files, and users that can access them).
There are many more features coming, but I must say my friends of Veeam Italy are really tough, and even if I stressed them out looking for info they did not told me nothing more than what you can read here 🙂
Seeams also there are at least other two features they think will be really game-changers, and they will become “must have” for every virtualized datacenter. And this makes me even more eager to know what they are 🙂