Almost exactly a year ago I wrote an article evangelising about Veeam Backup and Replication and looking at the new functionality which was due to be released with Version 7.
Twelve months on and we still cannot
help but be impressed by the things Veeam allow us to do to protect our
production systems and what they are doing to enhance the features of
Backup and Replicate in the forthcoming Version 8 release.
As a side note, I recently stumbled upon
something called "Veeam Quick Migration" which is an amazing piece of
functionality I never knew existed and which comes bundled with Veeam
Backup and Replication. In fact, it is included in Veeam Backup Free
Edition too. Effectively, it allows you to migrate running VMs in a
similar way to vMotion and Storage vMotion but without needing a vCenter
Server and without needing to be licensed for vMotion. It also allows
you to move running VMs between hosts which do not have shared storage.
We have used this feature extensively ourselves to move running VMs
from our North East datacentre to our North West datacentre with nothing
more than a WAN link and without shared storage. Really clever stuff!
Anyway, I digress... So what do we know about the new features Veeam
will give us when they release Backup and Replication Version 8 later
this quarter? From what we have seen so far, these appear to be some of
the most interesting enhancements;
Replication from backups
In the past, we have had to run
replication jobs from VMs at our production environment. With Version 8,
it looks like we will now be able to replicate directly from backup
files, meaning we won't have to touch our production storage once the
first backup job has completed. This should reduce the impact of data
protection activities on production storage.
Failover Plans
It is rumoured that Version 8 will allow
us to create failover plans for replicated VMs. This sounds similar to
the functionality which we have always relied on VMware's vCenter Site
Recovery Manager to provide. Additionally, it sounds like we will also
be able to test failover plans suing a feature called "SureReplica", to
allow is to fully test the recoverability of replicated VMs without
impacting any protected systems.
Built-in WAN Acceleration for replication jobs
With Version 7, we have only been able
to use the in-built WAN acceleration functionality for backup copy jobs.
It looks like version 8 will support WAN acceleration for replication
jobs as well, which should give us even more flexibility when planning
how to get our data offsite.
These are only a few of the new features
which will be available with Veeam Backup and Replication Version 8.
Veeam continue to improve their tool set with more and more new features
so we're sure to see a lot more functionality when Version 8 is
released.
Should you require more information on Veeam please contact a Celerity Representative.
Malcolm Smith, Technical Consultant, Celerity Limited
To read this article on the Celerity Limited website please click here
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