The release of Veeam 10 is just around the corner and with it comes a great set of new features and capabilities. With the amount of new add ons in this latest release, there will most likely be a few key features that will be game changers for most users. In addition, I believe the following will be beneficial to a large subset of Veeam users.
In conjunction with our Veeam cloud delivery partner iland we have listed some of these for you to take a look at.
On-Prem Archival Backups
Veeam 10 adds archival GFS retention to your local on premises backups. This was not possible in Veeam 9.5 and prior as you could only set the number of restore points to keep in the active chain along with scheduling periodic synthetic full backups or scheduling monthly active full backups. Veeam 10 streamlines this process by allowing you to save full backup created in your normal chain as an archival backup. This can be configured Weekly, Monthly and Yearly and allows for more efficient long term retention and data usage as you can keep your daily backups to hold 7 or 14 restore points, while you set x amount of weekly, monthly or yearly backups to the side.
This is a huge win for customers who want to utilise Object Storage for data offloading or as an offsite copy.
Many users would choose to create a local backup job and then create a backup copy of that job to take advantage of the GFS archival backups that were previously only available in Backup Copy jobs. Veeam 10 eliminates the need for that second copy job by adding GFS archival backups to local backup jobs.
Immediate Copying or Job Mirroring
As one of Veeam's largest Cloud Connect partners, we have dealt with several different use cases and goals of our customers. In typical cases, we recommend our customers create a backup job that maps to a local backup job on their side. We then would have the customer schedule the backup copy job's sync interval to begin shortly after the local job generally completes its backup. Veeam 10 introduces the Immediate Copy mode to backup jobs now which follows this same set. Essentially, this allows you to mirror one or more local backup jobs and can even include backing up transaction log backups. When a local job completes a backup, the Backup Copy job will immediately begin copying the data to your cloud repository.
On top of that, when using the Immediate Copy method, you can even set alarms to notify you if a newly created local backup or log backup has not been copied in a certain amount of time. This helps you ensure that your backup data is redundant while also giving a "Set it and forget it" type configuration. Prior settings are still available as well like the GFS archival backups and the ability to disable data transfer during the workday.
One caveat to the Immediate copy method is that it only allows you to select backup jobs created on the backup server. If you have Agent backup jobs that are managed by the source server, and not your Veeam server, these jobs will not be available with the Immediate copy method.
What makes this even better is that Veeam added this feature while still allowing you to use the previous method of periodic copying. In some cases, customers may not want to copy every VM in a particular job or want to have a more granular approach to what data is being transferred and when. This option is still available by using the Periodic Copying method for your Backup Copy jobs.
Object Storage
Veeam 10 has also added some new features to Object Storage repositories. Previously, you could configure restore points to be offloaded to your cloud tier storage in a Scale-Out Backup Repository (SOBR) after a set number of days. This helps cut costs and storage usage by sending the bulk of your older data to object storage while preserving your ability to recover from those restore points. With Veeam 10, you can now copy the backups to object storage immediately after they are created.
This creates a cost effective way of gaining backup redundancy for your backups. Even better, you can use both features at the same time for the best of both worlds. This enables you to hold a longer retention of your local backups while also gaining more cost-effective backup redundancy than was previously possible.
File Share Backups
Veeam 10 also now includes a Backup Job type for File shares. Veeam can now hook into a SMB, NFS, Windows or Linux file share to back up the shared data. You can configure a file share job to backup current versions of your files for your desired retention period, as well as set an archival retention period for older or deleted files. You can also exclude certain file types from the backup if they are not critical. For even more redundancy, you can select a secondary repository, whether offsite or local to copy file share backups to. Once your data is being backed up, you can restore the entire file share or a specific file/directory. You can also rollback the entire file share or sub-directories to a previous point in time.
The inclusion of file share backups shows Veeam is responding to the feedback provided by their users as this has been a requested feature for some time. While exploring the options for the archival backups and secondary repositories you will notice Veeam's focus to enable data redundancy and security for their client base.
If you would like to discuss the move towards the an opex consumption model for your Veeam backup & DR estate or looking to move away from another vendor speak with us and we will help you achieve the desired outcome the Simoda way.
thanks for reading
Regards
Daniel
0114 281 2208
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