Release: Veeam Backup & Replication 6.5

Yesterday was the release day of Veeam Backup & Replication 6.5. The first backup solution with full support for vSphere 5.1 and Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V 3.0.

An overview of the new features can be found in the this Youtube video:

I think the following features and enhancements are worth an upgrade. If you’re running a vSphere shop.

Features:

Restore from SAN snapshots
Version 6.5 also introduces Veeam Explorer for SAN Snapshots, which provides granular VMware recovery from HP StoreVirtual VSA and LeftHand snapshots. Codeveloped with HP, Explorer for SAN Snapshots lets you perform Veeam restores (Instant VM Recovery, Instant File-Level Recovery and Explorer for Exchange item
recovery) of VMware VMs directly from array-based snapshots.

You can find a short demo over here:

 

Reminder: Although SAN snapshots can provide excellent RPOs (recovery point objectives) for certain operational disasters, they cannot serve as real backups since they would be lost along with production data in the event of a storage disaster. Thus, you should never rely solely on SAN snapshots for data protection. To ensure protection against all types of disasters, continue to perform regular backup of all VMs to backup storage using Veeam backup jobs or VeeamZIP™.

vSphere 5.1 support:

Veeam Backup & Replication 6.5 provides full support for VMware vSphere 5.1.
And like vSphere 5.1, Veeam Backup & Replication 6.5 supports VMs running
Windows Server 2012 or Windows Server 8.

Enhancements:

Engine:

• Synthetic full transformation and reversed incremental backup. Improved performance (up to
  several times, depending on backup storage).
• Storage optimization. New storage optimization setting provides improved performance and
  resource utilization for backup jobs with backup files over 16TB in size.
• Memory consumption. Average memory consumption by the job manager process has been
  reduced up to 3 times.
• Network packet loss. Increased the processing engine’s tolerance to network packet loss.
• 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.
• Improved NAT support. Control whether the source backup proxy server or the backup repository/
  target backup proxy server establishes network connectivity. This is helpful when deploying Veeam
  Backup & Replication in a network with NAT and firewalls.
• Storage space notification. Added support for low disk space notification for CIFS-based backup
  repositories.
  File-level restore
• Direct file restore. When restoring a guest file back to its original location from the backup console
  (Backup Browser), perform the restore with a single click. You no longer need to supply destination
  information, and Veeam Backup & Replication does not have to stage the file locally on a backup server
  or on a network share.
• Dynamic disks. Extended support for file-level restores from dynamic disks to include spanned,
  striped, mirrored and RAID-5 volumes.
• Backup Browser UI. Updated the Backup Browser’s user interface (UI) to match the new product UI
  introduced in version 6.1. Removed the hidden system partition from the volume tree. Now retrieves
  actual drive letters from restored guest OS settings (rather than simply assigning in sequential order).

Enhancements specific to VMware:

• Improved processing performance. Significantly reduced data transfer initialization time in all
  transport modes by disabling excessive VDDK logging.
• Direct file restore. Perform a direct file restore (described earlier) without a network connection
  between the backup server and the destination VM.

You can read about the rest of the enhancements in the What’s new PDF here.

Personally I hope that I can find some time to test the Restore from SAN snapshots feature soon. We are running a huge Lefthand shop so this feature might become handy in the near future.