Veeam released the latest version of their backup software a week ago on August 15th.  I’ve been looking forward to this release as they’ve included some features that many customers have wanted for some time such as:

• Grandfather-Father-Son backup rotation as part of a Backup Copy Job to secondary storage
• Export Backups to Tape
• vSphere Web Client Plugin
• Built-In WAN Acceleration

The full list of enhancements and features can be found here.

$Work uses Veeam as the primary backup solution, so I set up a test environment to try out some of these new features before upgrading.  $Work is only licensed for the Standard Edition, and while the evaluation license is for the Enterprise Plus feature set, I will only be testing what I can use in my production environment.  So unfortunately, I won’t be trying out the WAN Acceleration feature or U-AIR.

First Thoughts

Installation of V7 and setting up jobs was a breeze.  There were a few small changes to the process compared to previous versions, like having to set up credentials to access VCenter and Windows servers in a credential vault, but those changes were relatively minor and saved time later.  In previous versions, I would have to go into my password vault each time I wanted to create a backup job that included windows servers.  This takes care of that.

Not much has changed with setting up new backup jobs.  They have added a screen for setting up a secondary storage site and backup rotation, which makes it easy to add backup jobs to a backup copy job if you already have one set up.  One of the best changes on various jobs screens, in my opinion, is that the backup job statistics screen is now accessible on the main screen just by selecting a backup job.  It is no longer buried in a context meu.

Previous versions of Veeam backed up servers sequentially if there was more than one server per backup job.  That’s changed in this edition.  Veeam will now backup multiple servers per job in parallel.  This will cut down backup times significantly.  This option isn’t enabled if you are upgrading from a previous version, but it can easily be enabled by going into the options menu.

I really like the Backup Copy job option.  There is a lot to this feature, and I want to dedicate more time to it in a separate post.

The timing of this release is very good.  We are a Veeam customer at $work, and we’ve just started to reevaluate our disaster recovery plan and capabilities.  Some of these features, especially the exporting backups to tape and GFS rotation, are capabilities that we wanted to get.  We currently back up directly to an offsite repository, so the backup copy job feature may be one of the best additions to this product.