Veeam had what they called “THEIR BIGGEST EVENT EVER” and while it at times did seem to be really heavy on the sales for the sake of sales pitch, there was a lot of stuff to legitimately be excited about for those of us who use their products. From the features coming in Veeam Backup & Replication in version 9.5 in a couple of months through the first new feature of next year’s version 10 all in total there were 5 major announcements here today that those of us using the product can make use of. In this post I’m going to run briefly through these and in the coming months will provide some deeper insights when possible.

Veeam Backup & Replication / Veeam ONE 9.5 (October 2016)

• Nimble Storage Integration- Nimble with be the next vendor after EMC, NetApp and HP storage systems that will allow Veeam to interact at the array level, allowing for backups from snapshot. If you are a Nimble customer (like me) this is going to be some good stuff
• Advanced usage of Windows Server 2016 ReFS- This is the real gravy here for anybody who is having to work with any kind of synthetic operations with their backup files. Through an integration Veeam has with Microsoft when ReFS is used to back your Veeam repositories your weekly rollups are going to take a heck of a lot less time and as well as see less storage consumption for long terms “weekly fulls”.  This is due to ReFS’ basic mechanism where file copies and moves never actually move data, it just moves the pointers. An example I’ve seen is on a 10 GB change rate backup the weekly full went from 35 minutes on NTFS to 5 minutes on ReFS. Now move that out to a real production dataset and you are really talking about something. There will be a lot more of this in follow-up posts.
• Direct Restore to Microsoft Azure – If you are resource constrained (which you usually are in a situation where you need a restore) Veeam now has the ability to restore a VM (even if it is vSphere based) directly to Azure. Pretty cool and I think probably the first of what we’ll see on this thread
• vCloud Director Integration
• VeeamONE 9.5 – If your organization needs to work with charge back this is something that is directly supported in VeeamONE. If you haven’t played with VeeamONE yet, please do so, I’ve yet to meet anyone who hasn’t found one problem with VeeamONE when first installed in their virtualization environment

Veeam Agents (November-December 2016)

Expanding on the Veeam Endpoint for Windows (and now Linux) Veeam has come out with a Veeam Agents for Windows and Linux product. While Endpoint is and will still be available for standalone installations, we finally have an enterprise managed version we’ve been looking for and we truly can have one centrally managed Veeam installation for our virtual, physical and workstation backups. As you can see there’s still a lot to like about the Free version including the new ability to restore directly to Azure or Hyper-V, the paid versions give us server grade capabilities such as Application-aware processing and transaction log processing. Further one I’m excited about as part of my use case for this is for my mobile workforce is the ability for workstations and remote office servers to cache their backups locally when they aren’t connected to the Internet and then ship them back to the corporate office or Cloud Connect repository when once again connected. This is good stuff that has been a long time coming.

Veeam Availability Console (Q1 2017)

I truly want to believe this is the first edge of “one UI to rule them all”, but the Veeam Availability Console is a web-based console to let you monitor and manage all of your Veeam resources; VBR, Agent, Cloud Connect, etc. This is an evolution of the managed backup portal available to Service Providers for a bit now and allows it to be moved downstream to the Enterprise. Let me  reinforce the emphasis on the Enterprise, while included in licensing you are going to have to be so big of an organization/installation to be allowed access to it. Hopefully as subsequent versions are released that will trickle down more.

Veeam Availability Orchestrator (Q1 2017, beta soon)

Veeam for a DevOpsy world. VAO will allow you to automate many of the processes you need to do with Veeam based upon your disaster recovery plan. Let’s say your plan requires you do so many backups, so many replicas, regular testing and comply with documentation practices. Orchestrator is going to allow you to take all that on paper and define it in workflows so in theory you are always in compliance, and if you aren’t have the documentation to show you where you aren’t. I’ve seen quite a few things about this, things that are going to be available to everybody to test soon, and they are all very powerful things.

Veeam Office 365 E-mail Backup (Q4 2016)

Of the new products announce this is the biggie. For those of us who have already began or have done Exchange migrations to Office 365, Veeam now has the ability to backup those mailboxes to your local repositories so that you always know that data is there. I don’t know how those conversations have gone for you but this is a major pain point for us in going to the cloud. Pricing or even how it is going to be sold still isn’t set but what is known is that when released the end of this year it will be free for a year for all Veeam customers with an active support contract and for 3 years for those with Enterprise Plus licensing.

Again, while I have no knowledge that it will happen I have to believe this is the first baby step into a whole host of things to make our cloudy life better in the future with Sharepoint, OneDrive and anything else coming down the road.

Veeam Backup & Replication integration with IBM storage (????, preview May 2017)

Finally the last announcement was the first related to Veeam Backup version 10, in this case the next storage vendor integration. This integration is going to work with any IBM product based on their Spectrum Virtualize software and should work like any other of their integrations. With this we also go to learn that the first technical preview of v10 will coincide with VeeamON 2017 in New Orleans, so mid May 2017.