VeeamOn Tour 2017 – Vienna Summary

As I wrote in my last post Veeam was touring through Austria and one of these stops was Vienna. I blocked this date in my calendar because as a Media Partner I wanted to attend. I was really excited to learn a little bit more about their upcoming releases and the other topics sounded also very interesting.
VeeamON Tour began with a warm welcome from Mario Zimmermann, Country Manager at Veeam for Austria and a strategic overview where Veeam was and where Veeam will be heading in the future. This was held very short to give the audiance enough time to hear about all the new technical stuff Veeam will offer in the upcoming release.
Next was Senior System Engineer at Veeam, Hannes Kasparick, who gave us a complete overview about all the new announced features coming with Veeam Availability Suite v10.

What’s new in Veeam Availability Suite v10

Built-in management for Veeam Agent for Windows and Veeam Agent for Linux (9.5 Update 3)

Centralized management for both Veeam Agent will be integrated into the Backup and Replication Console. This should make the deployment of Agents much easier than using other software deployment methods like SCCM or Altiris. During the deployment you can choose between Managed by Agent or Managed by Server.

• Managed by Agent means that the agent is deployed as we know it for 1.0/1.5/2.0 including the GUI so an end user can manage their backup jobs (Notebook user).
• Managed by Server means that a small thin agent will be deployed to the end device (mostly server OS) and all the configuration will be done in the Backup and Replication Console.

And one of the best things about the build-in agent management is that it will be available with the next Update 3 which is scheduled for November.

Veeam CDP (Continuous Data Protection)

With Veeam CDP, Backup and Replication will get the ability to lower the RPO of a replication job from now 15min to 15sec. To accomplish this, Veeam is using VAIO (vSphere API for IO Filtering) which is available on the VMware vSphere platform (Standard licensing and higher) only. This will remove the need of a snapshot during the replication job because VAIO will intercept and redirect the VM I/O to the replica. As of today this feature will only be available in the Enterprise Plus licensing.

Scale-Out Backup Repository — Archive Tier

Veeam Backup and Replication will also introduce a new Scale-Out Backup Repository type called Archive Tier. This new repository will save primary repository space and minimize costs by using cloud object storage like AWS Glacier, S3, Azure Blob storage or others. There is also currently a cooperation between Starwind and Veeam where you can use Starwind Cloud VTL as local Tape target. From there it will be replicated to S3 and then destaged to AWS Glacier.

Primary Storage Integrations — Universal Storage Integration API

Veeam introduced the first storage snapshot integration in 2013 with the release of version 7.0. The first vendor for storage snapshots was HPE with their StoreServ and StoreVirtual / VSA systems. Every new version Veeam added additional storage vendors to their product. Version 8.0 integrated Netapp, version 9.0 brought EMC VNX, VNX2 and VNXe support and with version 9.5 Nimble storage was integrated. But as you can see only every year or release Veeam could integrate a new storage vendor. That was the reason Veeam will introduce Universal Storage Integration API in their next release. This will be a plug-in architecture where the storage vendor will develop the storage plugin for Backup and Replicaion, Veeam will test it and support it if everything is fine. Because of this change it will be easier to integrate new storage vendors into Veeam. The following vendors will be integrated in the next version(s):

• 9.5 Update 3
  • IBM Spectrum Virtualize (IBM SVC, Storwize family)
• v10
  • Lenovo Storage V Series (storage based on IBM Spectrum Virtualize software)
  • INFINIDAT
• next year
  • PureStorage

NAS Backup Support for SMB and NFS Shares

One of the most awaited new features for the new v10 release is NAS Backup support for SMB and NFS. As far as I understood there will be new Veeam proxies specific for SMB/NFS backups which will have an universal SMB/NFS client for backing up the NAS data. In addition Veeam will also support NDMP as protocol for NAS backups. Backups for NAS will not use the classic Veeam container format, it will introduce a new container format which will be optimized for files. Also the metadata and catalog database will not be a MSSQL server because they need a database that is optimized for file search.

Veeam ONE

When Veeam Availability Suite is purchased there is also Veeam ONE included. Currently Veeam ONE consists of 3 tools. Veeam Monitor, Veeam Business View and Veeam Reporter. In v10 Veeam Business View will be moved to Veeam Monitor. Also the following features will be included in Veeam ONE v10:

• Service and Process Monitoring including actions like e.g. What should be done if a service is down.
• Backup Infrastructure Audit – Create Audit Report
• DSGVO support

Oracle RMAN Integration

When speaking with Oracle admins they want to backup their databases with the tools they know, especially RMAN. Therefor Veeam created a plugin which needs to be installed on the database server which will operates as some sort of gateway between RMAN and the Veeam Backup repositories. This plugin will be supported for RAC Cluster as well as for VM and physical Oracle DBs. Restores can be easily done by using Veeam Explorer for Oracle.
One last note from the What’s new was also that there will be Nutanix AHV support in the near future.

What’s new in Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365

A week before VeeamON Tour took place in Austria, Veeam released a new version (1.5) of Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365. This new version brought the following new features.

• Distributed, scalable architecture – for enhanced scalability in distributed environments with several Remote Offices/Branch Offices and in service providers’ infrastructures
• 
• Backup proxies take the workload off the management server, providing flexible throttling policy settings for performance optimization.
• Support for multiple repositories streamlines data backup and restore processes.
• Support for backup and restore of on-premises and hybrid Exchange organizations – allows you to choose from a variety of configurations and usage scenarios and implement those that meet your particular needs.
• Increased performance for restore operations allows for up to 5 times faster restores than in v1.0.
• Restore of multiple datastore mailboxes using Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange simplifies workflow and minimizes workload for restore operators, as well as 1-Click restore of a mailbox to the original location.
• RESTful API and PowerShell cmdlets will be helpful for automation of routine tasks and integration into existing or new portals.
• Support for backup and restore in Microsoft Azure Germany and Microsoft Azure China regions.
• Many enhancements were made to the UI, including main window, wizards, dialogs, and other elements, facilitating administration of the solution.

What’s new with Veeam Agents for Windows and Linux

As I said before central management for the Veeam Agents will be released with 9.5 Update 3 which is as far as I heard it November. So only a few weeks left and we can see the new shiny feature for Agent deployment.
Veeam Agents comes in 3 license packages:

• Free
• Workstation
• Server

An overview and feature list of each license can be found in this paper for Windows and here for Linux. One new feature of the Veeam Agent for Windows will be the Cluster Support (WSFC and all AlwaysOn clusters) in the Server edition. This will allow you to backup all WSFC based Windows clusters as well as SQL AlwaysON or Exchange DAG. Currently all of these are not supported or only partial support. For more infos see this KB article.
Another feature of the new version is that it will include a “Change Block Tracking” driver. Currently the agent can only to CBT through Master File Table (MFT) analysis which is only working for NTFS. Unfortunately I forgot the real use case behind the driver but I would assume to also support other file systems like ReFS etc.
When the new version is released I will do a separate post explaining all the new features.
For everyone who are using Linux in their enviroments in the new version (2.0) of the Veeam Agent for Linux the following features will be included:

• Cloud Connect Support
• SOBR Support
• Encryption
• Compiled Kernel Modules

For both Agents there will be also an Agent management from Veeam ONE (monitor and report) and from the Availability Console.

Other topics

Beside the massive information from Veeam about their planed new releases there were also two other presentations from HPE and KPMG.
HPE showed us a part of their storage portfolio which is currently integrated with Veeam like StoreOnce, StoreVirtual (VSA), StoreServ and also their new acquisition Nimble. The interesting part was how Nimble works, will be placed in the HPE storage portfolio and how it is integrated in Veeam through the Storage Snapshots integration.
KPMG has as topic Digital Forensic. Digital Forensic is a really big topic. It goes from classic PC forensic over Cloud forensic to Mobile forensic. Each category needs different tools to get the required information you want. My key take away from this topic was that forensic is very time consuming and for SSDs nearly impossible because of the carbage collection process.

Conclusion

Overall the whole event was a big success for Veeam. There were a lot of people interested in backup with Veeam. I had also good conversation with people I already know and also with new ones like the representative from HPE. I would be really grateful if only half of the attendies would show up at a VMUG meeting. For me the event was also a success because I expanded my network.
If someone is reading this and find information which is not or only partial true, please leave a comment or send me an e-mail and I will correct it.