Veeam Blog

Having been hands-on in service provider land for the entirety of my career prior to joining Veeam, I understand the pain points that come with offering backup and recovery services. I’ve spent countless hours working on getting the best combination of hardware and software for those services. I also know firsthand the challenges that storage platforms pose for architecture, engineering and operations teams who design, implement and manage these platforms.

With the release of vSphere 6.5, VMware introduced a supported version of the HTML5 vSphere Client that was bundled as part of the vCenter Server Appliance. Built upon VMware’s Clarity UI Framework, the move to the new HTML5 client had begun. The 6.5 release had partial functionality compared to the Flash-based Web Client, however, with the release of vSphere 6.7 in April, the HTML5 vSphere Client was brought up to feature parity and is now the preferred way to configure and manage vSphere environments.

In this blog post, I’ll be covering a very real-world solution with Veeam PN where it will be used to easily connect geographically disparate cloud hosting zones, enabling you to achieve High Availability for applications and provide cross cloud application and services access. This is probably the most exciting of the three use cases I will cover in this blog series on Veeam PN, and with multi-cloud adoption in full swing, this is a very timely and useful capability.

On January 2018, Veeam publicly announced the release of Veeam PN (powered network) version 1, a lightweight SDN appliance that was released completely FREE to use. And while Veeam PN was released as part of a greater solution focused on extending network Availability for Microsoft Azure, Veeam PN can also be deployed as a standalone tool via a downloadable OVA. Veeam PN has some key standalone use cases we’ll explore in this blog series.

Networking has always been one of the most complex parts of any IT solution, and whether you are connecting into a remote site, connecting branch offices together or extending on-premises networks to the cloud, there is traditionally a high level of complexity and cost that's involved in establishing a reliable networking solution. When it comes to networking during a disaster, the level of complexity and margin for error is magnified. In relative terms, it has become easy to back up, replicate and then recover workloads, but getting access to those recovered systems remains a cumbersome process.

It's been nearly a year since VMware released vSphere 6.5 which marked the 12^th major release of VMware's hypervisor and hypervisor management product suite. And while VMware has been focusing on more recent products like vSAN and NSX, it shouldn't be forgotten that vSphere still remains at the core of the virtualization platform on top of which all other products are consumed. Veeam has a strong history of working with and supporting vSphere features, and the 6.5 release is no different.

NEW Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows 2.0 has the ability to back up directly to Veeam Cloud Connect repositories without any additional investments from the VCSP. It just works as part of any existing Cloud Connect Backup infrastructure built on Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 2. As we did with Cloud Connect Backup and then Cloud Connect Replication in resolving the complexity around getting virtual machine backups, backup copy jobs and replicas up into a cloud platform, we have now resolved the complexity of getting physical servers and workstations as well as cloud-based Windows instances into cloud environments operated by our VCSP partners.

I am happy to announce that the Update 2 download for Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 is now available for Veeam service providers! This is the latest update for our flagship product and adds support for the upcoming release of Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows 2.0 along with other significant enhancements and bug fixes. But when it comes to our cloud and service providers, the biggest new feature is Veeam Backup Remote Access. Let’s dive straight into this new feature!

For a number of years now, Veeam has been talking about the 3-2-1 rule of backups, whereby you keep three copies of your backup data on two different media types with at least one of those backups held off-site. Traditionally, most organizations have been able to put this into play by taking advantage of on-premises storage and media hardware along with multiple data center locations to cater for the off-site requirements. This is where off-site data backup services can come into play to satisfy the off-site backup services requirement.

There’s a plethora of different cloud service providers out there. They range from traditional integrators offering backup services on top of their managed offerings to Information as a Service (IaaS) providers looking to specialize in business continuity and disaster recovery (DR), and even to the hyper-scale public clouds that offer platform services that can be consumed as part of an off-site backup solution. It’s important to understand the requirements around choosing cloud service providers that offer data backup, replication and recovery services, whether you are a large enterprise or a small-to-medium-size business (SMB).