This week we are excited to announce general availability for the latest release of NEW Veeam Availability Orchestrator v3 as well as its new pricing option – DR Pack! Read up to learn how Veeam allows for DR planning to become accessible to much more businesses and all their workloads, and at the price point that is unheard of at the DR market.
First, let’s take a closer look at some of the new features in VAO v3 and get a refresher on some of the key advantages of this product that helps organizations streamline their disaster recovery plans and processes.
NetApp ONTAP integration
Veeam Availability Orchestrator v3 introduces all-new Storage Orchestration plans. These plans can fully automate the recovery of your VMware virtual machines on ONTAP storage.
Now, with just a click of a button, VAO can perform all the steps required to failover and run those VMs from quiescing the SnapMirror Relationship, to registering and starting VMs in vSphere, and running the orchestration plan steps against them.
Like replica and restore plans, Storage Orchestration plans are simple to create. Before creating your first Storage Orchestration plan, source and destination NetApp SVMs need to be added to VAO, and recovery locations need to be created for your VMs.
When it comes to Storage Orchestration plans, you don’t need to have an existing Veeam Backup & Replication environment to take advantage of VAO. This means if you aren’t already a Veeam customer, you can still take advantage of VAO’s powerful planning, orchestration, testing and execution of orchestration plans against your VMware workloads.
Instead of manually needing to break SnapMirrors and mount them to vSphere, VAO can do all this and more with a single click. Furthermore, you can upload your own custom PowerShell scripts and VAO will run them for you.
You can also leverage the embedded Veeam Backup & Replication server to take advantage of the Veeam DataLab testing feature. I can’t promise you won’t want to test out Veeam Backup & Replication for your workloads afterwards though. Don’t worry, you can download a free 30-day trail of Veeam Backup & Replication in your environment to back up and restore anything, anywhere.
“We are pleased that NetApp was chosen as the first storage vendor to have snapshots integrated into this new release of Veeam Availability Orchestrator V3. The new functionality, including full disaster recovery orchestration and failback for NetApp ONTAP Snapshots, allows for faster and easier testing of DR recoverability. As our Strategic Alliance with Veeam matures and grows, our combined solutions continue to expand, providing robust, high-value capabilities for our joint customers while staying true to the principles of ease of use, flexibility and performance.”
Rick Hegberg, VP Global Pathways at NetApp
Beyond disaster recovery
Veeam Availability Orchestrator is capable of much more than just recovering virtual machines in the event of a disaster. A Veeam DataLab test has the ability to ensure that all of a plan’s steps complete successfully in the event of a disaster, without any impact to your production environment. The DataLab test will also accurately gauge your RTO, and tell you very clearly if you are meeting it or not in the DataLab test report.
Just think of what you can do with an extra copy of your application! From quickly testing new patches after the latest 0-day exploit comes out, to providing a training environment, the possibilities are virtually endless.
It can also help you make the business case for your disaster recovery infrastructure, since now you can leverage it for way more than just a DR test.
DataLab tests are quick and easy to run, and can be scheduled to run on a regular basis through VAO.
Veeam Availability Orchestrator is also a great tool for data center migrations, especially with the added NetApp ONTAP support. As someone who has manually migrated data centers using a combination of NetApp SnapMirror and lots of manual processes and scripts, VAO can make life a lot easier.
PowerShell scripts just need to be uploaded to VAO, and you can choose to run them as a pre-plan step, against VMs in your orchestration plan, or as a post-plan step.
Automated documentation for better DR compliance
Don’t forget, all of these things and more are included in VAO’s dynamic documentation. Between the Plan Definition Report with audit log, Readiness Check, DataLab Test, and Execution reports, it is easy to stay in compliance, proving SLAs both internally and externally and ensuring all stakeholders in an organization always know the state of their disaster recovery readiness.
With version 3, we added a few improvements here as well, making it possible to easily download all four reports at once as a zip file.
Here’s a reminder on some of the existing, great features of VAO’s dynamic documentation:
- Set up RTOs and RPOs as properties within the plan and compare them with real-world values after a test.
- Customize report templates, including all internal labels, making sure it has the look and feel that’s best for your business
- All reports are available in English, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish and Russian!
Introducing DR Pack
In today’s world, all data is essential, and here at Veeam we want to enable businesses to simply and reliably extend DR planning beyond what’s historically been deemed the most critical workloads.
Now it’s easier than ever to protect all of your VMware VMs with Veeam Availability Orchestrator. Veeam is introducing a new, exciting pricing option — DR Pack — which would allow to easily add DR planning and compliance solution on top of Veeam Backup & Replication or Veeam Availability Suite while providing up to 80% cost savings!
No more wasting time trying to decide which workloads are the most important to your business. The DR Pack is changing the game and creating the most simple and cost-effective BC/DR offering in the market. Learn more about DR Pack here.
More new features in Veeam Availability Orchestrator v3
Veeam Availability Orchestrator v3 is packed full of even more great features designed to streamline and accelerate disaster recovery and migrations.
First is the addition of a new Plan Operator role, which is exactly what it sounds like. This role allows users to operate plans, but not create or edit them, making it a perfect role for your ops teams.
Veeam Availability Orchestrator also has the ability to leverage backup copy jobs for restore plans, making sure you can use the data that is the most local to your DR site.
There has also been a number of incredible enhancements to both reporting and the VAO API.
Don’t just take my word for it! Head on over to Veeam.com and get started with the free 30-day trial for Veeam Availability Orchestrator today.
