With Veeam Availability Suite v10, we introduced 10 new updated core features, and one of those was the New Veeam Backup for Nutanix AHV. For those using our initial v1 product, Veeam Availability for Nutanix, we received a lot of great feedback that influenced us moving forward.
Veeam and Nutanix have been busy these past 12 months. This is a solution that focuses on protecting data on Nutanix AHV, the third hypervisor for Veeam to support within the Cloud Data Management Platform.
The major feedback with v1 was that we were missing:
Veeam Backup for Nutanix AHV
There has been a lot of installations and feedback since the v1 release which saw its GA date back in 2018. And good news, Veeam listens to what customers say and work it into upcoming releases. There’s no better time to prove it than with the new Veeam Backup for Nutanix AHV, which now includes AHV proxy centralized management and deployment, Veeam ONE reporting capabilities, and enhanced recovery capabilities.
Centralised deployment and management
The biggest bit of feedback received was the requirement for centralised management for the availability for Nutanix AHV workloads. In v1, the AHV Proxy would communicate with Veeam Backup & Replication to enable the use of the Veeam backup repository to store those backups. This new release features significantly expanded centralized management which provides the ability to centrally deploy and upgrade the Nutanix AHV proxies and have more visibility into the backup jobs.
Snapshot integrations
The new Veeam Backup for Nutanix AHV will see a much stronger integration into the Nutanix Distributed Storage Fabric and have the ability to leverage native storage snapshots as well as restore from those snapshots. By adding the capability to integrate into this storage layer, we can provide the ability to perform more frequent snapshots orchestrated by Veeam, which in turn tightens recovery point and time objectives.
Flexible recovery
Veeam has always looked at how recoveries can be as flexible and fast as possible. The snapshot integration we just mentioned also allows us to leverage those snapshots for file-level recovery, meaning we can recover files and folders at a granular level.
The second thing to mention is the ability to take any of the Veeam image-based backups and recover those workloads into the Nutanix AHV hypervisor.
The Veeam portable file format allows us to recover those image-based workloads into Nutanix AHV. This is all done through Veeam Backup & Replication.
In v1, there was also the requirement when it came to file-level recovery for Linux machines that you would need to run the Veeam Linux FLR Appliance in either Microsoft Hyper-V or on a VMware vSphere environment. This was a limitation to customers who had gone all in on Nutanix AHV as their choice of hypervisor. This release brings that Linux FLR appliance to run directly on the Nutanix AHV environment as well as be controlled and configured within Veeam Backup & Replication.
Monitoring & reporting
The new release of Veeam ONE also gives Nutanix AHV users the ability to perform monitoring on their environments. They can see what has been backed up and not, performance statistics, and any alarms being triggered during job runs.
There is also a new reporting functionality in Veeam ONE, which enables scheduled reports to be sent to backup administrators.
If you’re interested in learning more about Veeam ONE, check out my colleague’s blog post: 3 more reasons to love Veeam ONE v10!
New targets available for backup
Veeam Backup & Replication has another interesting enhancement which allows users to send backups to integrated deduplication devices. This also enables our Agent backups and enterprise application plug-ins to send primary backups to the same devices.
It’s also worth mentioning that both Windows ReFS and XFS Reflink, from a Linux point of view, are also supported as targets, and in particular, the block cloning technology here adds additional backup efficiency and space-saving methods to your backup plans with Fast Clone technology.
Nutanix Mine with Veeam
On top of the new targets to store your Nutanix AHV backups, there is also Nutanix Mine with Veeam. And let’s clear this up now, Nutanix Mine with Veeam is not the same thing as Veeam Backup for Nutanix AHV.
Nutanix Mine with Veeam can help solve common challenges with secondary storage and backup.
You‘ll find a great overview in this solution brief.
Licensing and installation
Veeam Backup for Nutanix AHV integrates with Veeam Backup & Replication and related suites. Protected Nutanix AHV VMs are licensed with the simplified Veeam Universal License (VUL). The separate installation package used for Veeam Backup for Nutanix AHV requires no additional license.
You can download your copy here today to install on your Veeam Backup & Replication Server.
These are some of the biggest features that were released with the new Veeam Backup for Nutanix AHV, but there are many more that can be found in the Veeam Backup for Nutnaix AHV user guide .
And rest assured, this solution will work with NAS backup, Cloud Tier, NAS Backup Archive Tier, and even Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 backup direct to Object Storage.
