Today we announced the general availability of Veeam Backup & Replication v7 R2. This is an important release because Veeam is the first backup and disaster recovery vendor to support BOTH vSphere 5.5 and Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V hypervisors. In addition, v7 R2 also includes full support for Windows Server 2012 R2 or Windows 8.1 as a VMware or Hyper-V guest, as well as support for installing Veeam Backup & Replication components on these operating systems.
vSphere 5.5
If you’re registered on our forums then you’ve most likely seen the “Word from Gostev” that’s sent out every Sunday evening. A few weeks ago Anton pointed out an important requirement with vSphere 5.5. Starting with version 5.5, the vSphere API for Data Protection (VADP) components (also known as VDDK) are now available only 64 bit (x64) only. That means that with vSphere 5.5, Veeam backup proxies must be installed on a 64-bit version of Windows. However, those not yet updating to vSphere 5.5 do not have to switch to 64-bit proxies, as we will continue using previous VDDK version for ESX(i) hosts prior to 5.5. And in mixed environments, you can have both 32- and 64-bit proxies and our intelligent load-balancing engine will assign processing tasks accordingly.
Highlights include:
- vSphere 5.5 support, including support for 62 TB virtual disks and virtual hardware v10 virtual machines
- vCloud Director 5.5 support
- The added ability to limit maximum amount of active VM snapshots per datastore to prevent it from being overfilled with snapshot deltas. This was a popular request due to the newly added parallel processing feature!
Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V
Microsoft made a number of changes in Windows Server 2012 R2, especially when it comes to interacting with Hyper-V. What this meant for Veeam was a massive rewrite of a lot of our code to take advantage of WMI v2 namespace as the WMI v1 namespace was completely removed from 2012 R2. Because of this, make sure you test all your third-party software thoroughly before upgrading to Windows Server 2012 R2.
Highlights include:
- Windows Server 2012 R2 with Hyper-V and free Hyper-V Server 2012 R2 support, including support for Generation 2 virtual machines (VMs)
- Support for the installation of Veeam Backup & Replication and its components on Windows Server 2012 R2 and Windows 8.1
- Support for System Center 2012 R2 Virtual Machine Manager (VMM)
Built-in WAN acceleration
- Increased data processing—up to 50%—with hard drive-based cache and up to 3 times with SSD-based cache
- Multi-core CPU on source WAN accelerator is recommended to take full advantage of the enhanced WAN acceleration engine
Replication
- Added ability for source and target proxy servers to reconnect and resume replication when network connection between source and target site drops for a short period of time, which should increase reliability of remote replication dramatically
Tape
- Added support for a number of enterprise-class tape libraries with partitioning functionality, allowing multiple tape library partitions to be presented to the same host
- Import/export slot interaction has been redesigned to add support for a number of IBM and Oracle tape libraries
Application-aware processing
- Added ability for application-aware processing logic to detect passive Microsoft Exchange DAG database present on the VM, and process it accordingly
- Added support for Exchange CCR clusters
User interface
- The user interface should now remember size and positions of the main window, as well as all panels and columns.
In addition to these new features, the update brings many minor enhancements and bug fixes. For the full list, please refer to the Veeam support KB 1831.
Important notes (known issues)
New platform testing uncovered some new issues, and here are the two most important:
- vSphere 5.5: E1000E vNIC adapters have been found to crash ESXi hosts under heavy load. Avoid using them until the patch is available from VMware. For more information, please refer to VMware support KB 2059053.
- Windows Server 2012 R2: In Windows Server 2012 R2 environments with the Windows Server deduplication feature in use, be sure to install Veeam Backup & Replication on Windows Server 2012 R2, and enable the Data Deduplication feature. The Windows Server 2012 deduplication driver is not compatible with Windows Server 2012 R2 deduplication, causing file-level recovery errors with false data corruption reports.