What’s New in Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5?

Veeam Cloud Mobility provides easy portability and fast recovery of ANY on-premises or cloud-based workloads to Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure and Azure Stack to maintain business continuity and Availability across hybrid cloud environments, allowing you to:

• Get direct portability of workloads across private, hybrid and public clouds
• Restore and recover workloads directly to the cloud for fast business continuity
• Unlock the test and development use case of the public cloud 

In addition to previously released Direct Restore to Microsoft Azure, Update 4 expands Veeam Cloud Mobility with the following new functionality:

Direct Restore to AWS delivers cloud restore for Veeam backups to optimize resource allocation and minimize cost, enabling you to restore backups of Windows and Linux-based VMs, physical servers and workstations as an AWS EC2 VM, including Amazon Government Cloud and Amazon China. This feature comes with a built-in UEFI to BIOS conversion, making it possible to restore modern Windows workstations directly to AWS EC2 (which does not support UEFI).

Direct Restore to Microsoft Azure Stack builds on top of the proven Direct Restore to Microsoft Azure engine to enable you to restore backups of Windows and Linux-based VMs, physical servers and workstations to Microsoft Azure Stack as an infrastructure as a service (IaaS) VM. Along with Veeam Agents, this functionality provides the complete backup solution for Microsoft Azure Stack IaaS VMs.

Veeam DataLabs is a set of powerful capabilities that empowers IT and developers to test workloads in an isolated environment enabling them to validate updates, test patches, check for security vulnerabilities, ensure compliance, and verify recoverability of Veeam backups. Previously known as Virtual labs, Veeam DataLabs have received new capabilities in Update 4 which enable delivering functionality for better security, compliance and streamlining IT workflows.

Staged Restore enables organizations to make required changes to the database content or application/OS settings before restoring a VM into the production environment. This is achieved by starting up the required restore point in a DataLab directly from backup files, injecting and running a custom script in the guest OS while preserving the changes made, and finally moving the modified state to the production environment to finalize the restore.  Use cases for Staged Restore include:

• GDPR compliance around the right to be forgotten, by enabling you to use the same applications or scripts designed to clean up personal data from your production systems, when performing the restore of VMs containing personal data from older backups.
• Streamlining IT workflows by enabling administrators to make the required OS settings changes (such as IP address, DNS or firewall settings), installing or removing applications and performing any other operations required to make the restored VM compliant with the target environment before it is actually placed there.

Access to the Staged Restore functionality requires the Enterprise edition.

Secure Restore enables organizations to easily scan guest file system within image-level backups for malware, such as computer viruses or ransomware, prior to performing the restore to the production environment. This is achieved by mounting disks to the mount server associated with the backup repository and triggering an antivirus (AV) scan with one of the supported AV programs installed on the mount server. Use cases for Staged Restore include:

• Detecting “sleeping” ransomware in the selected restore point to improve the time of recovery from a ransomware attack by not bringing ransomware with the restored VM back into the production environment over and over again.
• Verifying backups from remote and branch offices (ROBO) with less IT control prior to restoring them into the HQ data center in ROBO disaster recovery (DR) scenarios.
• Scanning the restore point with a different AV program from the one installed on the actual VMs to increase the chance of detecting rare or zero-day malware.

Secure Restore supports Microsoft Windows Defender, Symantec Protection Engine and ESET NOD32 out-of-the-box and is extendable through configuration file to any AV program that provides a basic command line interface.

Let your database administrators (DBAs) remain in control of backing up and restoring their databases using native tools they are comfortable with while continuing to centralize all backups into your Veeam backup repository with new enterprise application plug-ins.

• Veeam Plug-in for SAP HANA is an SAP certified solution that allows HANA DBAs to use the BACKINT interface to perform backups and restores of HANA databases to and from the Veeam backup repository, including support for HCI SAP HANA deployments.
• Veeam Plug-in for Oracle RMAN allows Oracle DBAs to use the RMAN manager to perform backups and restores of Oracle databases into a Veeam backup repository. This RMAN-based integration provides customers with an additional method to achieve Oracle availability and expanded platform without replacing the existing OCI-based integration built into the image-level – which often may be a better fit depending on your scenario.

The additional benefit of leveraging Veeam plug-ins for enterprise applications is support for scale-out backup repository (SOBR), which dramatically increases backup and restore throughput thanks to the scalable multi-node backend that SOBR provides.

Access to the enterprise application plug-ins requires the Enterprise Plus edition.

Improve recovery times and reduce TCO by allowing users to securely manage backups and restores of their own VMs through the self-service backup and restore portal for VMware vSphere with role-based access tied to your already established and maintained vSphere permission system – meaning any infrastructure changes or new hires will not require IT to update delegation rules.

Available delegation modes for brownfield deployments include using the particular vSphere permission or vSphere privilege, which enables users to only see and manage backup and restore of VMs they have the corresponding permission to, or privilege for. And for greenfield deployments, you may choose to leverage the convenience of vSphere tags, with users only having access to VMs with tags specified in their respective self-service configuration.

Self-service portal is based on the existing Enterprise Manager user interface but is streamlined for this particular use case. Job setup is simplified so users only need to select the VMs back up, as well as select essential parameters such as guest credentials, retention and notifications. Users are blocked from accessing advanced settings, such as repository or backup mode selection, which are managed by the portal administrator through job templates. And as it comes to restores, users are allowed to perform a wide variety of restore options for VMs that Enterprise Manager currently provides including application items, guest files, and full VM. 

Access to the self-service backup and restore portal requires the Enterprise Plus edition.

Improve your backup reliability and success ratios while reducing total cost of ownership (TCO) through proactive resolution of known issues and configuration problems.

This new feature of Veeam ONE, Intelligent Diagnostics, will monitor Veeam Backup & Replication logs for patterns of known issues and match these with the virtual infrastructure monitoring data.  Users will then be notified if it determines that your backup infrastructure may not be optimally configured, your virtual infrastructure is experiencing an issue that may affect backups or your installation is simply missing a critical hot fix – all before these issues have material impact on your backups.

And best of all – unlike alternative solutions – there’s no “phone home” involved, as the log mining is performed on-premises using issue signature bundles prepared by Veeam Technical Support and Product Management. In other words, this feature puts the power of Veeam’s support logs mining and analysis engine in your hands – so that you hopefully never have to open a support case again.

For more information on Intelligent Diagnostics, please refer to Veeam ONE 9.5 Update 4 release documentation.

Access to the Intelligent Diagnostics functionality requires Veeam Essentials or Veeam Availability Suite.

Update 4 delivers full support for all recently shipped platform updates, including:

• Microsoft Windows Server 2019 support as guest OS of virtual machines protected by Veeam Backup & Replication, for installation of Veeam Backup & Replication and all of its remote components, and for backup with Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows.
• Microsoft Windows 10 October 2018 Update support as guest OS of virtual machines protected by Veeam Backup & Replication, support as guest virtual machines, for installation of Veeam Backup & Replication and all of its remote components, and for backup with Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows.
• Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V 2019 support as a hypervisor host, including support for virtual hardware version 9.0 virtual machines.
• Microsoft Active Directory 2019, Exchange 2019 and SharePoint 2019 support for application-aware processing, and for item-level recoveries with Veeam Explorer.
• Oracle Database 18c support for application-aware processing on Windows-based virtual machines, including transaction log backup and point-in-time restores.
• VMware vSphere 6.7 U1 ESXi, vCenter Server and vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) support.
• VMware vCloud Director 9.5 support.

• Includes improved performance of Direct Storage Access (DirectSAN) and Virtual Appliance (Hot Add) transport modes for backup infrastructure configurations through optimizing system memory interaction.

• Added support for Direct Restore to Microsoft Azure for environments with ExpressRoute or site-to-site VPN connectivity to Azure, in which case proxy and helper appliances may have private IP addresses only. To enable, сreate 
  AzurePreferPrivateIpAddressesForProxyandLinuxAppliance (DWORD = 1) registry value under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Veeam\Veeam Backup and Replication key on the backup server.

• Added support for Linux SUID and SGID preservation to "Copy To" operation.
• Added support for Btrfs volumes located on an LVM volume.

• Installing Universal Storage API plug-ins on each backup console (in addition to the backup server) is no longer required.
• Storage snapshot-only vCloud Director backup jobs are now supported for all storage integrations which support storage snapshot-only jobs. Previously, it was supported for NetApp only.
• Cisco HyperFlex integration will no longer delete the base sentinel snapshot during each job run to improve processing performance and reduce storage load.

• Improved performance of enumeration in File to Tape jobs with very large number of files.