Veeam has just released the new version of their award winning product, Veeam Backup & Replication. Veeam Back-up & Replication 7 includes a lot of enhancement and cool new features.

With these new features and enhancements Veeam Backup & Replication 7 leverages the capabilities and benefits of virtualization to deliver a powerful, easy-to use and affordable solution for protecting your virtual infrastructure.

New features

Enhanced Backup & Recovery for vCloud Director
Using the vCD API, Veeam will display the vCD infrastructure directly in Veeam Backup & Replication, backup all vApp metadata and attributes, restore vApps and virtual machines directly to vCD, and support restore of fast-provisioned VMs. The integration with vCloud Director currently includes the ability to backup and restore virtual machines managed by vCloud Director.

vSphere Web Client  integration
Monitor backups and backup infrastructure directly from vSphere, identify unprotected virtual machines, and simplify capacity planning. The vSphere Web Client plug-in will have good information such as success, warning, and failure counts for all jobs as well as some cumulative information on key backup infrastructure topics such as storage space used and available.

Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SharePoint
Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SharePoint provides instant visibility into SharePoint backups, advanced search capabilities, and quick recovery of individual SharePoint items. Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SharePoint introduces a single tool that can easily be used to backup, compress and deduplicate SharePoint data stores.

Virtual Lab for Hyper-V
Virtual Lab plus vPower delivers agent-free recovery of individual objects from any virtualized application, automatic verification of every backup, and easy setup of isolated environments for testing, training and troubleshooting. Virtual Lab works in conjunction with Veeam’s unique technology to run a virtual machine directly from a compressed, deduplicated backup file on regular backup storage. This allows you to run a VM from any restore point, full or incremental, without any changes to the backup itself.

Native Tape Support
Archive to Tape provides another option for archiving Veeam backups – disk, cloud and tape. It supports virtual tape libraries (VTLs), tape libraries and standalone drives. And, it’s fully integrated into Veeam Backup & Replication and tracks virtual machines and restore points across tapes, making restores simple. The new tape support is a great way to make backups portable and take them offsite. This allows you to move backups offsite in a cost-effective manner.

Enhanced 1-Click Restore
These enhancements enable fast and easy VM restores, and new delegation options let administrators safely empower business owners for recovery of their own files and VMs. This new feature centers on self-service for virtualized environments. Veeam Backup & Replication includes the Enterprise Manager which is installed and runs in conjunction with your IIS web services to provide, among other things, on demand self-service capabilities for authorized users to search for, and then, with a single click, restore files – and soon virtual machines – from within the backups.

Virtual Lab for Replicas (VMware Only)
SureReplica lets you automatically verify every restore point in every replica, and Virtual Lab for Replicas also delivers fastest agent-free recovery of application objects (U-AIR) and On-Demand Sandboxes for testing, training and troubleshooting. With Virtual Lab for replicas, you now have an exact copy of your production environment running on standard hosts and datastores.

Back-up from storage snapshots
Storage snapshots are an ideal source of backup because they have no impact on production workloads. However, storage snapshots are not true backups, for true backup, the data must be moved to another storage device. Until now, there have been no convenient, robust tools to perform backup using storage snapshots. Veeam Backup & Replication v7 makes the entire process easy to use, more streamlined and 20 times faster than competitive solutions, creating true backups and replicas from which IT can restore if the SAN has completely melted down.

Build-in WAN acceleration
Veeam Backup & Replication v7 will include build-in WAN acceleration. This is not a general purpose WAN accelerator, but functionality specifically tuned for Veeam data transfers across the WAN. It includes global caching, variable length deduplication, traffic compression, TCP/IP optimizations (multi-threading, provisions for high latency links) and resume on disconnect.

Enhancements

Storage Integration plug-in architecture
has you all know since many months, actually Veeam supports only HP 3Par and HP StoreVirtual. But the plug-in architecture paves the way for the support of new and upcoming supported storage.

Parallel processing of multiple virtual machines and virtual disks
In version 7 Veeam B&R can now do a back-up multiple virtual machines inside a single job at the same time. In previous versions, a single job could include multiple virtual machines, but they were processed sequentially.

Besides parallel back-ups of multiple virtual machines it is now also possible to create a back-up of multiple disks of a single virtual machine at the same time. This serves multiple goals, it reduces the back-up windows, and most of it all reduces the time a snapshot is open and read-only.

64-bit data movers
With previous versions of Veeam B&R the data movers were only available in 32 bit versions which could lead to problems with memory-management when backing-up very large files. With the new 64-bit data movers those limits are now raised, but be aware you would need to update all the components to Windows 2012 to get this advantage.

Enhanced I/O pattern for data writes
Veeam has lowered the fragmentation occurring inside the backup file. In this way the performance of back-up and restore operations increases significantly.

Transparent backup of vCenter Server virtual machine
With previous versions of Veeam B&R back-up of a virtualized vCenter server took some workarounds. With this new version a virtual vCenter server can be backed-up like any other virtual machine.

Changed Block Tracking
Changed block tracking can now be enabled for virtual machines which already have snapshots.

Enumerated infrastructure objects
In previous versions Veeam B&R enumerates the objects included in a back-up job when the job starts. With a large number of virtual machines this operation can take quite some time. This causes you to lose valuable back-up time. With this enhanced feature you can save that time.

Versions

As of today Veeam Back-up & Replication 7 is available in the following versions.

Conclusion

With the release of Veeam Back-up & Replication v7, Veeam is delivering a full featured and mature back-up solution. With the existing Exchange Explorer and the new SharePoint Explorer you now have integration with two of the more difficult enterprise applications. With the integration with VMware and Hyper-V, the vSphere client integration, the Virtual Lab and Virtual Labs for Replica’s Veeam Back-up & Replication supports the two largest hypervisors on the market and adds even more features to it. The native tape support and back-up from storage snapshots really positions it in the enterprise segment and it answers to a long wanted feature, transport to tape.

With the vCloud Director integration and 1-Click restore with self service portal this release Veeam is aiming at service providers segment and end-user customers. But to be able to fully support public cloud solutions it needs multi-tenancy. The vCloud Director integration is nice from private cloud solutions which use vCloud Director internally. But for public cloud solutions is needs real multi-tenancy to be able to offer self-service to customers.

Visit the product page for more detailed information, download of an evaluation copy and FAQs.