Veeam v8

Yesterday at VMworld 2014 I attended a breakout session which gave a preview of Veeam v8. Veeam compared it to the V8 Lamborghini, it’s a beast. Just as Veeam Backup & Replication product name implies, the cornerstone of data protection strategy includes both image-based backup and replication in the same product. Backups are mandatory, but only replication is able to provide you with low recovery time objectives (RTOs), which are much needed for the modern data center. Because of that, we have provided both backup and replication since the very first release of our product, and always invested similar R&D efforts in both of these technologies.

At VMworld 2014 Veeam gave some insights in v8 which will be available in Q3, 2014. v8 includes some major enhancements to replication.

Replication from backups

With v8 you will be able to choose where the replication jobs obtain VM data from. In addition to production storage, you can now replicate from your backup files. No longer do you have to touch your production environment twice ―thus reducing the impact of data protection activities on your production storage in half.

Built-in WAN Acceleration for replication jobs

In v7, Veeam introduced Built-in WAN Acceleration for Backup Copy jobs. Because this is a built-in feature, it does not add complexity or cost of maintaining third-party WAN acceleration solution to your backup infrastructure. And since Veeam already knows the content of the backups, it offers the best results in reducing the amount of data over the network. Built-in WAN Acceleration proved to be a very popular solution in v7 for backup copy jobs, so now in v8 replication jobs are also included.

WAN acceleration for replication jobs goes hand in hand with another new v8 feature―network traffic encryption. Enabling encryption will not impact data reduction ratios of our Built-in WAN Acceleration, as is the case with general purpose WAN accelerators. Besides that v8 now provides the ability to warm cache from existing backup repositories before you even start your jobs, thus speeding them up even further.

Failover plans

The most exciting new feature is probably the added functionality for creating failover plans. This means you can now plan your entire failover in advance, and initiate it with a single click when needed. You can even do this from your iPad (using our web UI) while lying on a beach, even though we hope you will never have to do anything like that during your vacation.

Failover plans add a new UI tree element under the Replica tab.

In your failover plan, you can add VMs from your replicas and with an easy dialog you can move them up or down in order to set the boot order. For each of them, you can also set a delay so that they don’t start before a previous one has been booted and its services are running. You can also create multiple failover plans and only initiate the next failover plan when you know the previous ones have completed successfully and your DR site still has enough resources to maintain less important VMs. (e.g. “Core Infrastructure VMs,” “Business App VMs” and “Dev/Test VMs”). Testing the failover plan or plans would be based on the SureReplica technology, ensuring your replicas work when you need them. With SureReplica, you can fully test the recoverability of your replica VMs on a regular basis without impacting your production environment, thanks to the Virtual Labs.

Planned failover

Planned failover is now directly integrated into the product. This can be used to facilitate data center migrations or to perform maintenance work on your production hosts or production site. This is done without any data loss, but will require a small amount of downtime. When you perform a planned failover, the source VM will be shut down, the last changes will be replicated to the target VM, and the target VM will be started.

Conclusion

With the Veeam Availability Suite and Veeam Backup & Replication v8, Veeam continue to improves the product tool set with many new and exciting features with the following impact:

• Lower impact on primary storage.
  All in 1 job -A job creates a snapshot, makes a back-up of snapshot and replicate the back-up to a remote site.
• Lower impact on WAN links by vastly enhanced replication.
  Veeam promises 2x better performance than v7 and WAN acceleration warm up for backups to pre-populate cache.
  Besides that it offers true resume of data transfer on disconnect.
• Lower failover complexity.
  Single click failover, multiple failover plans supported, delegated failover, planned failover which allows you to leverage replication for DC migration.