The next big thing from Veeam! Veeam Availability Platform

So Veeam has been busy lately and today they showed us what they have been working on with their platform! With the upcoming release of Veeam availabilty suite 9.5 (Which I’ve blogged about previously here  –> http://msandbu.org/veeam-backup-and-replication-9-5-with-azure-and-windows-server-2016-support/

Veeam B&R (or Availbility suites) has always been aimed against virtualized enviroments, in order to become more agile against the move towards clouds, also with the introduction of cloud connect, direct restore to Azure, endpoint protection,  it gets difficult to manage in a larger scale. Also having orchestrated disater recovery options as well which makes management complex. Veeam has talked about the Orchestrator product which will fit nicely into the puzzle, the final piece is Veeam availbilty console which will allow for a centralized management of remote officies, clouds and virtual enviroments.

Veeam have also figured out that agents is needed to ensure compability and full featured backup across all platforms (virtual, physical, cloud)

So starting with Veeam 9.5 you can now have agents installed on any supported Windows or Linux operatingsystem

There are three different agents that can be used, depending on the required features. Where for instance Server and Workstation are paid instances, but if you now look at the features, we can now do direct restore to Hyper-V and Microsoft Azure (Both ASM and ARM) we can also do integration with Veeam Cloud Connect meaning that we can do direct backups from clients and server directly to a service provider or cloud endpoint. And since we can use the agents on a physical server, we can actually use it to do P2V or V2V from one platform to another cloud platform.

Another cool feature that Veeam has integrated is advanced use of ReFS filesystem. For those that are not aware of ReFS it is a new filesystem which came in Window Server 2012, which was aimed at replacing NTFS will continuing to support application compability level of NTFS. Is has enhanced resillency and file corruption detection and use of integrity streams to ensure file integrity.

ReFS on Windows Server 2016 implements block cloning by remapping logical clusters (that is, physical locations on a volume) from the source region to the destination region. It then uses an allocate-on-write mechanism to ensure isolation between those regions. The source and destination regions may be in the same, or different, files. So this allows for low-cost metadata operation, rather than actually reading and writing the underlying file data directly, resulting to drasticly decreasing time to do for instance full synthentic backups. It also implements cost savings since it does not need to rewrite the data it only copies the metadata. So think of the possibilities if we are using a Storage Spaces 2016 ReFS repository volume using for instance the improved deduplication feature as well. We can also use it in conjunction with Storage Spaces Direct (Which is a shared nothing, storage cluster option) to ensure resilliency, this requires ReFS format volumes from Microsoft.

NOTE: In order to use this feature you need to have a Windows Server 2016 format ReFS volume, and requires a 2016 cluster level if used in a Storage Spaces Direct setup. Also the ReFS block cloning is also being used for Windows Server 2016 features such as VHDX acceleration and Snapshot merging acceleration features.

Another piece of the puzzle, which is aimed at service providers is the ability to get chargeback reports directly from Veeam One

And yeah, 9.5 is coming already in October, when Windows Server 2016 is scheduled to launch.
The different agents are scheduled to be released in December 2016 ( For Windows, Linux in November) Veeam availability console is scheduled to Q1 2017.

Now the final piece of the puzzle, Office365.

When using Office365 it is your responsbility to control the data inside it, Microsoft does not take any hackup of Office365. While you have different features that you can configure inside Office365 to ensure you have versioning and such and retention policies defined in Exchange but if data is deleted, it’s gone for good.

Therefore Veeam is also releasing Veeam Backup for Office365! which will allow for iback and restore individual  single objects within mailboxes (aimed at Exchange Online part of Office365)  This feature is aimed at a Q4 release and will have a direct integration with Office365.

Summary:
So really looking forward to release 9.5 which will come with full support for Windows Server 2016, more support for Azure and Office2016, with greater integration with ReFS and block cloning API and of course the Orchestrator to easier control distaster recovery, support for agents (Already planning to implement Azure AD server with the endpoint using DSC….) and of course enhancements to the backup process itself with processing engine enhancements + full VM restore acceleration tech.