Veeam Backup Free Edition Changelog

What's new in Veeam Backup Free Edition 9.5.0.1536 Update 3

Dec 19, 2017

New features:
Built-in agent management:
Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows and Veeam Agent for Linux can now be deployed and managed directly from the Veeam Backup & Replication console, adding support for physical and cloud workloads protection.
Maintain complete control of data protection for ALL your virtual, physical and cloud workloads by managing both hypervisor-based and agent-based backups natively through the Veeam Backup & Replication console.
Ensure no Windows or Linux computers are left unprotected by centrally deploying Veeam agents with automated host discovery via dynamic protection groups based on Active Directory containers, or CSV files exported from your existing CMDB system.
Protect Microsoft Windows Server Failover Clusters, such as SQL Server failover clusters and SQL Server AlwaysOn Availability Groups, with new agent-based failover cluster backup jobs – and transparently restore guest files and application items from cluster backups.
Insider protection for Veeam Cloud Connect:
Ensure the ability to recover your data following a cyber-attack by having your Veeam Cloud Connect service provider protect your data against insider attacks. Service providers can now enable protection of your backups against accidental or malicious deletion directly from the Veeam Backup & Replication console. These deletions are often executed either by hackers who have breached the tenant’s network perimeter and obtained powerful credentials with a brute force attack (with the intention of deploying ransomware on the production servers), or by disgruntled employees.
Data location tagging:
Ensure data sovereignty compliance required by various regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), by tagging production infrastructure and backup infrastructure objects with locations. Location tags are used to prevent accidental errors when configuring backup and replication jobs or performing out-of-place restores, by issuing a warning when an action may result in a data sovereignty violation and producing audit trails whenever such action is confirmed. Additionally, new Veeam ONE reports use location data to help you prove compliance.
IBM Spectrum Virtualize Integration:
Reduce the impact on production environments and achieve lower recovery time and point objectives through new storage snapshots integration for IBM Storwize, IBM SAN Volume Controller (SVC) and any other IBM Spectrum Virtualize based storage system, such as Lenovo Storage V series or IBM/Cisco VersaStack.
Universal Storage Integration API:
The new storage array integration framework included in Veeam Backup & Replication starting with this update enables select storage partners to build integrations of their primary storage systems with advanced Veeam Backup & Replication functionality that leverages storage snapshots.
Platform support:
Microsoft Azure. Direct Restore to Microsoft Azure functionality has been updated to support 4TB virtual disks, Azure Germany and Azure China.
Microsoft SQL Server 2017 support for application-aware processing on Windows-based virtual machines, including transaction log backup and point-in-time restores; and as a backend configuration database for the Veeam Backup & Replication itself.
Microsoft Windows 10 Fall Creators Update support as guest virtual machines, and for installation of Veeam Backup & Replication and all of its components.
Microsoft Windows Server 1709 support as guest virtual machines, and for installation of Veeam Backup & Replication remote components.
Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V 1709 support as a hypervisor host, including support for virtual hardware version 8.2 virtual machines.
VMware Cloud on Amazon AWS support allows protecting VMs running in the cloud, and migrate or replicate workloads from on-prem vSphere deployment to VMC (and vice versa).
VMware vCloud Director 9.0 compatibility.
Storage support:
Cisco HyperFlex support of deployments with multiple HyperFlex clusters under a single vCenter Server.
DELL EMC Data Domain integration now supports Data Domain systems running DD OS 6.1
HPE 3PAR StoreServ integration has been extended to include snapshot-only backup jobs; ability to retain primary storage snapshots created by backup jobs with a different retention policy; and ability to perform backup from storage snapshots from secondary 3PAR array running in Peer Persistence mode.
Hyperconverged infrastructures (HCI) deployments can now leverage the new option to force the load balancer to use Direct NFS backup proxy located on the same vSphere host with the processed virtual machine, to avoid stressing storage replication network with backup traffic . To enable this functionality, create EnableSameHostDirectNFSMode (DWORD) value under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREVeeamVeeam Backup and Replication registry key on the backup server. The value is used to controls failover behavior when Direct NFS proxies if the proxy on same host is unavailable: 1 allows failover to other Direct NFS proxies, and 2 restricts failover to NBD only.
LTO-8 support for all tape-related functionality.
Backup Copy:
Backup mapping for agent backup files is now supported to enable scenarios such as backup seeding.
Restore from backup copies. When initiating a restore from local user interface, Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows and Veeam Agent for Linux will now provide the ability to pick a restore point stored in the secondary repository, should backup files in the primary repository be missing.
Hyper-V:
Hyper-V 2016 VMs with non-snapshottable disk such as disks connected via in-guest iSCSI initiator can now be processed by backup and replication jobs, with unsupported disks skipped and their content not included in a backup or replica. If you’d rather prefer the job to fail on such VMs (legacy behavior), create HyperVIgnoreNonSnapshottableDisks (DWORD) value under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREVeeamVeeam Backup and Replication registry key on the backup server.
Oracle:
New Oracle 12.2 account types support includes Microsoft Windows Group Managed Service Accounts (gMSA) and Microsoft Windows Virtual Accounts.
VMware:
VMDK resize operation will no longer result in resetting CBT data for all virtual machine disks, but rather for the resized disk only.
Non-encrypted NBD transport is again availble for vSphere 6.5, significantly improving backup and replication performance comparing to previously forced NBDSSL.

New in Veeam Backup Free Edition 9.5.0.1038 Update 2 (Jun 23, 2017)

Platform support:
Cisco HyperFlex Systems (formerly HX-Series/SpringPath) support for Backup from Storage Snapshots functionality.
HPE 3PAR StoreServ 3.3.1 support and improved scalability by migrating some API calls from SSH to RESTful API.
Microsoft Hyper-V BigEndian platform support.
Microsoft Exchange 2016 CU5 support for mailbox item recovery with Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange.
NetApp ONTAP 9.1 support.
Oracle 12.2 support for all Oracle database backup and restore functionality.
Veeam Agent for Linux 1.0 Update 1 (build 1.0.1.364) support, including new 1-Click FLR via Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager.
Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows 2.0 (build 2.0.0.700) support, including application-item recovery support from agent backups.
VMware vCloud Director 8.20 support.
VMware vSAN 6.6 support.
File-level recovery:
Restore to original location. If the original VM cannot be found by moRef identifier (as is the case if it was deleted and then restored from backup), the Multi-OS File Level Recovery wizard will prompt the user to specify target VM manually instead of failing.
Replication:
Failback performance improvements. Failback can now optionally use changed block tracking data to determine the changes between the original VM and replica VM state. This dramatically accelerates the failback performance due removing the need to read the entire original VM disks (“Calculating original signature” operation). For VMware hypervisor, we recommend that this option is not used if the failover event was triggered by a disaster that involved host or storage crash or dirty shutdown, as CBT data may be inconsistent in this Case.
Storage integration:
Optional NFS exports creation. You can now prevent Veeam from automatically creating the required NFS export rules on the NetApp storage by clearing the “Create required NFS export rules automatically” in the New NetApp Storage wizard.
Performance improvements. The performance of Backup from Storage Snapshot with application-aware processing enabled has been noticeably improved.
Tape:
LTO7 path failover support. Added support for LTO7 tape libraries with path failover functionality enabled.
Exclusive drivers support. Added support for exclusive tape library drivers (on top of already supported non-exclusive drivers).
User interface:
VeeamZIP usability improvements. VeeamZIP menu item with the default location will not be shown until a user performs VeeamZIP for the first time, selecting the required destination during this process. After that, said menu item will appear, reflecting the previously selected location. This should prevent users from accidentally overfilling the default C:Backup VeeamZIP location.
ExaGrid preset. Changed the default concurrent tasks value from 1 to 10 per vendor's request.
PowerShell:
Start-VBRZip enhancements. Added NetworkCredentials parameter to Start-VBRZip cmdlet to enable automating backups to file shares.
Backup import enhancements. Added support for importing backups from DELL EMC Data Domain and HPE StoreOnce repositories.
Setup:
Components auto-update. Update setup now offers an option to initiate the upgrade of all remote Veeam component automatically. This covers all Veeam components except Network Extension Appliances (part of Veeam Cloud Connect Replication functionality)
Update performance. The number of concurrently updated remote components have been increased to 10 to reduce large backup environments update time, especially with high latency networks. This value can be further increased by creating MaxConcurrentComponentUpgrades (DWORD) registry value under HKLMSOFTWAREVeeamVeeam Backup and Replication key on the backup server.
Streamlined updates. Installing the update no longer requires to disabling all jobs and stopping Veeam services manually. However, you still have to ensure there’s no running backup or restore jobs before installing the update.
Veeam Cloud & Service Provider PartnersZ:
Update 2 introduces Veeam Backup Remote Access functionality, scalability and reporting enhancements for Veeam Cloud Connect platform, and improved offline usage reporting. For the full list of service provider specific enhancements and bug fixes, please refer to the issue tracking topic in the private VCSP forum. If you are VCSP but don't have access, please apply to Cloud & Service Providers group using Veeam forum's User Control Panel.
This update also resolves the following common support issues:
Networkless restores for files above 10MB should no longer result in corrupted file restored.
Backup infrastructure resource scheduling algorithms have been improved to reduce job initialization delays in large infrastructures.
Shutting down or rebooting the backup server should now correctly stop all jobs.
Repository throttling rules should now correctly apply to Veeam Agent for Windows 2.0 synthetic full backups.
Instant VM Recovery should now be possible for VMs for which the original host is no longer registered with Veeam.
Fixed backup metadata resync issues caused by using storage-based replication or similar means of transferring backup files between Veeam backup repositories registered in the same backup server.
Improved SureBackup performance and domain controller (DC) recoverability testing logic. As a side effect, the recoverability testing for DCs backed up without application-aware processing will always fail (which however represents typical real-life recovery result from such a backup).
Improved Hyper-V 2016 RCT backup performance and off-host backup reliability.
Improved Direct NFS transport mode compatibility with Tintri storage.

New in Veeam Backup Free Edition 9.5.0.823 Update 1 (Apr 5, 2017)

Enterprise scalability enhancements:
The exponential growth of data and provisioned IT services is forcing businesses and enterprises of all sizes to rethink their Availability strategy. Through a host of new enterprise enhancements, Veeam scales efficiently and effectively, regardless of environment size and number of VMs. Backup acceleration technologies double I/O performance and shorten backup windows by up to five times — all while reducing load on primary storage, backup storage and vCenter Servers.
Advanced data fetcher:
improves backup performance for individual virtual disks up to two times on enterprise-class primary storage while significantly reducing the load on primary storage due to the reduced number of I/O operations required to
complete a backup, improving its availability to production workloads. Advanced data fetcher is available for the VMware platform and the following processing modes: Backup from Storage Snapshots, Virtual Appliance (hot add) and Direct NFS.
VMware vSphere infrastructure cache:
Maintains an in-RAM mirror of vSphere infrastructure hierarchy to dramatically accelerate job start up (Building VM list operation) and user interface responsiveness while browsing a virtual infrastructure. This approach removes the load from a vCenter Server, making it more available to perform its core infrastructure management duties, and improves backup success ratio in the environments where jobs would often time out or fail due to an overloaded vCenter Server. The cache is maintained up-to-date with real-time
updates via a subscription to vCenter Server infrastructure change events.
Highly optimized vSphere infrastructure queries:
Help ensure vSphere API queries complete faster and minimize vCenter Server load when full vSphere infrastructure hierarchy retrieval is required. For example, this is helpful after a backup server is rebooted or Veeam Broker Service (the service hosting the vSphere infrastructure cache) is restarted.
Restore acceleration technologies,including custom-tailored logic for raw disk,
deduplicating storage and tape, greatly improve VM restore performance regardless of the restore scenario, including:
Instant VM Recovery has improved performance up to three times depending
on the scenario, with a majority of the improvement observed when recovering
multiple VMs at once from per-VM backup file chains.
Parallel processing for full VM restore restores multiple disks in parallel, similar to the way backup is performed. This technique is automatically used for all disk-based backup repositories except Data Domain deduplicating storage
Data Domain accelerated restores use custom tailored logic during both
backup and restore time to ensure maximum full VM restore performance. A
portion of this logic introduces changes to the way backups are created on Data Domain storage, so a majority of the performance increase is experienced on newly created backups.
Direct restore from tape Now, users can perform a full VM restore directly from tape, without the requirement of staging the necessary VM backup files in a repository first. This improves RTO and eliminates the need of locating a repository with sufficient, free disk space to accommodate all of the backup files required to perform the restore. Performing a restore through a staging repository remains an option for when you need to restore a large number of VMs from the same backup file, in which case a restore through a staging repository may improve recovery times.
Engine enhancements:
Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 also includes a wide range of additional enhancements enabling users to scale for very large environments and maintain efficiency when processing jobs containing thousands of VMs or millions of files.
Major configuration database optimizations allow for queries to complete
faster while simultaneously reducing back-end SQL Server load, significantly
improving user interface responsiveness and job performance. Please note
that due to the fact that a portion of these optimizations leverage advanced
capabilities available only in SQL Server 2008 or later, SQL Server 2005 is no longer supported as the configuration database.
Accelerated metadata processing improves the performance of jobs containing
VMs with a large number of supported applications installed, as well as when
applications require large amounts of metadata to be stored as part of the backup (for example, Microsoft SharePoint server with thousands of sites).
Purpose-built user interface controls improve responsiveness and reduce
the configuration database load on grids with tens of thousands of objects, for
example, when a user clicks on the Backups node of the management tree.
File to Tape performance has improved by up to 50x when processing large amounts of very small files, making it up to 50% faster than leading legacy tape backup solutions on the same workload. The new engine was tested with 20 million files per job, enabling users to efficiently protect unstructured data to tape or VTL targets.
Advanced Resilient File System (ReFS) integration for Windows Server 2016.
The new ReFS 3.1 file system offers greater performance and capacity efficiencies for large-scale datasets, while ensuring backup data resiliency and the protection of business-critical applications through:
Fast clone technologyallowing for the creation and transformation of synthetic
full backup files to happen up to 20x faster for shorter backup windows and a
significantly reduced backup storage load. Backup and restore performance can be further improved with automatic storage tiering provided by a Storage Spaces Direct-based backup repository with an SSD tier
Reduced backup storage consumption with spaceless full backup technology
preventing duplication from occurring, resulting in raw disk space consumption by a Grandfather-Father-Son (GFS) backup archive that rivals deduplicating storage appliances. Further, unlike deduplicating storage, by integrating software dedupe and encryption with advanced ReFS capabilities, these storage savings remain even for encrypted backup files
Ensuring backup archive integrity and addressing silent data corruption (“bit
rot”) by monitoring and proactively reporting data corruption with ReFS data
integrity streams, including automated and seamless healing of corrupted backup file data blocks inline during restore or during periodic scans of the ReFS data scrubber by leveraging Storage Spaces mirror and parity sets.
Advanced ReFS integration requires a Windows Server 2016-based backup repository backed by a local volume or shared folder. A backup repository must be created after upgrading to 9.5, and backup files must be created on the ReFS volume by the backup job, instead of being copied from another repository.All of the enterprise scalability enhancements are available in all three product editions, as well as Veeam Backup Free Edition.
FULL integration with Microsoft 2016 data center technologies
Veeam’s FULL integration with Microsoft 2016 data center technologies modernizes private cloud platforms and enterprise applications through full support for:
Windows Server 2016,enabling users to install Veeam Backup & Replication components and protect guest VMs running on Windows Server 2016 with application-aware processing and guest file system indexing — all without requiring a direct network connection to the processed Windows 10 or Windows Server 2016 VMs, by leveraging new PowerShell Direct capabilities
Microsoft Hyper-V 2016 and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2016 (SCVMM),including:
Support for the new Hyper-V 2016 backup framework that is not reliant on
volume snapshots by software or hardware VSS providers coordinated with guest VSS processing. This dramatically improves the Hyper-V backup success ratio in large and busy environments. Please note that both on-host and off-host backup modes remain supported with the new framework
Support for Hyper-V’s Resilient Change Tracking (RCT) reduces complexity by
eliminating the need to run an additional filter driver in the parent partition for changed block tracking functionality for backups, replicas and restores. Unlike Veeam’s proprietary changed block tracking, RCT is also supported with third-party SMB3 storage
Support for Microsoft Hyper-V hosts installed on Nano Server
in on-host backup mode, including support for Storage Spaces Direct, enabling users to immediately deploy Microsoft’s recommended Hyper-V 2016 architecture, reducing the size of data center footprints
Microsoft enterprise applications. Support for 2016 releases of Microsoft enterprise applications is also included, providing application-aware processing for Microsoft Active Directory, Exchange, SharePoint and SQL Server, as well as application item-level recoveries through the corresponding Veeam Explorers™ for each application, ensuring high-speed recovery through fast RTOs of < 15 minutes.
Direct Restore to Microsoft Azure
Direct Restore to Microsoft Azure delivers cloud restore for backups created by ANY Veeam product, optimizing resource allocation to deliver improved scalability and increased IT efficiency, while minimizing operating costs and limiting capital expenditures. It enables users to take on-premises workloads and restore or migrate them to Azure through an automated P2V or V2V conversion process. Users can:
Quickly restore Windows and Linux-based VMs, physical servers or endpoints to Azure to minimize business disruption
Execute planned workload migrations from on site to the cloud to reduce on-site resource constraints
Easily create an Azure-based environment for development and testing. For example, users can test patches and updates to mitigate risks associated with new application version deployment.
In comparison to the technology preview of the Direct Restore to Microsoft Azure appliance released in March 2016, the following new functionality has been added:
Restore directly from a UI without needing to deploy an Azure appliance, copying backup files to it or managing the process in a separate UI. Now, users can simply right-click any backup and restore it directly to Azure Restore Linux computer backups created by Veeam Backup & Replication and Veeam
Agent for Linux,including automated UEFI to BIOS conversions Perform parallel disk restore for faster restore of computers with multiple disks
The Azure proxy accelerates restores up to 10x by optimizing data transfers to the Azure data center. By leveraging Veeam Cloud Connect technology, data transfers are performed over a single port using encrypted TLS connection, simplifying firewall configurations and removing the need to establish VPN connections to Azure. The Azure proxy VM takes just a few clicks to deploy directly from the Veeam UI, and can be powered off automatically after specific periods of inactivity to reduce Azure consumption costs. Using the Azure proxy is optional
Tighter Azure integration includes the automated installation of Azure Virtual Machine Agent for Windows VMs, the enabling of Windows firewall rules for Remote Desktop and support for the new Azure Resource Manager deployment model
Instant Recovery from ANY backup
Veeam invented Instant VM Recovery. Now, we are introducing Instant Recovery for physical computers! Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 enables users to perform instant recovery of endpoints and physical servers into a Hyper-V VM. This provides the ability to:
Immediately spin up a failed physical server from a backup, providing time to perform troubleshooting and/or acquiring replacement parts Run lost laptops directly from their last backup until a replacement is acquired, providing
users access via an RDP connection from any thin client that supports RDP (e.g., a smartphone, a tablet)
In conjunction with Veeam Cloud Connect, enterprises and service providers can manage complete disaster recovery (DR) of remote offices and tenant locations by spinning up backups delivered to the main data center by Veeam Cloud Connect, as Hyper-V VMs
Instant Recovery is supported from backups created by Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE 1.5, but will work best with Veeam Agent for Windows 2.0 or later due to additional information collected about the computer during backup.
Instant Recovery is available in all product editions, including Veeam Backup Free Edition. Please note that this functionality requires Microsoft Hyper-V. If you do not have a Hyper-V infrastructure, you can simply enable the Hyper-V role on the backup server itself.
Nimble Storage Snapshot integration
Expanding on existing integrations with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), NetApp and Dell EMC, Veeam extends its direct Storage Snapshot support to Nimble Storage users to help reduce the impact on production environments and achieve lower recovery time and point objectives (RTPO™) with:
Backup from Storage Snapshots.
Lower the additional impact from backup activities on
production storage by retrieving VM data from storage snapshots on primary storage and replicated copies on secondary storage
Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots. Recover individual application items, guest files or entire VMs quickly and efficiently from storage snapshots on primary storage and their replicated copies on secondary storage systems — whether they were created by a Veeam job or a native snapshot scheduler
On-Demand Sandbox for Storage Snapshots.
Use storage snapshots on primary and secondary storage systems to create complete isolated copies of production environments in just a few clicks for dev/test and troubleshooting purposes
Nimble Storage Snapshot integration requires Enterprise Plus edition, with the exception of Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots which is available in all product editions, including
Enhanced VMware vCloud Director Support for Service Providers
Maintaining IT efficiency and agility requires a new approach to keeping Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) models Always-On. Simplify management, increase efficiency and improve confidentiality by empowering vCloud Directortenants with a self-service backup and restore portal based on Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager, including:
Native vCloud authentication and integrated access scoping
allows tenants to continue to use their existing vCloud Director credentials for the self-service portal and restricts them from being able to backup and restore only the VMs belonging to their respective organizations. This enhances the tenant experience, as well as reduces costs for the service
provider, as any tenant change, such as disabling a tenant, changing passwords or adding new vApps or VMs, is immediately reflected in the portal
Self-service backup allows tenants to maintain better control over their backups by controlling existing jobs and creating new ones. Job setup is simplified so tenants only need to select VMs to perform backups of, as well as select essential parameters such as guest credentials, retention and notifications. Tenants are blocked from accessing advanced settings, such as repository or backup mode selection, which are managed by service
providers through job templates
Self-service restore allows tenants to perform a wide variety of restore options for VMs that Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager currently provides including application items, guest files, full VM and full vApp restores. These restores can now be easily performed in just a few clicks by tenants themselves, improving RTOs and reducing costs for service providers
Veeam Backup Free Edition
Additional enhancements:
Engine:
Parallel processing of per-VM backups:
Health check and Compact operations will now process each backup file chain in parallel when per-VM backup file chains are used.
Proxy affinity:
This new backup repository setting allows users to specify backup proxies
which are allowed to perform backups to and restores from the chosen repository. This capability is useful in a variety of scenarios including keeping backup traffic local to multiple all-in-one Veeam backup appliances. This functionality is available in Enterprise and Enterprise Plus Editions only.
Retention check after backup job failure:
Jobs will now apply a retention policy even if the backup itself fails. This will allow customers with an overfilled backup repository to lower the retention in the job settings, and apply the new setting so new backups can be created.
However, please note that jobs in forever forward incremental backup are unable to simply delete the oldest backups due to a full backup file merge requirement.
GFS retention enhancement:
To reduce the requirements for archive repository disk space,
the oldest GFS full backup will now be removed before a new GFS full backup file is sealed and a new synthetic full is created.
Backup Copy job performance enhancements
Backup Copy jobs should now initialize much faster and no longer cause load on virtual infrastructures due to obtaining the required information about processed VMs from the configuration database instead of the infrastructure.
Preferred networks for Linux:
Preferred network settings now also apply to managed servers running Linux.
Network throttling for Quick Migration:
Quick Migration operations will now adhere to network consumption throttling rules.
Restore audit data retention:
Restore operations audit events will now adhere to global event retention rules to avoid overfilling the configuration database.
Third party components updated:
A number of third party engine components have
been updated for enhanced stability and security, particularly OpenSSL to address its latest vulnerabilities.
vSphere:
Direct NFS priority over Hot Add:
To prevent undesired VM stun issues from hot adding virtual disks located on an NFS share, Intelligent Load Balancing will not leverage Virtual Appliance (hot add) proxies as long as at least one Direct NFS capable proxy isavailable.
Direct NFS proxy location awareness:
Intelligent Load Balancing now automatically selects the best Direct NFS proxies based on the number of hops to the datastore, providing optimal
proxy selection in distributed environments.
Thick disk type selection:
Users can now choose thick disk type (lazy zeroed or eager zeroed)
when performing a full VM restore or setting up a replication job. Choosing to preserve the source disk type will also distinguish between and preserve the correct thick disk type.
Replica VM count balancing:
When replicating to a cluster, each replica VM is now created on the host with least VMs registered at the time of replica VM creation.
NBD connections limit increase:
The legacy limit for the maximum amount of virtual disks
processed by NBD transport has been increased from 7 to 28 for ESXi 5.0 or later hosts, based on their architectural differences around NFC connections handling.
Hyper-V:
Performance enhancements:
Jobs processing legacy Hyper-V host versions (2012 R2 and earlier) should now initialize up to 2x faster due to the accelerating Building VMs list, CSV enumeration and VM ownership retrieval operations.
VLAN remapping:
Added the ability to map VLANs in virtual networks mapping the rules of
the replication job wizard
Primary storage integrations:
Protocol selection:
For primary storage supporting multiple protocols (FC/iSCSI/NFS), users
can now select the protocols used by Veeam to prevent backup jobs from attempting to connect to storage over undesired interfaces.
Proxy selection:
Users can now select the specific backup proxies to be used for storage
rescan and backup from storage snapshot operations.
HPE StoreOnce:
Increased limits:
The maximum number of supported increments in a backup chain now
depends on the StoreOnce model used for the backup repository, instead of being limited to seven for all StoreOnce models.
Traffic control:
The ability to control Catalyst traffic check summing and compression
settings in the StoreOnce wizard has been added to enable these settings tbe optimized for the network used for backup and copy.
Bandwidth mode control:
The Catalyst bandwidth mode is primarily based on the Catalyst store setting, instead of being forced to high bandwidth mode.
Catalyst over FC enhancements:
The reliability of establishing Catalyst over FC connection to StoreOnce in cases when all available FC connections are occupied has been increased.
Catalyst update:
The StoreOnce Catalyst software integrated with 9.5 has been updated to
the latest version 3.14 and features various performance optimizations.
NetApp:
Data ONTAP 9.0 support:
Added support for NetApp Data ONTAP version 9.0.
Data LIF support:
Backup from Storage Snapshots will now fetch virtual disk data LIF (logical
interface) belonging to the NetApp cluster node hosting the processed virtual disks, as opposed to picking the fastest LIF. This will remove the unnecessary load on the node with the fastest LIF, as well as the cluster network.
SVM Root Volume Protection support:
Added support for the Clustered Data ONTAP 8.3 SVM Root Volume Protection feature.
cale-out Backup Repository:
Temporary expansion:
Enterprise edition users are now allowed to add a fourth extent, even though no more than three extents can be online at the same time, with the fourth remaining in maintenance mode. This will help with upgrading scale-out backup repository capacity by attaching a larger storage unit, followed by evacuation of backups from the smallest one
Application-aware processing:
Oracle on SUSE support:
Added support for application-aware processing and redo log backup for Oracle servers installed on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) versions 11 and 12.
Oracle Data Guard support:
Added support for application-aware processing and redo log backup for Oracle servers using Data Guard.
Veeam Backupfor Microsoft Office 365 support:
Added support for application-aware processing of Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365
File level recovery:
OES 2015 support:
Added support for file-level recovery from 64-bit NSS volumes and AD-enabled NSS volumes on Open Enterprise Server 2015.
Copy to credentials:
A file-recovery attempt to a shared folder requiring credentials will now prompt users for credentials with Multi-OS File Level Recovery.
File level recovery performance:
Increased Windows file-level recovery performance up to 3x depending on the scenario.
SureBackup:
Domain Controller roles:
Added the dedicated Active Directory domain controller roles which instruct SureBackup jobs to perform authoritative or non-authoritative domain controller restore respectively.
Veeam Backup for Office 365:
Added the dedicated role for Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365servers.
Veeam Explorers:
Lazy database load:
All Veeam Explorers will now mount database files to restore from as needed, as opposed to automatically mounting all known databases at start up.
Traffic flow optimization:
Restore traffic no longer flows through the console, but goes directly from repository mount server to the target server.
Improved user interface:
All Veeam Explorers now feature context-sensitive toolbar ribbons.
Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Active Directory
Windows Server 2016 Directory Services support:
Added support for Active Directory object-level recovery from forests running in 2016 functional level (including user and computer account password restore).
Expiring links:
Uniquely, support for expiring links restore, a new feature of Windows Server
2016 Directory Services, includes export to LDF file, functionality that is not available in the native LDIFDE utility.
Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange:
Restore from Purges folder:
Added support for restoring items from the Purges folder
used by Exchange when Litigation Hold or single-item recovery features are enabled. Veeam Explorer will present these items under the Litigation Hold Items and In-Place Hold Items mailbox folders, respectively, in the mailbox folder tree.
Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 support:
Added support for restoring from archive databases (.ADB files) created by Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 – both from local files or by connecting directly to an archive server.
Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SharePoint:
SharePoint 2016 support:
Added support for item-level recovery from Microsoft SharePoint 2016 content databases.
Site restore report:
Added detailed site restore report detailing restore status for each site object.
Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SQL Server:
SQL Server 2016 support:
Added support for database-level, table-level and SQL object-level recovery from Microsoft SQL Server 2016.
Additional table types support:
Added support for restoring SQL objects from the following table types: System-versioned temporal table, memory-optimized table (in-memory OLTP) and file table.
Restore performance enhancements:
Improved database restore performance up to 3x in all SQL Server deployment scenarios, including blob stores.
Veeam Explorer for Oracle:
Dynamic parameters restore:
Added support for restoring dynamic database parameters.
Restore performance enhancements:
Slightly improved database restore times by accelerating specific database management operations.
Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager:
Scalability enhancements:
The Enterprise Manager engine was heavily optimized for very large environments and tested against databases containing one million restore
points. Additionally, reporting performance, web UI responsiveness and new backup server registration times were significantly improved for large environments.
Oracle database restore:
The self-service, application-item level recovery functionality was
expanded with self-service Oracle database restores by delegated database administrators.
Exchange mailbox item restore improvements:
Added CAS server auto discovery and enhanced certificates handling logic.
Improved self-service capabilities:
In light of adding a self-service backup and restore
portal for vCloud Director, the Enterprise Manager web UI was enhanced with new capabilities to perform Quick Backup operations on the VMs tab, as well as delete backup jobs, backup files and erase individual VMs content from multi-VM backup files.
1-Click FLR for agent backups:
Guest file system catalog search and 1-Click File Level Recovery is now supported for backups created by Veeam Agent for Windows 2.0 and Veeam Agent for Linux 1.0.
Concurrent catalog search:
Multiple web UI users are now able to perform guest file system catalog searches concurrently without commonly experiencing timeouts.
Veeam Cloud Connect (Tenant)
Parallel processing:
Tenants can now backup or replicate multiple VMs and disks in parallel,
based on the concurrent task limit set by the service provider, thus improving job performance on fast links. Please note that parallel processing applies to direct transport mode only, as built-in WAN accelerators will still process disks sequentially regardless of this setting.
Replication from backup in a cloud repository:
Tenants can now perform replication from a backup residing in a cloud repository, enabling a new DR option without generating additional network traffic or impacting production VMs.
Security enhancements:
Veeam Cloud Connect service will now attempt to use more secure TLS
1.2 and TLS 1.1 authentication algorithms when establishing a connection to the service provider. In addition, failover to SSL 3.0 has been explicitly disabled for all Veeam Cloud Connect components.
Configuration backup to cloud repository:
Added support for performing configuration backups to a cloud repository, except for those backed by a scale-out repository.
Veeam Cloud Connect (Service Provider):
Per-VM backup file chains support:
Cloud repositories can now be backed by backup repositories with the per-VM backup file chains setting enabled to improve scalability and better support for deduplicating storage appliances.
Scale-out Backup Repository support:
Cloud repositories can now be backed by
scale-out backup repositories to simplify backup storage management and save costs for service providers. The supported process for migrating existing tenant backups from simple repositories to scale-out backup repositories will be provided by Veeam. For more information, please refer to Veeam Cloud & Service Provider Forum
Advanced ReFS integration support:
Cloud repositories backed by backup repositories meeting the requirements for Advanced ReFS Integration fully support the corresponding functionality.
Improved diagnostic logging:
Multiple improvements were made to specific areas of tenant job
logging where it was possible to do so without exposing a tenant’s confidential information.
Tape:
Automatic tape driver cleaning:
Yes, finally! The backup server will now monitor tape drive status events and automatically perform a cleaning as required, as long as the cleaning cartridge is available in the tape library.
Tape job priority:
We have heard you loud and clear, and added an option to delay primary
jobs start up while tape jobs are still processing some of the required backup files, instead of killing the tape jobs immediately.
Waiting for tape notification improvements:
The email report and job Action log message now contain information about the tape device and media pool that lacks free media.
Adjustable GFS media set retention:
Similar to simple media pools, it is now possible to change the retention for previously written tape media within any GFS media set.
Additional media set variable:
Added “month numeric” variable to media set naming variables.
Tape job wizard enhancements:
Now, you can select multiple files to add to a File to Tape job at once, see additional information about the selected media pool in the tape job wizard,
and specify linked backup job wait time in hours (in addition to minutes).
Backup operator permissions:
Veeam Backup Operators user role is now allowed to perform essential tape infrastructure management operations such as inventory, eject, rescan etc.
Other optimizations:
Additional optimizations include multiple, under-the-hood enhancements improving stability and performance of GFS archival, parallel processing, tape encryption, file level recovery and catalog operations.
User interface:
New VeeamZIP retention options:
Additional VeeamZIP backup retention options of three months, six months and one year have been added to existing options for customers using VeeamZIP as a VM archival tool.
Free space threshold for production datastores:
You can now set the percent of free disk space on the production datastore, indicating when jobs should issue a warning or fail completely instead of creating a VM snapshot to prevent the datastore from overfilling with snapshot data. This is an addition to the existing BlockSnapshotThreshold registry
value (default is 2GB), which continues to serve as the last line of defense when the above functionality is disabled, as is the case for upgrading users. The new settings can be found under Options > Notifications.
Proxy selection:
You can now specify the proxy and disk type to use when exporting backed up volume as a virtual disk.
Restricted hours warning:
We will now display a warning if a user attempts to start a job during restricted hours. This is defined in the job’s backup window setting.
Color themes:
For those of you who find Veeam Green to be too acidic, we now provide
three additional color themes featuring neutral colors. The color theme is a per-user setting attaching to a specific backup server, allowing users to color-code backup servers to more easily distinguish between them during Alt-TAB
PowerShell:
More lenient execution policy support:
The Veeam PowerShell extension execution policy requirement has been lowered from RemoteSigned to Bypass.
On-going enhancements:
with new cmdlets added to cover all new 9.5 functionality, as well as multiple enhancements to existing cmdlets based on user feedback.
Enhancements for service providers:
Configuration backup and restore enhancements:
By popular demand, the configuration backup email report now includes backup server name. Additionally, Veeam Cloud Connect server configuration database migration is now fully supported by a configuration restore in
Migration mode.
RESTful API enhancements:
Added support for managing Backup Copy jobs and backup files, expanded existing APIs for file level recovery and job scheduling according to feedback,
and implemented many smaller enhancements.
Trial VMs:
With per-VM rental licenses, the product will now track newly added VMs
separately for the purpose of built-in usage reporting. Such VMs will not be included in the usage reports until the following month.

New in Veeam Backup Free Edition 8.0.0.817 (May 14, 2015)

Backup from Storage Snapshots and Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots – now available for NetApp:
Veeam’s storage snapshot integration technologies have been extended to support NetApp storage. Achieve an unprecedented level of data protection through a combination of NetApp’s low recovery point objective (RPO) capabilities and Veeam’s low recovery time objective (RTO) enablement. NetApp integration supports NFS, FC and iSCSI connectivity, and both 7-mode and cluster-mode deployment options. All Data ONTAP storage is supported, including NetApp FAS, FlexArray (V-Series), Edge VSA and IBM N Series.
Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Active Directory:
New Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Active Directory makes item-level recovery
with Active Directory easier than ever by providing the following simple and
powerful functionality:
Instantly restore individual Active Directory (AD) object attributes, objects and
entire containers
Recover user and computer account passwords to avoid disruptions
Perform 1-click compare between backed up and production Active Directory states on both object and object attribute levels
Easily search for objects and attributes in the backed-up AD; includes plain text- and advanced LDAP filter-based search capabilities
Export selected objects from backed-up AD state into LDIFDE format
Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SQL Server:
Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SQL Server enables you to achieve low RTOs and RPOs with Microsoft SQL Server database protection with the following all-new functionality:
1-click individual SQL database recovery for lowest RTO; no more searching for database files or spending time reattaching them to SQL server using native management tools.
Web-based restore portal for SQL database restores by delegated database administrators
Agentless transaction log backup and replay for no-impact, low RPO protection of your SQL databases.
Back up your databases as often as every five minutes!
Point-in-time SQL database recovery down to individual transactions with the unique transaction logs
viewer to ensure lowest possible RPOs
Full support for SQL AlwaysOn Availability Groups for both backup and restore
Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange:
Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange brings additional functionality, making granular Exchange restores easier and more efficient than ever. New features include:
Web-based restore portal for delegated help desk operators enables secure mailbox items recoveries
without restore operators having access to the content of restored items
Ability to recover hard-deleted items that you thought might have been lost forever
Support for searching of and recovering to Online Archive mailboxes
Restore of Public Folder permissions (in addition to Public Folder contents)
Support for item-level recovery from secondary (passive) DAG node backups
EMC Data Domain Boost:
With EMC Data Domain Boost (DDBoost), you get source-side data deduplication, yielding faster, more efficient backups that enable lower RPOs and lower exposure to data loss. The benefits of combining the Veeam Backup & Replication with EMC Data Domain Boost include:
Up to 50% faster backup performance with advanced source-side deduplication by DDBoost
10x faster in-place synthetic full backup file creation and transformation for dramatically shorter backup windows
Fibre Channel (FC) connectivity enables LAN-free backup to Data Domain
DDOS 5.4 or later and DDBoost license from EMC required.
End-to-end encryption:
With Veeam’s built-in AES 256-bit encryption you can secure your data end to end:
At source (backup file encryption via backup proxy)
In flight (network traffic encryption for replication and quick migration)
At rest (via “at source” encryption, or using tape encryption)
Unique password loss protection enables IT managers to maintain the ability to recover backups even if the passwords set on backups by your IT staff are lost, all without compromising security.
More importantly, because all Veeam technologies are tightly integrated, backup encryption does not impact the data reduction ratios of built-in compression and WAN Acceleration, as is the case when using third-party bandwidth reduction solutions.
Replication enhancements - improve offsite backup and recovery with additional replication enhancements from Veeam, allowing you to:
Reduce the impact on your WAN link with
Built-in WAN Acceleration for replication resulting in up to 50x faster replication over slow links, and up to 20x reduction in bandwidth consumption on fast links
Reduce the impact on primary storage with replication from backup files
and replication from NetApp storage snapshots
Lower failover complexity with new Failover Plans providing built-in orchestration for easy 1-click entire-site failover
Lower RTOs and ensure zero data loss with Planned Failover functionality designed to facilitate data center migrations using replication jobs
Reduce the time difference between replicated states when replicating a group of VMs by processing retention policy at the end of the replication job for all VMs, as opposed to doing this after each replicated VM
Eliminate bandwidth loss on network disconnects with true resume
of data transfer upon network disconnects; available for both standard and WAN-accelerated replication jobs
Veeam Cloud Connect:
Avoid the risk of catastrophic data loss in case of a site disaster through hosted backup repositories with Veeam Cloud Connect. It’s the easy, efficient way to get backups off site to a service provider through:
Hosted offsite backups - Get your backups off site to a cloud repository hosted by the service provider of your choice through a single port over a secure connection protected by SSL authentication and network traffic encryption.
Complete visibility and control - Access hosted backup repository content and perform recoveries directly from a cloud repository—no need to copy backup files locally first!
Modern backup architecture - Leverage Built-in WAN Acceleration, forever incremental backups, Backup Copy jobs, GFS retention and MORE with cloud repositories, just as if they were your local backup repositories.
Veeam Cloud Connect also gives service providers an easy way to host offsite backups for Veeam customers by providing:
Cloud gateways - Virtualize all traffic between the customer and service provider across SSL—no need for VPN; deploy multiple cloud gateways to enable high availability (HA) and automatic load balancing.
Multi-tenant support - Segment a single backup repository into multiple cloud repositories, and manage resource allocations and expiration dates for each tenant.
Service provider licensing - Monthly subscription-based, per-VM licensing with no upfront investment or commitment.
Service provider lookup - Web portal where Veeam customers and resellers can find YOU!
Backup I/O Control:
Backup I/O Control ensures your workload’s availability by reducing the impact of backup and replication jobs on production VMs running on the same storage where backed-up VMs reside by monitoring the production datastore read latency and controlling job I/O to keep the latency within user-defined, acceptable limits. This ensures availability of production workloads during the backup window without unnecessarily sacrificing backup job performance when the datastore load is low (as is often the case with legacy solutions offering static per-datastore task limits).
Backup I/O Control works in conjunction with Automatic Intelligent Load Balancing to ensure no new I/O-intensive tasks (such as virtual disk backup, restore or snapshot removal) are assigned to the same datastore if the datastore’s latency is above a user-defined first latency threshold.
Additionally, Backup I/O Control actively throttles Data Mover I/O for existing tasks if the production datastore’s latency goes above a user-defined second latency threshold (e.g., due to a production VM starting to execute an I/O intensive operation).
To ensure that backups can complete under any circumstances, Backup I/O Control will always allow at least one active task per datastore, and will never throttle any given task to less than 10% of full I/O capacity.
Self-restore portal for application owners:
Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager v8 includes a new, dedicated self-service, file-level restore portal for application owners. The portal will automatically detect what VM the user logs on from, find the given VM backup, and check if the user was a member of a Local Administrators group on the given VM at the time when the backup was executed. If this is the case, the user is immediately provided with the ability to browse, search and restore files and folders from the latest restore point of this VM or select another restore point if necessary.
The self-restore portal simplifies restores for application owners, as they no longer have to guess the VM name of the server from which they need to restore files (and thus increase their restore times). Since delegation is fully automated and leverages the existing Microsoft Windows permissions already in place, the portal also reduces TCO by eliminating the need for portal administrators to constantly tweak the restore delegation settings as new VMs are added to the environment, or new users requiring privileges to be granted for performing file-level restores.
150+ additional enhancements:
As a result of ongoing research and development efforts and in response to customer feedback, Veeam Backup & Replication v8 includes an extensive range of additional features and enhancements, the most significant of which are listed below.
GENERAL:
Forever forward incremental backup mode - This new, default backup mode for primary backup jobs creates forward incremental backups for all the following runs after the initial full backup, which always remains the oldest restore point in a full backup chain. When the retention policy needs to remove the oldest restore point, the job merges the oldest incremental backup into the full backup file, discarding any data replaced in the full backup file by this process. This is identical to how Backup Copy jobs store
the backup files. Because forward incremental backup creation involves mostly sequential write I/O, the forever forward incremental backup mode reduces the time a VM runs off of a snapshot by up to 3x when compared
to the reverse incremental backup mode. This prevents a VM snapshot from growing large and making its commit much faster, thus reducing both backup window and load on production storage.
Quick rollback - When restoring an entire VM, the new quick rollback option can be used to restore only the data blocks known to be changed since the last backup was taken. This option is not selected by default, and should only be enabled in case of application-level issues. This option should not
be used in scenarios with storage corruption or power loss, because CBT data cannot be trusted in such cases, which is why the entire VM restore is highly recommended. However, quick rollback can significantly improve RTOs in disaster scenarios that were not caused by hardware problems.
Certificate-based authentication - Support for certificate-based authentication for Linux servers used as backup repositories, and for the guest OS for application-aware processing and guest file system indexing has been added. Supported SSH keys formats include: OpenSSH RSA, OpenSSH DSA,
OpenSSL PEM, Open SSL PKCS#8, SSH.com and Putty Private Key (PPK).
Native SQL authentication - Native Microsoft SQL Server authentication is now supported for the configuration database. When native authentication is used, Veeam Backup & Replication user interface users are no longer required to have configuration database owner privileges.
Pre-job script - In addition to the existing post-job script, backup and replication jobs can now be configured to run pre-job scripts, for example to stop certain VMs before backup, using a PowerCLI script to ensure cold backup.
Job script enhancements - Both pre- and post-job scripts are now executed as a part of the job, instead of being launched in a separate, unmonitored process. This allows us to reflect script execution results depending on the exit code) right in the job status. The default script execution timeout of 900 sec (15 minutes) can be changed with the PreJobScriptTimeoutSec
DWORD) and PostJobScriptTimeoutSec DWORD) registry values under the
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Veeam\Veeam Backup and Replication key.
Update notification - Veeam Backup & Replication can now optionally notify users about new updates that are available by checking the current version against the Veeam website. This includes updates for Veeam Backup & Replication, as well as critical Microsoft Hyper-V updates and patches. When the backup server does not have an Internet connection, an updated
vbrupdate.vdf definition file can be downloaded and copied to C:\ProgramData\Veeam\ manually, replacing the existing file.
ENGINE:
Preferred networks selection - Enables the selection of preferred networks for multi-homed backup proxy and backup repository servers. This helps to ensure the backup and replication traffic is transferred over dedicated backup networks, without impacting the production network.
Multi-streaming of restores - Veeam Data Movers now leverage multiple TCP/IP streams when performing restores, in addition to backups. This helps to improve performance by more fully leveraging available network bandwidth of high latency links.
Concurrent jobs - The limit of 100 concurrent jobs has been removed to allow running even more jobs at once.
Parallel processing for host discovery - Infrastructure rescan now scans multiple hosts and servers at once, thus dramatically improving operations such as registering large virtual infrastructures.
Infrastructure rescan - The default infrastructure scanning period was changed from 24 hours to four hours to be able to detect any virtual environment or storage changes faster, thus preventing failed jobs.
AUTOMATIC INTELLIGENT LOAD BALANCING:
Job start time priority - The backup infrastructure resource scheduler will now prioritize all jobs according to their start times, and attempt to finish any particular job as soon as possible once it has been started. This means that if you start multiple jobs at once, the scheduler will assign newly appearing processing resources to the job that started earlier, as opposed to assigning them between all running jobs. This approach ensures that the backed-up state of all VMs within the same job remains as close together as possible.
Retry cycle priority - The retry cycle inherits the priority of the job it belongs to, as opposed to getting the same priority as other running jobs.
Periodic job priority - The resource scheduler will now give highest priority to jobs scheduled to run periodically over daily and monthly jobs to ensure required RPOs are being met.
Snapshot removal priority - Pending snapshot removal tasks get highest priority among all other tasks in the event that Backup I/O Control starts restricting task assignment to a certain datastore.
Backup window enforcement - Activities isolated to backup repositories, such as full backup transformation, should no longer be affected by the backup window setting.
Periodic jobs improvements - Scheduled, periodic jobs will now have more predictable start time behavior upon reaching their defined time periods, which have been limited to factors of 24 hours (i.e.,1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 8, 12, and 24).
APPLICATION-AWARE PROCESSING:
Custom pre-freeze and post-thaw scripts - You can now specify custom pre-freeze and post-thaw scripts for both Windows and Linux in the advanced application-aware processing settings to prepare applications requiring custom processing for backup, which completely removes the hurdle of deploying and updating said VMware Tools scripts in vSphere and brings this otherwise missing functionality to Hyper-V.
Copy-only VSS processing - Application-aware processing can now be configured to perform “copy-only” backups, which allows application-onsistent images to be created without touching transaction logs. This can be required if transaction logs are processed with a third-party application.
Microsoft Exchange VSS improvements - If standard VSS processing of a Microsoft Exchange Server times out, the job will retry processing using persistent in-guest VSS snapshot, which should prevent VSS processing timeouts commonly observed with Microsoft Exchange 2010. Persistent snapshots are removed from the production VMs once backups are finished. All VM, file-level and item-level restore options have been enhanced to detect and properly handle restores from Exchange backups created with the help of persistent VSS snapshots.
Oracle VSS improvements - Oracle databases that do not meet the requirements for successful VSS processing are automatically excluded from application-aware processing to avoid job failures.
Guest logging improvements - Improved guest logging significantly reduces disk space consumption in the guest OS. This should prevent situations with guests running out of disk space on the system volume due to too many logs being created
GUEST FILE SYSTEM INDEXING:
Parallel indexing - Guest file system indexing is now performed in parallel with virtual disk data backup, as opposed to holding backups until indexing finishes.
Linux indexing - Support for Linux guest file system indexing has been added. This feature requires that the Linux server has mlocate (which is standard for the vast majority of Linux distributions).
NTFS indexing improvements - NTFS indexing logic has been redesigned for up to 10x better indexing performance on file servers with large amount of files.
ReFS indexing improvements - ReFS indexing logic has been optimized for over 2x better indexing performance.
Indexing from VSS snapshots - The indexing will now be performed from a VSS snapshot to make the catalog more precisely reflect the backed-up state in cases where the guest OS supports Microsoft VSS.
Indexing priority - The indexing process now runs with a lower priority to reduce impact from its CPU consumption on existing applications running on the backed-up VM.
INSTANT FILE-LEVEL RECOVERY:
Overwrite/keep options - When restoring to the original location, users performing restores can now choose whether the original file should be overwritten or renamed and preserved. This functionality is available in both Windows UI and Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager web UI.
Enhanced LVM support - Logical volume names are now fetched from the LVM configuration and displayed to the user, as opposed to showing /dev/mapper device names (dm0...dmN) to help users find the location of the files they need to restore more easily.
Solaris UFS support - Support for Solaris UFS to multi-OS file level-recovery wizard has been added.
Extended ZFS version support - ZFS pools are now supported up to version 5000. Note that ZFS pools from proprietary Oracle Solaris distributions are still not supported due to Oracle licensing limitations.
Improved performance - Windows file-level recovery performance was increased for scenarios in which multiple files are being restored over the network or locally to a backup server. Performance improvements should be especially noticeable when the backup server is protected with antivirus
software with real-time scanning enabled.
Inactive IFLR session shutdown - After 30 minutes of inactivity, an Instant File-Level Recovery IFLR) session will be considered abandoned, and will be automatically closed after displaying the corresponding warning. This will remove the locks from backup files and prevent potential failures of daily backups.
Volume quantity limit removed - The maximum of 20 mounted volumes limit has been removed from the native file-level recovery engine. This engine is leveraged for both file and item recovery, so the change should help with item-level recovery scenarios from application servers with large amount
of volumes hosting application databases.
4K native disk support - File-level recovery is now supported from native 4 KB formatted disk with. This requires switching the IFLR engine to an alternative mounter. To enable one, create the EnableHvVDKDWORD) = 0 registry value under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Veeam\Veeam Backup and Replication key
VMware vSphere:
Snapshot Hunter - Detects and automatically consolidates hidden VM snapshots to prevent production VMs from stopping due to datastores overfilling with snapshot files. To detect hidden snapshots before exiting, and in addition for checking “Consolidation Needed” VM status, the jobs will physically scan datastores for snapshot files belonging to snapshots not registered in vSphere. If hidden snapshots are found, the job will attempt to automatically consolidate them by following the procedure described in Mware support KB article KB1002310. If the job fails to remove hidden snapshots due to snapshot files being locked, the job will log an informational event and exit, however a background system process will attempt to perform consolidation three more times every four hours in the hope that file locks will be removed. If these attempts fail too, Snapshot Hunter will stop trying, and a warning email will be sent to the global notification recipients urging them to take manual action.
Direct SAN restore - This enables thick virtual disk restore directly through the SAN fabric for faster performance and no impact on the production network. Using thick disks is common among users who choose to do thin-provisioning on a storage level. This functionality is explicitly disabled for thin disks, because it impacts vCenter Server and does not provide acceptable performance due to vSphere storage architecture. We recommend using hot add for fast restore of VMs with thin disks.
Hot add improvements - Backup proxies can now process multiple virtual disks of the same VM in parallel using hot add. This includes hot add backup, restore and replication (on both source and target proxy). Additionally, performance of said operations can see an increase of up to a few times depending on the environment.
Tag-based job population - Jobs can now be populated using VM tags as the dynamic selection scope. This provides incredible flexibility around job management. Consider using Veeam Business View (part of Veeam Availability Suite v8) to automate the assignment of tags to newly created VMs in your environment based on pre-defined rules.
Tag backup and restore - VM tags are now backed up and restored when restoring VMs back to the original location.
Datastore cluster-based job population - Jobs can now be populated using Datastore clusters as the dynamic VM selection scope. This job population method gives greater predictability of job size compared to other methods.
Datastore cluster support - Datastore clusters can now be selected as the target for restore or replication. The actual VM placement will be determined by the restore or replication job automatically by querying DRS recommendations at VM creation time
Append to VM attribute - Instead of overwriting the existing contents of a selected VM attribute (such as VM Notes) with the last backup status string, last VM backup information can now be optionally appended to the current attribute’s value. (Shout out to Michael White for this one – we appreciate
your continuous support!)
Support for vSphere Flash Read Cache - Restore jobs and replication jobs will now correctly configure VMs when restoring or replicating to target hosts without SSD storage installed
Building VMs list optimization - The performance of the Building VMs list job operation was enhanced by optimizing virtual infrastructure data queries
Snapshot release improvements - VM snapshot interaction logic in corner cases (such as job hangs and crashes) has been reworked to reduce the chance of snapshot files being locked by data movers that may still be running, thus preventing potential snapshot removal issues
Backup server connectivity - The backup server no longer requires connection to source and target ESX(i) host on port 902, as the operation requiring this connection is now performed by the source and target backup proxies respectively. This requirement was causing issues in environments with high
network isolation, such as in service provider environments.
Microsoft Hyper-V:
Shared VHDX support - Backup jobs can now back up shared VHDX virtual disks in a crash-consistent state. The full VM restore wizard has also been enhanced to account for shared VHDX restore specifics.
Consistency groups - Jobs can now process more than one VM from the volume snapshot at a time instead of creating a separate volume snapshot for each processed VM. For reliability reasons caused by Hyper-V backup architecture, the maximum amount of VMs is limited to four per snapshot by default in case of software VSS, and eight per snapshot in case of hardware VSS, but can be increased on fast primary storage with the MaxVmCountOnHvSoftSnapshot DWORD) and MaxVmCountOnHvHardSnapshot DWORD) registry values under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Veeam\Veeam\Backup and Replication key.
Volume-based job population - Jobs can now be populated using volumes as dynamic VM selection scope.
Checkpoint-based replicas - Replica restore points are now stored as VM checkpoints for faster recovery to any replica restore point, better reliability and the ability to power on any required restore point manually if required.
VLAN ID support - SureBackup network mapping rules for production networks and multi-OS file-level recovery helper appliance configurations now support pointing to specific VLANs in a multi-VLAN environment.
VSS failover control - Failover from hardware-based VSS snapshots to software-based VSS snapshots has been made optional in order to prevent undesired usage of software-based VSS snapshots when a hardware-based snapshot fails.
Hyper-V resource pool support - Hyper-V resource pool settings are now preserved when restoring VM backups to their original location, and are automatically removed when restoring a VM to a different location.
Smart Paging File support - The Smart Paging File location can now be customized in replication jobs to control the file’s placement on the target host, thus preventing potential issues upon failover.
CBT driver certification - The proprietary changed block tracking (CBT ) driver has passed Microsoft Windows Hardware Certification testing for Windows Server 2012 R2.
CBT driver improvements - Optimizations to further reduce the CBT driver’s CPU consumption have been added.
Bitlocker support - Support for CBT on CSV volumes encrypted with Bitlocker has been added.
Differencing VHDX improvements - Backup and replication performance has been improved significantly for differencing virtual disks, especially for VMs running on Windows Server 2012 R2.
BUILT-IN WAN ACCELERATION:
Performance improvements - Data processing performance has been improved up to 3x compared to v7 with the latest patch. The enhanced data processing engine includes additional optimizations specifically aimed to better leverage faster CPUs and SSD cache.
Cache optimizations - The WAN accelerator cache will now consume the entire allocated space immediately upon creation to prevent fragmentation and avoid unexpected lack of disk space issues at a later time as the cache grows.
Cache management - The WAN accelerator cache population can now be triggered without having to run the job by selecting one or more backup repositories to crawl for OS data. Cache reset was also made available directly in the user interface for troubleshooting purposes.
ROTATED DRIVES:
Rotated drives functionality can now be enabled with a checkbox in the advanced backup repository settings, as opposed to being controlled by registry settings (which are still supported for upgrade compatibility reasons). Additionally, when a backup repository backed by rotated drives is running on the Windows server, the following additional functionality is supported:
Intelligent cleanup - When a rotated drive that was used during previous cycles is attached, the backup job will only delete backup files if they are no longer under retention policy. This prevents unwanted deletion of backup files still under retention due to accidentally attaching an incorrect rotated drive.
Drive letter tracking - Backup jobs will now track rotated drives, and will follow them without failing even when the drive letter changes. Drive letters may change when adding new volumes or adding additional storage hardware, such as CD-ROM.
TAPE:
Remote tape server - This enables leveraging tape libraries and standalone drives connected to any Windows server in the environment, as opposed to the requirement of attaching them directly to the backup server. Adding multiple tape devices connected to different servers is supported.
Extended backup modes support - Backup to Tape jobs now support backup jobs using backup modes without periodic full backups as the source. For such jobs, on the full backup day, Backup to Tape jobs will synthesize the full backup file on the fly, using data from source backup files on disk. The synthesized full backup file will be compatible with the following incremental backup files created by the primary backup job.
Backup Copy job support - Backup to Tape can now leverage Backup Copy jobs as the source.
Performance enhancements - The performance of File to Tape backup has been increased up to 50x when backing up workloads consisting of a large number of small files. Performance of backing up large files should see minor improvement as well.
Media Vault - Enables tracking the physical tape medium location, such as storage shelves or offsite locations. Tape mediums are automatically assigned to the specified vault as they go offline (removed from tape library). Different media vaults can be specified for each media pull.
Software overwrite protection - Enables the ability to protect certain tape mediums from being overwritten according to the data retention policy. This functionality can be useful in certain situations, such as legal hold.
Media pool retention - Changing the retention policy on existing media pools is now supported.
Job scripts - File to Tape and Backup to Tape jobs now allow configuring pre- and post-job scripts to perform auxiliary actions with the tape library.
Granular email notification - File to Tape and Backup to Tape jobs now allow setting up per-job email notification recipients and settings.
Catalog auto-refresh - The tape catalog is now subscribed to change notification from all jobs, and performs automatic granular refresh as required (e.g., when a new tape backup is created).
Tape library rename - Tape libraries and tape drives can now be renamed in the user interface, in cases when the native name supplied by the driver is unreadable.
Last chain backup - When creating a new Backup to Tape job that uses an existing backup job as the source, and that has multiple full backup chains already created, users can choose whether all backup files, or only the latest full backup chain files, should be copied to tape.
Job timeouts - Tape backup and restore jobs will now time out and fail after 72 hours of waiting for user interaction (e.g., inserting tape), as opposed to waiting for user action forever and not reporting any issues.
Amazon Storage Gateway support - Added support for AWS Storage Gateway in virtual tape library VTL) configuration for seamless tape-like backup Experience to Amazon S3 and Amazon Glacier - Requires AWS Storage Gateway version 23-Oct-2014 or later and using Sony TSL-A500C Autoloader
medium changer emulation
PRIMARY STORAGE INTEGRATION:
HP 3PAR StoreServ iSCSI support - Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots and Backup from Storage Snapshots are now supported for HP 3PAR StoreServ with iSCSI connectivity.
Processing failover - Jobs using Backup from Storage Snapshots can now be set to automatically fail over to standard vStorage API-based backup, should primary storage integration fail. The failover is disabled by default to prevent unexpected impact on primary storage when Backup from Storage Snapshots suddenly becomes impossible, but it can be enabled manually if desired.
BACKUP STORAGE INTEGRATION:
In addition to EMC Data Domain integration described earlier, v8 integrates with the following deduplicating storage:
ExaGrid - Joint development between Veeam and ExaGrid R&D enables the Veeam Data Movers to run directly on the ExaGrid appliance, resulting in improved backup performance due to enabling local access to backup files. Note that integration must be configured in the ExaGrid management UI before registering ExaGrid appliance with Veeam. Additionally, backup jobs will now automatically change the default settings to one recommended by ExaGrid when pointed at the ExaGrid-backed repository.
HP StoreOnce - Backup jobs will now automatically change the default settings to those recommended by HP when pointed at a StoreOnce-backed repository. The integration does NOT include HP Catalyst support. (We are working on it though!)
AD-HOC BACKUPS:
Quick Backup - Enables fast, incremental backups of one or more selected VMs. Quick Backup looks up the job to which the selected VM belongs, and runs incremental backup for the selected VM only. If multiple jobs exist for the same VM, the one with most recent restore point will be used to ensure
smallest incremental backup and fastest backup. Restore points produced by Quick Backup do not affect overall job retention; they are “glued” to the previous restore point produced by a standard job run, and are removed during regular job retention processing.
VeeamZIP auto retention - VeeamZIP now includes optional retention on produced backup files. When enabled, created backup files will be utomatically deleted after the specified amount of time. vSphere Web Client integration. Both Quick Backup and VeeamZIP are now available directly from
the vSphere Web Client, placing excellent alternatives to classic VM napshots at your fingertips.
BACKUP COPY JOBS:
Backup Copy suspend - A Backup Copy job is now suspended when source backup files are locked by another job or process, such as a restore or full backup file transformation, instead of just failing
Backup mapping - In addition to full backup, you can now map Backup Copy jobs to any existing backup chain, as long as it does not contain reversed incremental (VRB) files. This dramatically simplifies Backup Copy seeding, and makes it possible to repoint Backup Copy jobs after moving backup files to another storage target.
Backup Copy as a source - Backup Copy can now use backups produced by another Backup Copy job as a source. While the Backup Copy job itself cannot be the source due to its continuously running nature with no stop event, you can point the “child” Backup Copy to a backup repository used by the parent” Backup Copy job to store backups in, to achieve the desired result.
Backup repository throttling - Backup Copy jobs now respect the I/O throttling rule on the source backup repository. For example, if more than one Backup Copy job reads from repository with I/O throttling enabled, all Backup Copy jobs will split the allowed bandwidth equally.
Forward lookup - Backup Copy jobs can now be configured to wait for the new restore point to be created by a primary backup job, instead of using the latest non-copied restore point already available. To enable the new behavior, create the BackupCopyLookForwardDWORD) = 1 registry value under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Veeam\Veeam Backup and Replication key.
CONFIGURATION BACKUP:
Cross-version configuration restore - Configuration restore now supports restore of configuration backups created by any product version supported for upgrade to the given product version. In case of v8, this means support of configuration backups created by versions 6.5, 7.0 and 8.0.
Encryption - Configuration backups can now be encrypted. When encryption is enabled, configuration backup will include all credentials, which in turn accelerates the configuration recovery process.
Tape catalog backup - Configuration backup now catalogs all tapes written by File to Tape and Backup to Tape jobs. This significantly reduces backup server recovery times, as re-cataloging all tapes can take significant time to complete.
Session history backup - Configuration backup now includes all job session history, including restore operator activity.
New restore wizard - Configuration restore has been streamlined with the new restore wizard, allowing users to choose between two distinct restore scenarios: regular configuration restore and backup server migration.
Flexible restore options - Configuration restore now supports restoring only certain parts of product configurations (i.e., only backup infrastructure, only jobs configurations and restore points catalog or only session history).
Flexible scheduling options - Configuration backup now provides more flexible scheduling options, similar to what is available for regular jobs.
Additional notification options - Configuration backup jobs now provide SNMP and email notifications to global notification recipients.
SUREBACKUP:
Enhanced SQL Server script - The pre-defined Microsoft SQL Server script has been replaced with a more advanced script that checks each database’s availability, instead of just SQL Server service availability
BIOS UUID removal - SureBackup jobs can now automatically remove BIOS UUID from VMX file of tested VMs to prevent problems with VMware SRM and similar tools that track VMs using this parameter. To enable UUID removal, create the RemoveBiosUuid DWORD) = 1 registry value under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Veeam\Veeam Backup and Replication\SureBackup key.
USER INTERFACE:
Guest account testing - Guest accounts used for application-aware processing and guest file system indexing can now be automatically tested on the corresponding job wizard step. Testing is performed building the list of all VMs added to the job, and attempting to connect to each guest using the
provided guest credentials settings (including any overrides in the advanced guest credentials settings dialog).
Job-level email notifications - Email notification settings can now be configured on the job level. Job-level notification can include a custom set of recipients and be triggered by different status than global notifications.
Save as Default - The advanced job settings pages now provide the ability to save the current settings as defaults to simplify the configuration of future jobs. Note that clicking Save as Default saves the settings of the currently displayed dialog page only.
VM snapshot removal progress - The VM snapshot removal progress percentage is now included in the job statistics to provide users with a better idea of how much longer the process will take.
Password peeker - Password peeker control is now included everywhere where passwords need to be supplied to save users from typing the same password twice for input verification purposes.
Minute-based periodic job start time - Start times within an hour can now be set for minute-based periodic jobs in addition to hourly jobs.
Monthly job schedule improvement - Monthly jobs can now be configured to run on a particular day of the month (e.g., 1st or 31st), in addition to the first or last day of the week of a month.
Job abort reasons - The exact reason for job stopping is now displayed in the job’s session when it is stopped by a user (username is included), another job (name of the job is included) or when it runs over the forced backup window.
Job size calculation improvements - The total VM size now takes into account excluded disk sizes. (We are sorry it took us a while to fix this one!)
TCP/IP thread control - The number of concurrent TCP/IP connections can now be set in the UI on the Network Traffic Rules dialog, as opposed to being a registry value. Increasing the value helps to saturate high latency links, but setting it too high may increase backup proxy CPU usage significantly
as well as affect reliability due to intermediary network equipment isbehaving under heavy load.
Session type display - Session window caption and session list views now show the job session type i.e., full, active full, synthetic full, incremental or reversed incremental).
Disk exclusion improvements - IDE and SATA disks exclusions can now be configured.
Multi-select support - Multi-select is now supported in the advanced application-aware processing and Guest OS Credentials dialogs.
Guest OS details - Guest OS details are now displayed in the Virtual Machines view as an additional column.
Capacity details - Backup repository capacity is now displayed in the Backup Repositories view.
Session report sort order - By popular demand, the sort order for the multiple jobs session report was changed to display the latest session at the top.
Hide unneeded tabs - The ability to hide unneeded tabs in the management tree has been added. For example, you can now hide the Storage Infrastructure and Tape Infrastructure tabs completely if you don’t have supported primary storage and don’t use tape.
New repository type - The backup repository wizard now allows adding backup repositories backed by deduplicating storage through the corresponding designated option. This option lets you can choose between deduplication appliances featuring appliance-specific integration with Veeam Backup
Replication, as described earlier.
Backup Copy jobs with an empty source - You can now create Backup Copy jobs with an empty source to be used as the secondary destination job later when configuring primary backup jobs. This helps to streamlines job configuration in large environments.
Hide splash screen - The ability to hide the splash screen has been added based on requests from terminal users experiencing color display issues as well as users wishing to hide name and email address information of the product’s licensee. To hide the splash screen, create the ShowSplashScreen DWORD) = 0 registry value under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Veeam\Veeam Backup and Replication key.
VEEAM BACKUP ENTERPRISE MANAGER WEB UI:
1-Click Linux file restore - Enables 1-Click file restores from Linux guests. Just like with Windows guests, this functionality requires guest file system indexing to be enabled in the backup job settings.
Failover initiation - Enables VM failover from the web UI using Failover Plans. Delegated users can only initiate failover if they have full VM restore permission for all VMs included in the Failover Plan they choose.
Self-dismissing full VM restore warning - Initiating full VM restore will first show the warning explaining that the original VM will be deleted. The warning will dismiss itself and the full VM restore will proceed if the user provides no input within 20 seconds, so as to not impact any existing web UI integration logic.
Backup to Tape jobs display - Backup to Tape jobs can now be monitored with the Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager web UI.
Job disable - Disabling jobs is now supported with the Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager web UI.
New design - The Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager web UI has been refreshed to have a more modern look. (We hope you like it!)
POWERSHELL API:
Multi-OS IFLR - By popular demand, multi-OS IFLR can now be managed through the newly added PowerShell cmdlet.
Improved cmdlet architecture - All-new v8 cmdlets, as well as some existing cmdlets, have been implemented using the new architecture to allow access to certain internal objects without “dirty hacks.” This should help to ensure compatibility of newly developed scripts referring to internal objects with future Veeam Backup & Replication versions.
RESTFUL API:
Veeam Cloud Connect support - RESTful API has been extended with the ability to manage Veeam Cloud Connect infrastructure and tenants.
Multiple enhancements - We’ve added many improvements and enhancements based on feedback from real-world implementations. (Special thanks go to iland web portal developers.)
SETUP:
Streamlined setup - The setup wizard has been streamlined to enable the installation of Veeam Backup Replication in default configuration with fewer clicks. This includes support for running system services under LOCAL YSTEM (new v8 installations only). Setup will now also automatically detect and use the volume with most free disk space for the default backup repository and guest file system catalog location, as opposed to defaulting to the C: drive.
Automatic upgrade - The new VBR_AUTO_UPGRADE="YES" unattended setup option has been added. When enabled, the setup wizard initiates all Veeam components to upgrade automatically and make truly unattended upgrade a possibility for environments with dozens of backup servers.
SQL Server 2012 Express - Veeam Backup & Replication v8 ships with Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Express Edition as the default local database option. Remote SQL Server databases and other SQL Server versions are still supported as before.
TOOLS AND UTILITIES;
Configuration database management wizard - The new wizard has been added to allow users to easily update database connection settings (i.e., database name, authentication type, account or password).
Backup Validator enhancements - To simplify scripting, Veeam Backup Validator no longer requires verified backup files to be imported into the backup server and can be pointed at standalone backup files (e.g., VBM, VLB, VBK+VBIs chain, VBK+VRBs chain). Encrypted backups are also supported, but require backup passwords to be present in the Password Manager of the corresponding backup server. Additionally, Veeam Backup Validator can now create nicely formatted HTML reports at the specified
location that contain backup verification results and details.

New in Veeam Backup Free Edition 7.0.0.690 (Aug 19, 2013)

2 disruptive innovations:
At Veeam, we take things like WAN acceleration, deduplication, replication, and
Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft SharePoint recovery that many consider add-ons
or standalone products, and we deliver them as integrated features. We remove
limitations other vendors have accepted, like unrecoverable backups, long restore
times, and backup and recovery agents. We do all this to eliminate barriers and
offer technology that is powerful, easy-to-use and affordable.
Built-in WAN Acceleration:
Offsite storage of backups is a critical component of a good data protection strategy,
and in v7, Veeam makes offsite storage easy with Built-in WAN Acceleration. Caching,
variable block length data fingerprinting and TCP/IP protocol optimizations result in
up to 50 times faster transfers of Veeam backups across the WAN while eliminating
the need for additional backup jobs, copy scripts and capabilities like storage-based
replication. Best of all, there are no VM- or host-based agents to install and no special
network setup required.
High performance Backup from Storage Snapshots:
Continuing what we started with the introduction of Veeam Explorer for Storage
Snapshots in version 6.5, Veeam Backup & Replication v7 takes advantage of SAN
snapshots again to offer new capabilities for powerful data protection. Exclusive
innovations, including direct VMFS access and the ability to leverage VMware
Changed Block Tracking, enable instant VMware snapshot commit and let you
create backups and replicas from storage snapshots as often as you like and
whenever you like. The result is dramatically improved RPOs for near-CDP that
doesn’t impact your production environment or running VMs.
This VMware-only feature currently supports HP StoreVirtual VSA, HP StoreVirtual
and HP StoreServ storage product lines.
Native tape support:
Many organizations have invested in tape and are subject to policies requiring tape. Veeam Backup & Replication v7 offers you an easy way to copy files and backups on tape, with support for virtual tape libraries (VTLs), tape libraries and standalone drives. Files, VMs and restore points are tracked on tape, enabling you to easily locate items and making restores easy.
Virtual Lab for replicas:
Reduce risk and put your replicas to work with Virtual Lab for replicas. With new SureReplica, you can automatically verify every restore point in every replica. You can also turn your standby replicas and DR infrastructure into valuable resources for item-level recovery with U-AIR (Universal Application-Item Recovery) and isolated environments for testing, training and troubleshooting with On-Demand Sandbox.
Enhanced backup and recovery for vCloud Director:
Support for vCloud Director (vCD) goes deep with integrated visibility of the vCD infrastructure in the backup console and backups that include the metadata and attributes associated with vApps and VMs. Recovery enables restore of vApps and VMs directly back to vCD, and even includes support for fast provisioning.
vSphere Web Client plug-in:
Monitor your backup infrastructure directly from the vSphere Web Client, VMware’s next-generation administrative interface for vSphere. The plug-in delivers at-a-glance and detailed views of job status and backup resources, alerts you of potential backup issues, and also simplifies capacity planning and identification of unprotected VMs.
Virtual Lab for Hyper-V:
Veeam Backup & Replication v7 brings SureBackup®, U-AIR and On-Demand Sandbox to Hyper-V. SureBackup eliminates risk by automatically verifying the recoverability of your backups, while U-AIR enables quick, agentless recovery of objects from any virtualized application and On-Demand Sandbox creates isolated environments for testing, troubleshooting and training.
Enhanced 1-Click Restore with self-service recovery:
1-Click Restore in the Enterprise Manager web UI now offers the ability to restore entire VMs, and powerful new delegation options let you safely put restore tasks in the hands of business users. This results in faster recovery times and decreased burden on IT staff.
Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SharePoint:
Offering instant visibility, advanced search capabilities and quick recovery of individual items in SharePoint databases, Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SharePoint saves you time and effort. With built-in e-discovery and agentless recovery, you now have an affordable tool for browsing, searching, and selectively recovering SharePoint items from Veeam backups and replicas.
75+ additional enhancements:
As a result of ongoing research and development effort and in response to customer feedback, v7 includes an extensive range of additional features and enhancements, the most significant of which are listed below.
Backup Copy jobs:
Veeam Backup & Replication v7 gives you the ability to efficiently create copies of backups in local and remote backup repositories, making it easy for you to satisfy the recommended best practice of keeping multiple copies of backups on different media. Backup Copy jobs also facilitate implementation of a cost-effective, tiered backup storage strategy.
Backup Copy jobs can be set up for selected VMs from one or more Veeam backups, and each job can beconfigured with its own independent retention policy. Additional optional capabilities include:
Grandfather-father-son (GFS) policy:
This data retention feature helps you meet data archival
requirements by copying and storing full VM backups for specified intervals of time.
Automated backup health check and remediation:
Backup files are periodically scanned to identify storage issues, such as bit rot. Automatic healing fixes corrupt data blocks by retrieving correct data from the source backup file, increasing the reliability of forever-incremental backup copies and removing the need for periodic full backups.
Backup file compaction:
Decrease the size of your backup files by automatically recreating them based on current data, which lets you remove the data associated with deleted VMs without having to perform an active full backup. This prevents unnecessary growth over time of your full backup files as VMs are added to and removed from jobs.
Engine:
Parallel processing of multiple VMs:
Enables better utilization and saturation of your storage infrastructure, eliminates dead time between backups and improves overall backup performance.
Parallel processing of virtual disks within VMs:
Significantly improves backup performance for VMs with multiple large disks and reduces the amount of time a VM runs off its snapshot, thus helping to reduce snapshot commit times.
Resume on disconnect:
Data movers are now capable of transparently resuming communication after a network connection drops completely for a short period of time. This capability dramatically improves the reliability of remote backup and replication.
Hardware-accelerated compression:
A new default compression level with a proprietary algorithm implementation leverages advanced CPU instruction sets (SSE extensions). This reduces backup proxy CPU usage up to 10 times when compared to the previous default compression level.
64-bit data movers:
Backup repositories can now support appreciably larger backups. Please note versions of Windows prior to Microsoft Windows 2012 have a 16TB limit for maximum NTFS file size. This limit roughly equates to a maximum of 25TB of source data per backup job.
Backup repository overload protection:
When a backup repository’s storage is overloaded with regard to I/O capacity, new tasks are not assigned to that backup repository even if task slots are available.
Reduced memory consumption:
Memory consumption optimization allows 32-bit data movers to support larger backups.
Enhanced I/O pattern for data writes:
Decreased fragmentation within backups files results in improved backup and restore performance, as well as reduced degradation from full backup file transformations over time.
Automatic termination of deduplication:
When full backup files significantly exceed the maximum size recommended by Veeam Backup & Replication, deduplication is automatically disabled for those specific backup files. This measure is intended to increase the reliability of deployments that perhaps
were not carefully planned or are not optimally configured.
Graceful job stop:
Attempt to cleanly shut down all jobs when the Veeam Backup & Replication service is stopped (either manually or as a result of a computer shutdown).
Decreased disruption from host activity:
Activities such as upgrading or reattaching hypervisor hosts are now less disruptive to Veeam Backup & Replication jobs.
VMware vSphere:
Intelligent disk-level load balancing:
Virtual disks are now assigned to the most suitable backup proxy, rather than assigning all disks for a given VM to the same backup proxy.
Transparent backup of vCenter Server VM:
The vCenter Server VM can now be backed up without having to resort to workarounds, such as adding the vCenter Server’s host by IP address and then
configuring a separate job for it.
Concurrent snapshots commit operations:
The maximum number of concurrent operations is now automatically limited to a preconfigured value (per standalone host or cluster). This reduces the impact of snapshot commits on your production environment. Maximum values are configured via updates to corresponding registry values.
Replica resume:
Rather than replicating restore point data for all virtual disks again, the retry cycle for
a replication job now reuses restore point data for virtual disks that were fully replicated to the replica VM before the job interruption occurred.
Changed Block Tracking:
Changed Block Tracking can now be enabled for VMs that already have snapshots.
Enumerated infrastructure objects:
Performance is improved when enumerating infrastructure objects in large vSphere deployments.
VeeamZIP performance:
VeeamZIP performance is improved significantly for VMs with virtual disks containing large amounts of empty space.
Microsoft Hyper-V:
Improved intelligent load-balancing:
When using a VSS Software Provider and CSV 2.0 (Microsoft Windows Server 2012 or later), intelligent load balancing selects the backup proxy based on the CSV owner, resulting in significantly improved backup performance.
Clustered disks:
Volumes residing on clustered disks are supported by changed block tracking.
Instant File-Level Recovery for other file systems:
Wizard-driven file-level recovery for 15 file systems is now available for Hyper-V backups.
Maximum concurrent snapshots per volume:
This setting can now be configured separately in the Hyper-V host properties for each volume. Caution should be exercised because higher values may introduce intermittent backup failures due to Microsoft VSS behavior peculiarities.
Instant VM recovery initialization:
Instant VM Recovery is now up to 3 times quicker due to a faster disk preallocation process.
ODX-enabled storage:
ODX-enabled storage is now fully supported, and ODX is no longer disabled on hosts after installing Veeam Backup & Replication Hyper-V integration components.
Saved state avoidance:
For VSS-aware operating systems, VSS processing is now retried after timeout when Hyper-V Integration Tools report that a VM can be processed only via saved state. This
occasionally happens on busy systems, and the retry significantly reduces the likelihood that backup activities will suspend the VM.
Hyper-V Integration Tools version monitoring:
Jobs now detect and log an information event when a VM’s Hyper-V Integration Tools are out of date.
Updating Veeam Backup & Replication Hyper-V integration components:
A reboot of the Hyper-V host is no longer required after updating or patching Hyper-V integration components.
Windows file-level recovery:
Length restriction removed for restore file path:
The restore file path is no longer limited to 240 characters.
Mount point drive preservation:
The drive letter for mount points is now preserved by the Veeam Backup Browser. This is particularly helpful when users running Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange want to access Exchange mailbox databases stored on mount points.
Faster performance when restoring many small files:
Restores are now up to 50 times faster for network-less restore modes.
File-level recovery UI is no longer modal:
You may now access other Veeam Backup & Replication interfaces while concurrently performing file-level recovery operations.
Other OS file-level recovery:
Faster performance when restoring many small files:
Restores are now up to 50 times faster for oth network-based and network-less restore modes.
NSS (Novell Storage Services):
File-level recovery for NSS is now supported from VMware backups.
Veam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange:
Mcrosoft Exchange 2013:
Support for Microsoft Exchange 2013 is now available.
Rstore to original location:
Redesigned restores to original location are now faster and more reliable.
Restore to Office 365:
Experimental support is available for restoring mailbox items to Microsoft Office
365.
Backup file validation:
To detect storage-level issues, such as bit rot, a new option is available for alidating all data blocks belonging to the backup files with restore points being tested by SureBackup.
Virtual Lab internet access configuration:
The Virtual Lab configuration settings for internet access are now available directly within the Virtual Lab wizard, removing the need to update registry values.
Windows UI:
Credentials Manager:
All accounts used throughout Veeam Backup & Replication can be managed
through one central dialog, allowing account passwords to be easily updated when they change.
1-Click job cloning:
Jobs can be cloned with a single click. New jobs are initially disabled, giving you the flexibility to activate them when you are ready.
Enhanced job grid view:
Real-time statistics are integrated into the job grid view for quicker access to particular job details.
Read and transferred graphs:
New graphs have been added to views of real-time statistics, and by simply clicking on the graphs, you can switch between views of the previous five minutes and the entire session.
VM console:
You can now open the VM console of VMs started by Instant VM Recovery directly from
the Veeam Backup & Replication UI.
Add to job enhancements:
In addition to being available for VMs, the “Add to job” shortcut is now available for all objects in an infrastructure tree, as well as for files and folders being added to File Copy
jobs.
Deduplication and compression ratio:
The backup properties UI now expresses the ratios in magnitude (i.e. “times”) instead of potentially confusing percent values.
Additional license information:
The total count of protected VMs is displayed in the license information dialog, enabling Veeam Cloud Providers to easily audit compliance with per-VM licensing agreements.
Support expiration warnings:
Expiration warnings now appear throughout the product and in job email notifications, making users aware of expired support contracts. These warnings can be disabled, if desired.
Performance improvements:
The amount of interaction with the configuration database has been reduced, significantly improving UI responsiveness.
Support ID:
Your support ID is now displayed directly in the license information UI for assistance and convenience when opening support cases.
Enterprise Manager:
RESTful API:
All Enterprise Manager functionality is now available through the RESTful API, enabling
integration with existing web portals and other web applications.
1-Click Failover:
Enterprise Manager now provides an easy-to-use interface for performing failover of individual VMs.
1-Click Restore of VMs:
In addition to 1-Click Restore of individual guest files, you can now perform full restores of individual VMs.
1-Click Restore web page:
The user interface for restoring files is updated and streamlined for better usability.
Restore Operator restrictions:
File download and extension restrictions are no longer global settings and are now set instead on individual restore operators.
Credentials Manager:
The Credentials Manager can now be leveraged when editing jobs.
Automatic failover for Microsoft Search Server:
Built-in search capabilities are now available to transparently handle searches affected by integration failures with Microsoft Search Server.
Real-time data collection:
Instead of periodic data collection, Enterprise Manager subscribes to backup server notifications that let it retrieve new data as soon as it becomes available. This allows
Enterprise Manager to display the most up-to-date job state at any time.
Session retention period:
The retention period is now set in weeks, instead of months, to allow for more granular retention.
Portal customization:
A special band image that appears at the top of Enterprise Manager pages can be customized with a company-specific logo and other items.
Enhanced UI:
New and improved page design and UI components enhance Enterprise Manager appearance.
Storage integration:
HP StoreServ (3PAR):
HP StoreServ is now supported by Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots (Fibre Channel connectivity only).
HP StoreVirtual VSA:
Versions 10 and 10.5 are now supported by Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots.
HP StoreVirtual registration:
The registration process has been revamped to avoid timeouts with large infrastructures.
Plug-in architecture:
A new storage plug-in architecture is now in place to simplify the process of adding support for other storage vendors and models in future releases. This architecture is not meant to be leveraged by storage vendors directly; rather, implementation will be performed by Veeam.
Setup:
Silent setup:
Silent installation is now supported for the Veeam Backup & Replication server and Enterprise Manager.
ISO file:
Veeam Backup & Replication is now distributed as an ISO file, simplifying installation in virtual environments.
Prerequisites validation:
A wizard runs during setup to validate that all prerequisites are met before installing Veeam Backup & Replication.
Logging:
Export logs wizard:
The wizard offers new filters that let you create smaller log packages targeted more specifically to problematic areas. This can substantially reduce upload time for logs when troubleshooting issues with Veeam support.
Job logs storage:
For additional convenience, job logs are now stored in per-job folders.
Other:
Root passwords:
Root passwords can now be configured for helper appliances.
Extract utility UI:
The utility now offers a standalone Windows UI; the command line utility is still available for more experienced users.
New license key format:
The license key now includes your support ID. Also, the license information for multiple products can now be included within a single license file.
New PowerShell cmdlets:
Support has been added for new v7 functionality, and a number of enhancements have been made to the existing cmdlets. Backward compatibility has been maintained.