When Veeam 8 went GA in November of last year I put together a post where I reviewed the best New Features of the v8 release. Last week Veeam released Patch 2 for version 8 and in going through the release notes it’s much more than a patch and in truth, probably could have been a point release.
Once again Cloud Connect has been improved with Multiple subscription support which adds the ability to add the same service provider multiple times using different credentials…which was a pretty annoying limitation of the initial release. This allows multiple Cloud Repository accounts to be mapped to a single Cloud Connect endpoint…handy for providers like ZettaGrid with three Zones from which to choose Cloud Connect from.
There has also been Reconnect performance improvements where reconnecting to a service provider now occurs faster when a cloud provider has multiple Cloud Gateways deployed…which should be best practice for availability and performance…there are also Enhancements for service providers such as when deleting a tenant, the global cache belonging to the tenant is deleted automatically…Adding the ability to query the amount of protected VMs for the given tenant through the vmCount API property. and Enhanced debug logging that includes initiator information for when the connection is terminated.
Apart from Cloud Connect, below are the rest of my standout features and updates of Patch 2.
- vSphere 6 support. Added support for ESXi 6.0 and vCenter Server 6.0
- vCloud Director 5.6 support. Added support for backup and restore of vCloud Director 5.6 virtual machines (VMs) and vApps.
- VMware Virtual SAN (VSAN) 2.0 support. VMs residing on VSAN can be backed up in Virtual Appliance (Hot Add) and Network (NBD) processing modes. For VMs with existing snapshots, hot add processing requires that all proxy VM disks are located on the same VSAN datastore.
- Hot-Add transport mode of SATA virtual disks. On ESXi 6.0, SATA virtual disks can now be processed in Virtual Appliance (Hot Add) processing mode, which was previously limited to SCSI virtual disks only.
- Disable CBT reset. The workaround for VMware Changed Block Tracking (CBT) corruption issue at 128GB boundaries (VMware KB2090639) can now be disabled by customers with ESXi hosts patched against this issue. To disable automatic CBT reset upon virtual disk size change, create theResetCBTOnDiskResize (DWORD) registry value under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Veeam\Veeam Backup and Replication, and set it to 0.
The above list is taken from the release notes and for me represent the most value in my day to day and future day to day role. Obviously vSphere 6 support is huge, but also kudos to the Veeam team for continuing to Support the SP versions of vCloud Director. I also think the SATA Hot-Add is significant for those VMs that have been migrated from non-VMware platforms. Lastly the CBT Bug that was present last year and that was worked around by Veeam now has an on/off flag for patched hosts.
One disappointment for me if the lack of direct Cloud Connect Support for Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE …I thought this would be a logical choice for Veeam to release the ability to backup to Cloud Connect Repositories from the start…but the best we get is listed under Offsite protection where you can get your endpoint backups off site to disk-based storage, tape or your Veeam Cloud Connect service provider with Backup Copy Jobs..Hopefully there is a future product update that allows this.
That said, another great release by Veeam and the already #1 Backup Solution for VMs has gotten even better!
http://www.veeam.com/download_add_packs/vmware-esx-backup/kb2024/
