It has been a busy time at Veeam… which kicked off last week with the GA release of Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 (VBO) version 5.0 (5.0.0.1063). This new version again builds on the 4.0 release that added Object Storage support for repositories as well as further enhancements around performance, reporting and APIs. Version 5.0 is heavily focused on the addition of the full, first class support for the Backup of Microsoft Teams.

The Rise of Teams:

This year has seen the solidification of online collaboration. Covid has meant that almost all workers have had to resort to virtual events and also, virtual collaboration. Early in the year we saw the rapid rise of Zoom for video conferencing, however a few security hiccups along the way meant that Microsoft saw an opening for Teams. Teams is more than just video conferencing and its biggest advantage that has driven strong growth is its integration with other Microsoft Productivity tools… namely the Office 365 Suite. On the chat front, Zoom is no competition and its biggest rival in that space, Slack has recently been acquired by Sales Force, meaning that Teams continues to go from strength to strength and its Daily Active User (DAU) count will continue to grow… with that… you need to be able to protect all that collaborative data.

What’s New in 5.0:

Apart from the headline new feature around Teams there are a lot of key scalability and performance enhancements that address the needs of larger and growing organizations and Veeam Cloud Service Providers. VBO v5.0 delivers multiple architectural enhancements and processing optimizations such as

  • ~5x backup infrastructure scalability increase is delivered with the support of up to 50 remote proxies per a single backup server
  • Faster population of objects in the backup job wizard reduces to minutes the time for creating or editing backup jobs via the UI
  • Searching for individual objects is now performed directly on the Azure AD side, which significantly speeds up searches
  • ~2X faster backup data migration to object storage from local repositories.
  • Faster backup and more efficient digesting of massive SharePoint Online sites achieved through parallel processing of individual lists and improved handling of failed items within lists.
  • Improved UI responsiveness for larger-scale deployments achieved with the optimized communication between backup infrastructure components.
  • Thousands of backup repositories, OneDrive accounts and Exchange items represented within seconds with the optimized RESTful API calls.
  • Optimized PowerShell cmdlets.
  • Faster SharePoint and OneDrive restores initiated through optimized RESTful API calls.
  • Improved speed of export to PST achieved through parallel processing of mailbox folders.

Further Reading and Viewing:

Niels Engelen goes through his top new features in detail here and for service providers out there, it’s worth looking at his Self Service Portal which will soo be updated to support 5.0. Michael Cade has also done some YouTube Video’s on the upgrade and config here. And finally Ben Young walks us through the RestAPI changes from v4.0 to v5.0.

Architecture and Components:

With Object Storage for a repository, we keep only metadata and a cache with all backup data located in Object Storage. Because multiple Repositories can be created and mapped to one or more users, there is flexibility in being able to have a choice of local storage or one or more Object Storage platforms. When using object storage, data can be protected with optional encryption at-rest.

Proxies are the work horses of VBO and can be scaled out again depending on the size of the environment being backed up. Again, this could be Office 365 or on-premises Exchange or SharePoint instances. These proxies can now be configured standalone and not on a Domain, allowing for more DMZ design options.

Installation Notes:

You can download the the latest version of Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 from this location. The download contains four installers that covers the VBO platform and two new versions of the existing Explorers plus the new Explorer for Teams. Explorer for Microsoft OneDrive for Business is contained within the Explorer for Microsoft SharePoint package and installed automatically.

  • 5.0.0.1063 for Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365
  • 10.0.0.4461/1063 for Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange
  • 10.0.0.4461/1063 for Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SharePoint
  • 10.0.0.4461/1063 for Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Teams

To finish off…It’s important to read the release notes here as there are a number of known issues relating to specific situations and configurations.

Backup for Office 365 has been a huge success for Veeam with a growing realisation that SaaS based services require an availability strategy. The continuity of data on SaaS platforms like Office 365 is not guaranteed and it’s critical that a backup strategy is put into place. With the addition of Teams as a first class citizen there is even more importance to capture all data that is being collaborated with across that platform as well.

Links and Downloads: