For ten plus years Veeam has continued to develop new innovative features and enhancements supporting our Cloud and Service Provider partners. As I posted earlier this week, there is a proven track record built upon a strong foundation of Veeam technology that backs up our strong leadership position in the Service Provider space. This accelerated in v7 with vCloud Director support…continued with Cloud Connect Backup in v8, Cloud Connect Replication in the v9 release and even more through the Backup and Replication 9.5 releases and Updates.

In my initial v9.5 Update 4 Top New Features post I covered off new core features and enhancements that are included in Update 4. Specifically there are a number of new features that VCSPs can take advantage of…

Over the next few weeks I am going to deep dive into each of the features listed above as they all deserve their own dedicated blog posts. With a release as huge as this, there is no shortage of content that can be created off the back up Update 4!

Beyond the core enhancements, there are also a significant number of general enhancements that are referenced in the What’s New Document. I’ve gone through that document and pulled out the ones that relate specifically to Cloud and Service Provider operations for those running IaaS and B/R/DRaaS offerings.

  • Maximum supported individual disk size and backup file size have been increased 10 times. With the default 1MB block size, the new theoretical VBK format maximums are 120TB for each disk in backup. Tested maximum is 100TB for both individual disks and backup files.
  • Optimized backup job initialization and finalization steps, resulting in up to 50% times faster backups of small VMs
  • Added experimental support for block cloning on deduplicated files for Windows Server 2019 ReFS
  • vPower NFS write cache performance has been improved, significantly improving I/O performance of instantly recovered VMs and making a better use of SSD drives often dedicated by customers to write cache.
  • vPower NFS scalability has been improved to more efficiently leverage expanded I/O capacity of scale-out backup repository for increased number of VMs that can be running concurrently
  • Support for Paravirtual SCSI controllers with more than 16 disks attached
  • Added JSON support
  • Added RESTful API coverage for viewing and managing agent-based jobs and their backups
  • Added the ability to export the selected restore point of a particular object in the backup job as a standalone full backup file (VBK)
  • Added ability to instantly publish a point-in-time state of any backed-up database to the selected SQL Server for dev/test purposes by running the database directly from the backup file
  • Added the ability to export a point-in-time state of any backed up database to a native SQL Server backup (.BAK file) to simplify the process of providing the database backup to SQL developers, BaaS clients or Microsoft Support
  • Added the ability to schedule Active Full backups on a particular day of the month, as opposed to just weekdays
  • Instant recovery of agent backups to a Hyper-V VM now support Windows 10 Hyper-V as the target hypervisor. This is particularly useful for managed service providers by enabling them to create low-cost all-in-one BCDR appliances to deploy at their clients’ premises.

What I pulled out above is just a small subset of all the general enhancements in Update 4. For Cloud Connect, there is a Post in the Veeam Forums here that goes through specific new features and enhancements in greater detail as well as fixes and known issues.

Stay tuned for future posts on the core new features and enhancements in Update 4 for Veeam Cloud and Service Providers.

References:

https://www.veeam.com/kb2878

http://www.veeam.com/veeam_backup_9_5_whats_new_wn.pdf

http://www.veeam.com/veeam_backup_9_5_u4_release_notes_rn.pdf