Veeam Backup & Replication v10 has been Generally Available since mid Feburary and last week I posted a What’s in it for Service Providers overview blog post. In that post I briefly outlined all the new features and enhancements in v10 as it related to our Veeam Cloud and Service Providers. As mentioned each new major feature deserves it’s own separate post. I’m going to start off with talking about vCloud Director! Not really a surprise given that it’s me! #LongLivevCD

As a reminder here are my top new features and enhancements in v10 for VCSPs.

  • Cloud Tier Copy Policy, Immutability and Object Storage Import
  • NAS File Backup
  • Enhanced Instant VM Recovery
  • Improved Restore to EC2 and Backup for AWS/Azure Support
  • Enhanced Linux File-Level Recovery
  • Cloud Connect Enhancements
  • Linux Backup Proxy and XFS Integration
  • Data Integration API
  • vCloud Director v10 Support and SSP Enhancements
  • Veeam Agents for Windows and Linux v4.0

vCloud Director v10 Support and SSP Enhancements

Late last year, VMware released vCloud Director 10.0 and we couldn’t miss the opportunity to Support v10 in v10! As I have mentioned before, we have always been strong in our support of vCloud Director, and as many Cloud Providers start to transition and upgrade to vCD 10.0 from the 9.7 release those that have Veeam Backup & Replication protecting their tenant workloads will have supportability with v10. We continue to support versions of vCD back to 8.20 and will be looking to continue supporting future versions. Support for VMware’s vCloud Director SSP was released with Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5, and with the release of v10 we have added much of the new v10 core functionality into the portal by way of allowing tenants to configure GFS retention and choose points vs days on their primary backup jobs. These are small, but important enhancements that allow tenants to be more granular and allow for longer-term retention which they can configure themselves through the portal.

How it Works:

With version 9.5 of Veeam Backup & Replication (released in November 2016), the vCloud Director Self-Service Portal was released. This feature was built upon the self-service capabilities of Veeam Enterprise Manager and taps into vCloud Director for tenant authentication. This portal uses Veeam Enterprise Manager and allows service providers to grant their tenants self-service management of their vCloud Director workloads. This enhances the VCSP’s ability to offer Backup as a Service (BaaS) for vCloud Director.

In v10 we have been able to bring into the portal two new v10 features… the ability to set retention as days rather than points, and the long awaiting GFS on Primary backup jobs.

Tenant’s configuring their Backup jobs will now have the option to base their retention on number days rather than number of restore points. Traditionally this has been set by by the number of restore points produced and has a few challenges in working out the number of restore points depending on your desired schedule. Being able to configure day based retention allows you to set the number days to keep backups and not worry about running the job at various schedules through the day.

Probably one of the biggest feature requests we get for this portal is the ability to configure backup copy jobs for longer terms GFS type retention. While this new feature isn’t an exact replacement over that the ability to configure GFS on Primary backup jobs from within this console is significant. There was no way for the tenant to configure Backup Copy Jobs through the portal… with this new feature tenants can store a copy of your longer term archival backup points on the primary backup repository as shown below

What this Means for VCSPs and Wrap Up:

In a nutshell, this adds more value to the existing Self Service portal and works to negate the need for Backup Copy Jobs which can be more complex to manage in a self service sense. When you put this together with some of the other v10 features, specifically around Cloud Tier enhancements for Scale Out Backup Repositories…the ability to protect vCD base IaaS with Veeam is a very compelling use case.

References:

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/vsphere/vcloud_director.html?ver=100