Over the weekend, we released the v10a (Build 10.0.1.4854) release of our flagship product, Veeam Backup & Replication. This is the first major update to v10 which was released back in Feburary. While not touted as a major release, Veeam R&D team has delivered a lot of value in this release. Apart from having over 1200 minor fixes and enhancements, this release adds some significant features and enhancements. The bigger ticket items here include the ability to extend Veeam Backup & Replication to connect to Veeam Backup for AWS installs for remote awareness and management, additional platform supportability including support for VMware Cloud Director 10.1 and under the hood enhancements that have resulted in major performance increases around our Object Storage functionality.

Object Storage Performance Enhancement

One of the use cases I’ve been pushing since we released Cloud Tier back in 9.5 Update 4, was the ability to leverage our Scale Out Backup Repository Object Storage Capacity Tier extents for migration and On-Demand Recovery. It’s also something that our Cloud and Service Provider partners can leverage for the same. While we have all the goodness of being able to recover in multiple ways directly streaming off an Object Storage repository, some of the restore speed we saw where limiting some use cases.

I am glad to say that with 10a, we included a previous HotFix that has resulted in a 10-15x increase in restore speeds. I have confirmed this in my testing and will share more later this week in a dedicated post.

We also have enhanced restore speeds for Restore to Azure and EC2 and added support for Amazon Snowball Edge as a scale-out backup repository Capacity Tier, including full user interface integration. This was actually one of the most asked questions and requested features since we released Object Storage support in v9.5 Update 4.

Platform Integration and Support

Clearly for me, the biggest new platform support in v10a is for VMware Cloud Director 10.1 and again has been a well requested feature from our Cloud and Service Provider partners as lots of them continue to double down on the Cloud Management Platform. We have also added support for Windows 10 version 2004 and Windows Server SAC version 2004 as well as Linux Kernel version 5.7. Both for support for guest VMs, for the installation of Veeam Backup & Replication components, and for agent-based backup with the Agent for Windows and Linux which have also been updated and included in the release.

As mentioned in the first paragraph, one of the top line features of v10a is the release of the AWS Plug-in for Veeam Backup & Replication. This allows for awareness and operations of our Backup for AWS built directly in to the Veeam Backup & Replication console. The Plug-in is a separate download and more information can be found here KB3239. This new feature allows the Backup & Replication console to be a central point of management and also information when it comes to our new platform products. As we continue to enhance the platform services integration we will see even more interoperability between products.

NAS Backup and Licensing

With NAS Backup, there is a new enhancement with the ability to support Azure File Sync as well as multiple fixes around corner cases based on support cases from early adopters. For smaller data sets we decided to allow the protecting of the first 250GB of data from any file source to be free. To achieve this, v10a will only consume a license for each fully consumed 250GB set of data protected. We have also added File version archiving option of NAS backup available regardless of the Socket license edition when backup servers has both Socket and VUL license installed. All this shows that we can and will act quick to customer responses for better penetration of our feature sets.

Compatibility with other Veeam solutions

Note that this update also includes all fixes from Cumulative Patch 1 and Cumulative Patch 2 for v10 and the new ISO supersedes those patches. For installation of the upgrade confirm that you are running at least 9.5 Update 3 (build 9.5.0.1536) or later prior to upgrading. Not that you should, but if you are running earlier upgrades and need to upgrade, call support. After the upgrade, the build number should be 10.0.1.4854.

References:

https://www.veeam.com/kb3228