Overnight, Veeam made available to our VCSP partners the RTM of Veeam Backup & Replication 11 (Build 11.0.0.825). Seems like only yesterday v10 was released, but just over a year and week to the day, we have the much awaited v11 version of Backup & Replication. Before it goes GA, we give our providers a window to deploy the new version as v11 is what we term a breaking update. This means that if a Cloud Connect tenant upgrades from any previous version before VCSPs this will break backup or replication functionality. With that in mind the RTM has been made available for our VCSP partners to ensure it is installed and tested before being pushed out to production before the GA release.
Backward Compatibility and Veeam Platform Support:
Veeam Backup & Replication releases from 9.5 Update 4 (build 9.5.4.2866) can write backups via Cloud Connect to a cloud repository on v11. For Cloud Connect Replication, pre vCloud Director Hardware Plan based replicas can go to a cloud host on v11. To take advantage of the vCloud Director based replication, tenants need to be on at least 9.5 Update 4. To take advantage of the new features listed below, all tenants are required to be on v11.
As I detailed this week, there is an update that need to be applied to Veeam Backup for Office 365 v5 to make it compatible with v11. In addition to that and Backup & Replication v11, the RTM location also contains the new versions of Veeam ONE v11 (11.0.0.1379) and the new versions of Agent for Windows (5.0.0.4300) and Linux (5.0.0.4318) and the brand new Mac Agent (1.0.0.713) and Veeam Service Provider Console (5.0.0.6726)
VCSP Features and Enhancements:
v11 is huge release release and contains a number of enhancements. A lot of those enhancements are aimed at improving the performance and scalability of the Backup & Replication platform that VCSPs can take advantage of.
- CDP Low second RPO replication for vSphere workloads is now possible leveraging the vSphere APIs for IO (VAIO). We now offer VCSPs and partners the ability to offer four tiers of data protection policy, building on snapshot based replication, snapshot based backups and archive to longer terms repositories.
- VCD to VCD Replication – One of the most long awaited features for VCSPs is the ability to replicate between VMware Cloud Director organizations… be it the same or seperate VCD instances.
- VCD Native HTML5 Plugin – Building on the industry first vCloud Director Self Service Portal released back in v7, we have integrated that directly into VCD and began to have deeper right click functionality throughout the UI.
- Enhanced Object Storage Support – Not only have we added Google Storage as a target for the Capacity Tier, but we have added a whole new tier for SOBR. The Archive Tier is built for long term storage of backup data that possibly never needs to be touched, but is required for compliancy.
There are over 150+ new features and enhancements in v11 and stay tuned for an updated, What is in it for Service Provider series coming out over the next few months as I deep dive into how service providers can leverage v11 and other elements of our platform to offer services and generate recurring revenue with Veeam.
Current Veeam Universal Licenses (compatible with Veeam Backup & Replication v10 and later) are compatible with all builds shipping in this release. No new licenses are needed to upgrade.
As usual, there has also been a lot of work to improve and enhance scalability in the Backup & Replication Cloud Connect functionality to accomodate the increasing usage of Veeam Agent for Windows and Linux of which there are new versions (4.0.0.x) released at the same time of v11 RTM/GA.
Veeam Service Provider Console v5
As a reminder, for Veeam Service Provider Console v5 (which has RTM’ed today as well), v11 will be taken advantage and I will also be posting separately around what’s contained in that release. Our Veeam Cloud and service Providers are strongly encouraged to download and install the RTM build of console into production. This latest release includes significant enhancements including:
- Production Ready v3 API
- Complete, awareness and control for Windows, Linux and Mac Agents
- Awareness and control of backup running in AWS and Azure via the Backup & Replication Plug-ins
- Expanded security features and integrations
v11 Preview Posts:
There will be a live streamed launch event on the 24th of February. You can register for that event here.
