v11 was officially Launched and GA’ed last week meaning customers could get their hands on the next flagship release of Veeam Backup & Replication. Since then we have already had about 15,000 downloads! This is why we offer our Cloud and Service Provider Partners an RTM build two weeks in advance of GA… So What’s in it for Service Providers?… a lot!
For more than ten years Veeam has supported our service provider partners by delivering industry-leading, innovative features that allows them to build service offerings underpinned by Veeam products and technologies. This extends to the Veeam Platform as a whole. Many of the features and enhancements that we have released over that time have been leveraged by our partners. In turn, they offer their own customers leading innovative solutions that work towards solving backup and data availability requirements.
As can be seen by this VCSP Reverse Roadmap Veeam has been accelerating the volume of features (and products) that our Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) partners can leverage. 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. 9.5 Update 4 was a huge release for service providers with a number of top-line enhancements and features added which partners were able to take to market and improve their already strong service offerings. While v10 wasn’t specifically a VCSP release, it still contained features and enhancements that could be taken advantage of and productized.
In my initial v11 Top New Features post I covered off new core features and enhancements that are included in the release. When looking at the broader set of new features and enhancements there are a number of new features that VCSPs can take advantage of…
- VMware Cloud Director to Cloud Director Replication
- VMware Cloud Director Native HTML5 Tenant Portal
- VMware Cloud Director v10.2 Support and SSP Enhancements
- Archive Tier, Object Storage and other SOBR Enhancements
- Continuous Data Protection for VMware Platforms
- New PowerShell Module and RESTful API
- Hardened Linux Repository for Immutability on Primary Landing Zones
- Enhanced Instant Recovery for Databases and NAS
- Improved Restore to EC2 and Backup for AWS/Azure Support
- Enhanced Linux File-Level Recovery
- Linux Backup Proxy Enhancements and other Linux Enhancements
- Data Integration API Enhancements supporting more platforms
- Veeam Agents for Windows and Linux v5.0 and Agent for Mac v1.0
Over the next few weeks I am going to deeper dive into each of the features listed above as they all deserve their own dedicated blog posts.
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.
- NUMA awareness – v11 implements full NUMA awareness and ensures source and target data movers never end up in different nodes.
- Resources scheduler improvements – optimizations to the backup infrastructure resource scheduler, reduces the time to issue resource by up to 50%, which significantly accelerates job start time. Especially significant in an environment with a large number of backup proxies, repositories and Scale-out Backup Repository extents.
- Persistent guest agent – New persistent guest agent for Windows-based VMs. This approach reduces network ports usage down to just a few static ports (depending on the functionality used) and eases account privilege requirements associated with overcoming UAC to deploy a run-time process into the guest, while also reducing network traffic and guest processing time
- High priority jobs – You can now designate backup jobs as high priority. Such jobs will place their pending tasks into the dedicated resources scheduler queue that is offered for backup infrastructure resources before the queue used by normal priority jobs.
- Backup Copy Jobs – We now use the same GFS retention logic as the primary backup jobs including Time-bases GFS Retention instead of restore points, GFS fulls are created and sealed right on the scheduled day instead of based on the restore point being oldest and we have removed quarterly backups for consistency with primary jobs.
- Cloud Connect Backup MSP mode – When the “Allow this Veeam Backup & Replication installation to be managed by the service provider” check box is selected in the Service Provider wizard on the tenant-side backup server, backup metadata like machine names will not be obscured in the service provider-side backup server, allowing MSPs to deliver managed backup services more efficiently
- Tenant evacuation – Tenants can now be evacuated from the Scale-out Backup Repository extents using the Start-VBRCloudTenantBackupEvacuation PowerShell cmdlet.
- Cloud Connect server RAM consumption – We significantly reduced RAM consumption on the Cloud Connect server during the incoming replication job activity.
- SAML support for vSphere Self-Service Backup Portal – Added SAML support, enabling service providers to provide their tenants access to the portal by assigning quotas to external users and groups. In case of SAML accounts, the only supported delegation mode is vSphere Tags-based
Wrap Up:
What I pulled out above is just a small subset of all the general enhancements in v11. Stay tuned for future posts on the core new features and enhancements in v11 for Veeam Cloud and Service Providers. Veeam Backup & Replication v11 is now Generally Available and can be downloaded here.
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