Last Friday, Veeam made available to our VCSP partners the RTM of Update 2 for Backup & Replication 9.5 (Build 9.5.0.1038). Update 2 for Backup & Replication is what we term a breaking update, meaning that if a Cloud Connect client upgrades from the 9.5 GA (9.5.0.711) or Update 1 (9.5.0.823) 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. Veeam Backup & Replication releases from 8.0 (build 8.0.0.817) can write backups to a cloud repository on 9.5 Update 2, and any release from 9.0 (build 9.0.0.902) can write replicas to a cloud host on 9.5 Update 2.

Update 2 is a fairly significant update and contains a number of enhancements and bug fixes with a lot of those enhancements aimed at improving the scalability of the Backup & Replication platform that VCSPs can take advantage of. The biggest and most anticipated update is for the support of the upcoming Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows, but we also pushed out an awesome feature for our VCSPs to help manage their client or tenant Cloud Connect jobs or in fact manage their remote Veeam Backup & Replication instances with Remote Access.

VCSP and Cloud Connect Features and Enhancements:

Below are the main VCSP related features and enhancements included in Update 2. For a full list, head to the Veeam Cloud and Service Provider channels of the Veeam forum. For VCSPs with more than 300 connections there is a post regarding tweaks for improving performance at scale.

Core

  • Veeam Backup Remote Access: Full remote management of Veeam Backup & Replication installations at customer sites with a Veeam backup console or Microsoft RDP client over the existing Cloud Connect tunnel.
  • Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows integration: Full support for Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows 2.0, including direct backup to a cloud repository backed by Veeam Cloud Connect. This includes the introduction of separate workstation and server counters for Cloud Connect Backup
  • Usage reporting enhancements: Usage reports are now saved in two formats, CSV and PDF.

Cloud Connect

  • Major scalability improvements: In light of support for direct agent backups, numerous optimizations to the Cloud Connect framework on both the service provider and the tenant sides have been introduced to significantly increase its scalability (including number of concurrent tenant jobs per Cloud Connect server) and reliability large at scale. The release was tested with 1000 concurrent agent backups per single Cloud Connect instance. Reaching this number may require applying additional tweaks, please refer to this post for more information.
  • Improved reporting and monitoring: Better visibility from the service provider side into Cloud Connect tenant jobs, including current job activity and statistics such as current rate and amount of data sent and received.

Cloud Connect Replication

  • Improved failback performance: Failback to the original location can now optionally leverage VMware changed block tracking information, instead of scanning the entire VM disks to determine the difference, improving failback performance up to 20 times.
  • Hardware plan enhancements: Added the ability to increase a number of networks assigned to the Hardware Plan after it has been created.

Important Note for Veeam One Users:

As mentioned in the VCSP forum digest this week, there is a patch available for Veeam One which enables compatibility with Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 2. This hotfix must be deployed to any Veeam ONE server that is monitoring Cloud Connect services…it doesn’t need to be installed on instances not monitoring Cloud Connect services.

Conclusion:

Once again, this is an important update to apply for VCSPs running Cloud Connect services in preparation for the GA release which will happen in about two weeks. Once released I’ll link to the VeeamKB for a detailed look at the fixes but for the moment, if you have the ability to download the update do so and have it applied to your instances.