Earlier this week, Veeam made available to our VCSP partners the RTM of Update 3 for Backup & Replication 9.5 (Build 9.5.0.1335). Update 3 is what we term a breaking update, meaning that if a Cloud Connect tenant upgrades from any previous 9.5 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. Veeam Backup & Replication releases from 8.0 (build 8.0.0.2084) can write backups to a cloud repository on 9.5 Update 3, and any release from 9.0 (build 9.0.0.902) can write replicas to a cloud host on 9.5 Update 3.

Update 3 is a very significant update and contains a number of enhancements and known issue fixes with a lot of those enhancements aimed at improving the scalability of the Backup & Replication platform that VCSPs can take advantage of. One important note is around new licensing for Cloud Connect Backup that all VCSPs should be aware of. There is a detailed post in the VCSP Forums and there will be emails sent to explains the changes.

We have also pushed out a number new features for our VCSPs with two of them highlighted below. One of which is the new Insider Protection feature or Recycle Bin for Cloud Connect Backups and the other is the a long awaited ask from our providers in the Maintenance Mode for Cloud Connect.

  • Insider protection: Option to hold backups deleted from a tenant’s cloud repository in a “recycle bin” folder for a designated period of time. For more information, see this post in the VCSP forum.

    • Maintenance Mode: Allows you to temporarily stop tenant backup and backup copy tasks from writing to cloud repositories. Already running tenant tasks are allowed to finish, but new tenant tasks fail with an error message indicating that the service provider infrastructure is undergoing maintenance. This is supported at the tenant end in 9.5 Update 3 GA, Agent for Windows 2.1 and Agent for Linux 2.0.

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 of which there is a new version (2.1) coming in early December and prepare for the release of Veeam Agent for Linux (2.0) that will include support for backups to be sent to Cloud Connect repositories. For the recently released Veeam Availability Console, Update 3 is 100% compatible with the 2.0 GA (Build 2.0.1.1319) released last week and is good from Update 2 or later.

Conclusion:

Once again, Update 3 for Veeam Backup & Replication 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. For more info in the RTM, head to the VCSP Forum post here.