Scalability Enhancements:
In general there has been a doubling of I/O performance that can shorten backup windows by up to five times while reducing the load on core virtualisation platform components such as vCenter and storage arrays.
- Advanced Data Fetcher: This improves backup performance for individual virtual disks while reducing the load on primary storage due to the reduced number of I/O operations required to complete a backup. This is a VMware feature and is used by Backup from Storage Snapshots, Hot Add and Direct NFS modes.
- VMware vSphere Infrastructure Cache: This maintains an in RAM mirror of vSphere infrastructure hierarchy to accelerate the Building VM list operation when creating or modifying a job. This also removes load from vCenter. The cache is maintained up-to-date with real-time updates via a subscription to vCenter Server infrastructure change events.
Restore Acceleration Technologies:
Being able to recover from disaster quickly and efficiently is an important feature that shouldn’t be underestimated or understated and v9.5 has further improved this.
- Instant VM Recovery: This has improved performance up to three times specifically around when recovering multiple VMs at once from per-VM backup file chains.
- Full VM Parallel Processing: This restore restores multiple disks in parallel, similar to the way a backup is performed. This is automatically used for all disk based backup repositories except Data Domain deduplicating storage.
Engine Enhancements:
Version 9.5 includes a wide range of additional enhancements targeted at large environments to maintain efficiency when processing jobs containing thousands of VMs allowing for scalability improvements. Database optimisations have allowed queries to complete faster reducing back-end SQL Server load that improves user interface responsiveness and job performance.
Advanced Resilient File System:
ReFS is now the preferred disk data format for Windows Server 2016. This updated version provides many new capabilities including improvements data integrity, resiliency and availability as well as speed and efficiency.
https://www.veeam.com/blog/advanced-refs-integration-coming-veeam-availability-suite.html
- Fast Clone Technology: This allows for the creation and transformation of synthetic full backup files to happen up to 20x faster for shorter backup windows and a significantly reduced backup storage load. Backup and restore performance can be further improved with automatic storage tiering provided by a Storage Spaces Direct-based backup repository with an SSD tier.
- Reduced Backup Storage Consumption: Spaceless full backup technology prevents duplication from occurring resulting in raw disk space consumption by a GFS backup archive that rivals deduplicating appliances. By integrating software dedupe and encryption with ReFS capabilities these storage savings remain in play for encrypted backup files which is significant.
- Backup Archive Integrity: This is addressing silent data corruption by monitoring and proactively reporting data corruption with ReFS data integrity streams, including automated and seamless healing of corrupted backup file data blocks inline during restore or during periodic scans of the ReFS data scrubber by leveraging Storage Spaces mirror and parity sets.
Instant Recovery From Any Backup:
This is actually quiet huge and will leverage Veeam Agent technologies to extend on Instant VM Recovery by way of Instant Recovery for physical computers. Version 9.5 enables users to perform instant recovery of endpoints and physical servers into a Hyper-V VM and can:
- Immediately spin up a failed physical server from a backup
- Run lost devices directly from their last backup
Veeam Cloud Connect enabled VCSPs can manage the disaster recovery of remote offices and tenant locations beyond key servers and services by spinning up backups copied to the Veeam Cloud Connect repositories as Hyper-V VMs.
Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager
- Scalability Enhancements: The Enterprise Manager engine was heavily optimised for large environments and tested against databases containing one million restore points. Reporting performance, Web UI responsiveness and new backup server registration times were significantly improved for large environments.
- Improved Self-Service Capabilities: With the addition of a self-service backup and restore portal for vCloud Director the Enterprise Manager web UI was enhanced with new capabilities to perform Quick Backup operations on the VMs tab as well as delete backup jobs, backup files and erase individual VMs content from multi VM backup files.
Additional Enhancements In Brief
- Proxy affinity: This new backup repository setting allows users to specify backup proxies which are allowed to perform backups to and restores from the chosen repository. (Enterprise Editions)
- GFS retention enhancement: To reduce the requirements for archive repository disk space, the oldest GFS full backup will now be removed before a new GFS full backup file is sealed and a new synthetic full is created.
- SOBR Temporary Expansion: You can add a fourth extent even though no more than three extents can be online at the same time with the fourth remaining in maintenance mode. This will help with upgrading SOBR capacity by attaching a larger storage unit, followed by evacuation of backups from the smallest one. (Enterprise Editions)
- PowerShell: On going enhancements with new commands added to cover all new 9.5 functionality as well as multiple enhancements to existing commands based on user feedback. (http://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/backup/powershell)
That’s a pretty significant list of the top enhancements as I see it! I haven’t gone into detail around the enhancements for Veeam Cloud Service Providers in this post but I will get a separate post out over the next few days going through the key enhancements for VCSPs.
If you have Veeam 9 running do yourself a favour and go through the required change controls to upgrade to v9.5…your backups will thank you! 🙂
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