Welcome to the 11th edition of Veeam Vault and the first one for 2019! It’s been more than a year since the last edition, however in light of some important updates that have been released over the past couple of weeks and months, I thought it was time to open up the Vault again! Getting stuck into this edition, I’ll cover the releases of Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 4b, Veeam One Update 4a as well as an update for Veeam Availability Console and some supportability announcements.

Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 4b and Veeam ONE 4a:

In July we released Update 4b for Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5. It brought with it a number of fixes to common support issues as well as a number of important platform supportability milestones. If you haven’t moved onto 4b yet, it’s worth getting there as soon as possible. You will need to be on at least 9.0 Update 2 (build 9.0.0.1715) or later prior to installing this update. After the successful upgrade, your build number will be 9.5.4.2866.

Veeam ONE 9.5 Update 4a was released in early September and containers similar platform supportability to Backup & Replication as well as a number of fixes. Details can be found in this VeeamKB.

Backup & Replication Platform support

  • VMware vCloud Director 9.7 compatibility at the existing Update 4 feature levels.
  • VMware vSphere 6.5 and 6.7 U3 Supportability vSphere 6.5 and 6.7 U3 GA is officially supported with Update 4b.
  • Microsoft Windows 10 May 2019 Update and Microsoft Windows Server version 1903 support as guest VMs, and for the installation of Veeam Backup & Replication and its components and Veeam Agent for Windows 3.0.2 (included in the update).
  • Linux Kernel version 5.0 support by the updated Veeam Agent for Linux 3.0.2 (included in the update)

For a full list of updates and bug fixes, head to the offical VeeamKB. Update 4b is a cumulative update, meaning it includes all enhancements delivered as a part of Update 4a. There are also a number of fixes specifically for Veeam Cloud & Service Providers that offer Cloud Connect services. For the full change log, please see this topic on the private VCSP forum.

https://www.veeam.com/kb2970

VAC 3.0 Patch:

Update 3 for Veeam Availability Console v3 (build 2762) was released last week, and containers a number of important fixes and enhancements. The VeeamKB lists out all the resolved issues, but i’ve summerized the main ones below. It is suggested that all VAC installations are updated as soon as possible. As a reminder, don’t forget to ensure you have a backup of the VAC server before applying the update.

  • UI – Site administrators can select Public IP Addresses belonging to a different site when creating a company. Under certain conditions, “Used Storage” counter may display incorrect data on the “Overview” tab.
  • Server – Veeam.MBP.Service fails to start when managed backup agents have duplicate IDs (due to cloning operation) in the configuration database.
  • Usage Reporting – Under certain conditions, usage report for managed Veeam Backup & Replication servers may not be created within the first ten days of a month.
  • vCloud Director – Under certain conditions, the management agent may connect to a VAC server without authentication.
  • Reseller Reseller can change his or her backup quota to “unlimited” when creating a managed company with “unlimited” quota.
  • RESTful APIs – Querying “v2/tenants/{id}” and “/v2/tenants/{id}/backupResources” information may take considerable amount of time.

https://www.veeam.com/kb3003

Veeam Cloud Connect Replication Patch:

Probably one of the more important patches we have released of late has to do with a bug found in the stored procedure that generates automated monthly license usage reports for Cloud Connect Replication VMs. This displays an unexpected number of replicated VMs and licensed instances which has been throwing off some VCSP license usage reporting. If VCSPs where using the PowerShell command Get-VBRCloudTenant -Name “TenantName”, the correct information is returned.

To fix this right now, VCSPs offering Cloud Connect Replication servers can visit this VeeamKB, download an SQL script and apply it to the MSSQL server as instructed. There will also be an automated patch released and the fix baked into future Updates for Backup & Replication.

https://www.veeam.com/kb3004

Quick Round Up:

Along with a number of platform supportability announcements at VMworld 2019, it’s probably important to reiterate that we now have a patch available that allows us to support restores into NSX-T for VMware Cloud on AWS SDDCs environments. This also means that NSX-T is supported on all vSphere environments. The patch will be baked into the next major release of Backup & Replication.

Finally, the Dell EMC SC storage plug-in is now available which I know will be popular among our VCSP community who leverage SCs in their Service Provider platforms. Being able to offload the data transfer of backup and replication jobs to the storage layer introduces a performance advantage. In this way, backups from storage array snapshots provide a fast and efficient way to allow the Veeam backup proxy to move data to a Veeam backup repository.