Welcome to another Veeam Vault! This is the ninth edition and given the last edition was focused around VMware and VMworld I thought just for a change, the focus for this edition will be Microsoft. Reason for that is over the past couple of weeks we have had some significant announcements around Azure Stack and the GA release of Backup for Office 365 1.5. I’ll cover both of those announcements, share some Veeam employee automation work that shows off the power of our new APIs and see what the Veeam Vanguard’s have been blogging about in the last month or so.

Backup for Office 365 1.5 GA:

The early part of my career was dedicated to Exchange Server however I drifted away from that as I made the switch to server virtualization and cloud computing. The old Exchange admin in my is still there however and it’s for that reason that I’m excited about the GA of our Backup for Office 365 product which is now at version 1.5. This release caters specifically for service providers adding scalability and automation enhancements as well as extended support for on-premises and hybrid Exchange setups.

New features and enhancements:

  • Distributed, scalable architecture: Enhanced scalability in distributed environments with several Remote Offices/Branch Offices and in service providers infrastructures
  • Backup proxies: take the workload off the management server, providing flexible throttling policy settings for performance optimization.
  • Support for multiple repositories: Streamlines data backup and restore processes.
  • Support for backup and restore of on-premises and hybrid Exchange organizations: Allows a variety of configurations and usage scenarios and implement those that meet your particular needs.
  • Increased performance: Restore operations allows for up to 5 times faster restores than in v1.0.
  • Restore of multiple datastore mailboxes using Veeam Explorer for Microsoft Exchange: simplifies workflow and minimizes workload for restore operators, as well as 1-Click restore of a mailbox to the original location.
  • RESTful API and PowerShell cmdlets: Helpful for automation of routine tasks and integration into existing or new portals.
  • UI Enhancements: Including main window, wizards, dialogs, and other elements, facilitating administration of the solution.
Examples of the Power of the Veeam APIs:

One of the features of Backup for Office 365 was the addition of a power set of RESTful APIs and PowerShell commandlets that are aimed are service providers automating the setup and management of their offerings around the product. A couple of our employees have written example interfaces for the Backup for Office 365 product and it shows that any service provider with some in house programming skill set can build customer portals that enhances their offerings and increases efficiency through automation.

Special welcome to Niels who this week joined our team. Great to have you on board!

Microsoft Azure Stack Support:

Last week at Microsoft Ignite, we announce our supportability for Azure Stack. This is based around our Windows Agent, Cloud Connect and Availability Console products that combine together to off an availability solution

Key benefits of Veeam’s support for the Azure Stack include:

  • Multi-tenancy: Veeam Cloud Connect isolates backup copies for each tenant ensuring security and compliance; 
  • Multiple recovery options: Veeam Backup & Replication supports both granular item level recovery through Veeam Explorers for Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Active Directory and for Oracle, as well as full file level restores for tenant files that were deleted or corrupted;
  • Reporting & Billing: Veeam Availability Console supports real-time monitoring and chargeback on tenant usage, allow either Hosting providers or Enterprise organizations to easily manage and bill their tenants for Availability usage.

Veeam Vanguard Blog Post Roundup:

References:

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/docs/vbo365/guide/vbo_what’s_new_in_v1_5.html?ver=15