Veeam 9.5 Update 4

Posted on by

Veeam 9.5 U4 has been out in the wild for a few weeks now and I’ve been keen to get this installed in my lab to review some of the new features.  There were a couple of key announcements that caught my attention with this release, first of all I’m loving the new splash screen!

vSphere (and Microsoft) Support 

It’s great to see U4 support vSphere 6.7 U1 as well as full support 6.5 U2. In my day jobs this has certainly caused a few headaches with upgrades over the last couple months. Whilst I’m a die hard VMware guy I can’t ignore the fact Windows Server 2019, including Hyper-V is supported.

Cloud Tier

One of the announcements that jumped out for me was the Cloud Tier feature. This works with the Scale Out Backup Repository (SOBR) feature and allows object storage to be added from cloud providers such as Azure,  Amazon (S3) or IBM (Cloud Object Storage). The tiering of data is done automatically and policy driven. You set the operational restore window on the SOBR and once data passes this point it can be tiered out to object storage. There is builtin intelligence to assist with restores to minimise bandwidth costs. Any restore requests will first be served by  blocks from the closest available on-prem backup file before pulling from data from object storage. With data growing at an exponential rate it’s great to Veeam now integrate with object storage allowing the SOBR’s to easily scale. 

Veeam Data Labs

Before May last year restores were a lot simpler but with new GDPR regulations taking effect the processes in place for restores need to be updated for compliance. To ensure anyone who has exercised their right to be forgotten aren’t forgotten about when restores occur, 9.5 U4 brings a nice feature called Staged Restore.    

This works by restoring the application into the data lab, removing or adjusting any data by running a script, then moving the updated restored file into production. This is very smart but it doesn’t stop there. Secure Restore also allows customers to protect themselves against threats such as sleeping ransomware. This works by mounting the disks and scanning them for threats before restoring to the production environment. The last thing anyone wants to do is restore infected data back to their production environment!

There’s so much in U4 and I’ve only scratched the surface in this post so I’ve included the links to the releases notes below for further reading. Also the guys over at the Virtually Speaking Podcast hooked up with Michael Cade and Anthony Spiteri to run through all of the announcements and it’s definitely worth a listen.

Resources

https://www.veeam.com/veeam_backup_9_5_whats_new_wn.pdf

https://www.veeam.com/veeam_backup_9_5_u4_release_notes_rn.pdf

http://www.vspeakingpodcast.com/episodes/103