VMworld 2010: SP9741 The new standard for data protection

<update October 20> For a very good and comprehensive review of version 5 of Veeam Backup & Recovery see this link https://up2v.wordpress.com/2010/10/20/cool-review-on-veeam-backup-replication-v5/

This session at VMworld 2010 was presented by Veeam’s Doug Hazelman. Doug explains the audience about the new Veeam product called Veeam Backup & Replication v5. This new release has several new and interesting features which are unique for the industry and a revolution for protection of virtual machines running on VMware vSphere.

Version 5 has three new technologies:

SureBackup Recovery Verification. Why does someone makes backups? To be able to restore the data. How are you sure you can restore your data? By actually restoring the data. How many times does someone actually test a restore procedure? I do not think many people do that. A lot of companies find out their backup is not useable at the moment they really need to recover the data. Finding out the hard way is not good.
SureBackup will actually restore a virtual machine after every backup, start the virtual machine, start services and report if data and services are available. The product does this by:
– storing the backup of virtual machines on a NFS volume managed by the Veeam backup server (prefered to be a physical server)
– attach the NFS volume as a VMFS datastore to ESX hosts.
-compress the virtual machine data
-start the virual machine from the backup datastore while being compressed and in an isolated network so it does not conflict with the server it made a backup of. The virtual machine virtual disks on the Veeam NFS datastore will remain read only to guarantee the integrity of the backup.
Instant VM recovery restores an entire vm in a couple of minutes.  

U-Air is a Universal Application Item recovery technique enabling the recovery of individual items from any virtualized application without the need for backup agents in the VM. Veeam has a wizard available which enables item recovery of :
-Microsoft Active Directory
-Microsoft SQL Server
-Microsoft Exchange Server

For other applications, the procedure for item recovery will be to restore the virtual machine holding the application in an isolated network and use tooling to extract the data by the application manager. Databases like SQL Server have tools which can easily export tables.
In the near future more wizards will be added.

I have seen a demo of the product and it is really cool. Very easy to use.

Veeam Backup and Replication is not able to backup physical servers, is limited to backup of VMware virtual machines. It is not able to handle tapes and tape libraries. You will need an additional product for tape handling if required. It needs to store it’s backup data to disk and supports  destinations like Windows shares,VMFS datastores located on iSCSI or FC or NFS.

Doug Hazelman announced for the first time that version 5 of Backup & Replication will be released at October 20. To join the lauch event, click here http://www.veeam.com/go/v5-launch-event/

More on the launch event here http://www.veeam.com/blog/we-are-excited-the-v5-live-launch.html