You may have missed that when it was officially announced by Veem few weeks ago. Veeam has released 4th patch for their flagship datacenter backup software – Veeam Backup and Replication 7.0. It's a cumulative update, so you don't have to install the previous 3 patches. The patch assures compatibility with VMware VSAN as previously the backup of VMs running on VSAN datastore by using Veeam Backup was not possible. Other major add-ons are SQL 2014 support for guest OS and as a backend DB for Enterprise manager.
Interesting is that Veeam managed to optimize backup in distributed architecture, where several backup proxies participated on backup job. During backup of VMs residing on VSAN, the VSAN traffic isn't impacted by additional network traffic through VSAN's VMkernel NICs as Veeam has optimized the way backups are processed by using proxy which is closest to the VM's data disks. (where most of the virtual disks data is local).
What Brings Patch 4 for Veeam Backup and Replication 7.0?
You can find the release notes here and the download. The patch further brings some other new features like support for SQL Server 2014 for Guest OS and also backed database for backup and enterprise manager.
Quote from Veeam's newsletter:
We have made our intelligent load-balancing engine aware of vSAN specifics, so for each VM with disks on vSAN datastore, our load balancer will pick the backup proxy server running on vSAN cluster node which has most of the virtual disks’ data available locally on the node. This allows us to reduce the backup traffic on vSAN cluster network to the minimum.
Other enhancements of Patch 4:
- License key auto update: Added an automated license key update option to the license Information dialog. When enabled, backup server will start checking the Veeam licensing server for an updated license key periodically. Once the new key is available, it will be downloaded and installed automatically, eliminating the need for manual import.
Backup Copy
- The maximum allowed amount of restore points in the Backup Copy job has been increased to 999.
- Backup Copy will now resume the transfer after network connection drop to a Linux-based backup repository.
- Backup Copy jobs should no longer report errors during the days when source backup jobs are not scheduled to run – for example, during the weekend.
Hyper-V
- Added support for certain Hardware VSS Providers that previously could not be detected by the storage rescan process, and as such could not be used by the jobs.
- Jobs will now retry failed snapshot creation when another shadow copy of the same volume is already in progress, instead of immediately failing to process a VM.
I'd like to quote the Interesting part concerning the backp proxy selection during backup of VMs residing on VSAN that I invoked in the beginning of the post. It's from the original post created by Luca Dell'Oca on Veeam's blog:
Patch 4 introduces a smart logic for processing VSAN datastores. Since VSAN is based on local storage resources of all participating ESXi hosts, it can be that a virtual proxy is sitting in the same host where most of the virtual disks data resides. To determine where most of the VM data resides, Veeam Backup & Replication obtains information about data distribution inside the VSAN datastore from vCenter.
If there is a hot add proxy local to the data, Veeam server gives priority to that proxy; this is a strict rule, so as in the previous example even if other proxies were free and able to process VMs, they were never used and all VM disks where processed by the virtual proxy sitting on the correct ESXI server.
How does the proxy selection works? Veeam will always choose the proxy where the majority of data is saved at the start of the backup, unless the difference between VM data is less than 5% between two proxies.
Here are two quick examples:
Host A = 70% , Host B = 30 % , Host C = 0%, Only proxy running on Host A will be used
Host A = 40% , Host B = 41% , Host C = 19%, both proxies running on Host A and Host B will be usedThe final result will be the least possible network consumption inside the VSAN cluster to retrieve VM data. Pretty smart isn’t it?
For a complete list of new features and resolved issues, and to download Patch 4, check out the following Veeam KB article1891.
Veeam Recommends install the patch after rebooting the backup server to clear any possible locks on the Veeam services, and also prior to upgrading stop the Veeam services. When the patch is installed, start the Veeam services and open Veeam, and allow it to update all the components. (vPowerNFS service, Tranport and installer).
This patch contains all fixes from Patch 1, R2 update and Patch 3. After the upgrade the build version will be 7.0.0.871.
Source: Veeam's Blog
