Veeam Backup 7 has been announced today, but the GA release is planned for Q3. The countdown to the new version has been floating around since some time at the Veeam's teaser page, but today all the features has been unveiled. There is many of them which had been added because clients has asked for it (ex. tape support), but also features like backing up vCloud Director workloads (with all the metadata) and virtual labs for replicas (vPower, U-Air for replica VMs). With the features like those, Veeam in addition to the usual customer's profile can target also service providers.
Now what's hot? One of the hottest feature announce is certainly the WAN accelerator, which can make the offsite backups up to 50 times faster.
What's WAN Accelerator?
From this screenshot you'll see that Veeam has added a completely new function to their product. It's called WAN accelerator. It is a built-in WAN acceleration for creating offsite backups. It ‘not simply copying VBK to the other site, but the VM(s) and the point in time are being cached and deduped before hitting the wire to be transferred to the other side. It's handled not by usual backup jobs, but by special copy jobs, where you can specify (Grandfather – Father – Son scenarios) and forever incremental and for specific VM(s).
WAN Accelerator for which usage scenarios – It's a built-in function, which allows to speed up the offsite backup process. It's used only for the backup of copy jobs.
The Backup of Copy Jobs – allows to specify the VM(s) that will be processed (backed up) to the WAN location. Which point in time of a VM(s) will be copied up to the WAN location. The built in WAN accelerator is used for achieve performances speeds up to 50 times faster.
It's possible to use scenarios like Grand father – Father – Son (GFS) for long term retention (it's a checkbox). So basically if you keep doing incremental backups to your normal location with normal backup jobs, you can, in addition, now specify with different schedule, how many Weekly backups you want to copy to the DR site, how many Monthly backups, Quarterly or Yearly backups… with still keeping the most recent full backups at the main backup location (close to the production VMs) for obvious reasons – for maximum restore speed, and copy the older offsite.
To better understand how this function will fit into the product, it's better to show a diagram. Until now, Veeam backup server had three roles where there was a Veeam backup server, source proxy and target proxy. The WAN accelerator is a fourth role which can be activated of the Veeam's software. Here is the screenshot principle.
The wan acceleration is fourth role which can be installed in Windows VM, similar way as backup proxy gets installed today.
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