Today Veeam announced Update 2 (notice the name change from patch to update) for the Veeam Avaiability Suite v8.

This means updates are available for both products in the Availability Suite:

• Release Notes for Veeam Backup & Replication 8.0 Update 2
• Release Notes for Veeam ONE v8 Update 2

vSphere 6 FULL support

The most important new feature is the FULL vSphere 6 support. This includes all new additional features such as backing up VVols, VSAN 2.0, Fault Tolerant VM’s and cross-vCenter vMotion awareness (this is really cool, no more problems with moRef id’s changing).

Currently there is a known SAN transport issue in VDDK 6.0.0 but Veeam created a fix for it so you don’t have to worry about it. It just works!

Veeam Endpoint Backup FREE integration

This was already announced a while ago and it is now possible to send Endpoint backups to a Veeam backup repository and it’s now fully available!

Using a Veeam backup repository as the target for your Endpoint backup jobs enables the following additional functionality:

• Centralized monitoring. Perform basic monitoring and management for all incoming endpoint backup jobs, including email notifications about endpoint backup status.
• Offsite protection. Get your endpoint backups off site to disk-based storage, tape or your Veeam Cloud Connect service provider with Backup Copy and Backup to Tape jobs.
• Backup encryption. You can choose to optionally encrypt your endpoint backups stored in Veeam backup repositories. All standard Veeam encryption features are supported for endpoint backups, including password loss protection.
• Application item-level recovery. Restore application items from backups of server machines with Veeam Explorers™ for Microsoft Active Directory, Exchange, SharePoint and SQL Server.
• Disk export. Export physical disk content from backup into VMDK/VHD/VHDX virtual disk files.

I already blogged about this feature in the preview stage which got covered in a small demo video.

Other cool changes

Besides these important changes there are some other interesting things to be found in the release notes.

SNMP traps. Both Windows and Multi-OS File-Level Recovery can now trigger SNMP notifications. To enable such notifications, create the EnableRestoreSNMPTraps (DWORD) registry value under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Veeam\Veeam Backup and Replication, and set it to 1.

I really did not see this coming but I can see lot’s of use for this. Sending traps for every recovery can for example help assisting in troubleshooting wrong restores even faster.

Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SQL ServerDatabase restore performance has been improved by up to 3x.

While the Veeam Explorer for Microsoft SQL already is an amazing tool to perform perfect restores it got improved even more. Hooray for faster restores!

Again an amazing update by Veeam and another proof why Veeam is the #1 Availability product for your environment.