In case you missed it last week, the Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 (Veeam Backup & Replication and Veeam One combined) is available for download right now.

Both the What’s New documents are available for Veeam Backup & Replication and Veeam One so I am not going to list it all here.

With the new release there is now support for another storage vendor: Nimble! This one is probably the most requested on our forums but besides this it’s a known fact that the people over at Nimble wanted us to work together. I spoke a few times with them at events and they stated they had the need for a proper integration and felt this task was up to Veeam.

If you are looking at upgrading to Windows Server 2016 (or any related application such as Active Directory, SQL Server or SharePoint) make sure you upgrade to 9.5 however keep in mind that the 9.5 release currently does not support vSphere 6.5! This is related due changes under the hood and therefor support is currently planned for update 1 so you might want to hold of on the jump to vSphere 6.5.

Another cool thing about Windows Server 2016 is the new version on ReFS. I am not going to cover these details as Rick Vanover already did this in a blog post but I can tell you it is a big deal and gamechanger for storing Veeam backups.

Personally there are 3 other features in the Veeam Availability Suite I want to highlight.

1. VMware vSphere infrastructure cache

Maintains an in-RAM mirror of vSphere infrastructure hierarchy to dramatically accelerate job start up (Building VM list operation) and user interface responsiveness while browsing a virtual infrastructure.

This approach removes the load from a vCenter Server, making it more available to perform its core infrastructure management duties, and improves backup success ratio in the environments where jobs would often time out or fail due to an overloaded vCenter Server. The cache is maintained up-to-date with real-time updates via a subscription to vCenter Server infrastructure change events.

2. Parallel processing for full VM restore

As the feature title states this restores multiple disks in parallel, similar to the way backup is performed. This technique is automatically used for all disk-based backup repositories (except Data Domain deduplicating storage for which a new improvement has been added by leveraging a custom tailored logic for both backups and restores).

3. Veeam One Scalability

One major improvement is related to Veeam One and are mostly related to under the hood changes but this is a major step forward in terms of enterprise needs. There are 3 improvements towards the data collection engine which achieve this.

Backup data collection mode: In this mode, Veeam ONE collects Veeam Backup & Replication™ data only and skips virtual infrastructure performance data. This allows you to improve scalability of your Veeam ONE server.

Enhanced advanced scalability mode: This mode collects performance metrics that are used in predefined alarms and reports. This allows users to improve scalability of their Veeam ONE server.

Granular performance metrics selection: The enhanced data collection engine now allows users to select individual performance metrics for each monitored object type (e.g. VMs, hosts, datastores), to improve Veeam ONE server scalability.

As a final note make sure to read the release notes for Veeam Backup & Replication and Veeam One before upgrading.

If you have any questions or need a demo you can always contact your local Veeam represent or hit me up on Twitter.