Today marks another release day for Veeam with Veeam Backup for AWS v2. Let’s take a closer look at what’s new and more important what you need to know about it.

This post has been devided in 5 sections:

• AWS Disaster Recovery
• Improved cost-efficiency
• User Interface improvements
• Usability improvements
• Automation and management

AWS Disaster Recovery

One of the first major features introduced is snapshot replication which enables you to replicate snapshots between AWS accounts and regions so you can protect yourself from outages. This feature is available via the reworked policy wizard.

The first thing you’ll need to do is enable the option in the wizard.

Once enabled, you can configure the region settings in a separate panel. In here, you can configure to replicate snapshots to specific regions or to the same region.

Once this is configured, there is only 1 thing left to do: configure a schedule. You will notice that within v2, the schedule has changed compared to v1 but we’ll get to this later. In the daily retention example below, I’ve configured replicas to run twice a day. The first replica happens in the middle of the day and the second one at 6 PM.

Improved cost-efficiency

We all know that anything in the public cloud costs money. There isn’t much that is free. One of the big changes is the introduction of Changed Block Tracking (CBT) within a policy. This is automatically enabled in supported regions (Amazon is still rolling out their API to more regions) to shrink backup windows. This also means it has a beneficial impact on compute and storage costs, by only reading blocks that have changed since the last backup.

On the aspect of cost efficiency, starting from v2, every policy schedule is harmonized which means the same snapshot is re-used as much as possible in a policy.

If you schedule a snapshot, backup, and replica at 12 AM, it will create 1 snapshot and re-use it for both the backup and replica. This is a drastic improvement compared to v1.

However, harmonization doesn’t just stop there. To further save costs, we allow you to re-use the daily snapshot for your weekly and monthly retention schedule as well.

User Interface improvements

There are a ton of new improvements within the interface such as a notification bell (very common in web applications nowadays), the reworked full-screen policy wizard but one of my favorite changes is the policy session log.

The policy session log is available straight from the policies page and gives you direct insight into what has happened within a policy. Veeam customers will recognize the concept from Veeam Backup & Replication.

The left part will contain every instance within the policy as well as the latest status, while on the right you can find information regarding the snapshot, backup or replica session.

Usability improvements

Looking at the usability changes, there are several points which have been improved.

If we look at File-level Recovery, there are 3 new changes.

• FLR workers no longer require a public IP address
• FLR Relay Proxy enables you to use your own signed SSL certificate for file restores
• FLR test allows you to test a restore without actually performing one which can greatly help in troubleshooting if you can’t access the FLR Explorer

From an accounts / IAM roles aspect, Veeam now provides the ability to perform a permission check from within the UI and makes it easier than ever to create IAM roles directly within AWS.

Automation and management

Finally, I would like to highlight how the product now has a public RESTful API which can be used for integrations and automation of your workflows which fits perfect in the AWS world. Create a policy via the API? No problem! Create the whole infrastructure via the API? No problem!

And the last point I want to highlight is around the management of the appliance and especially updates. Starting from v2, a new Updater UI is available. The Updater UI will inform you of new updates both for Veeam Backup for AWS (and components) as well as security updates for the operating system (Ubuntu in this case). Just like Windows update, you can choose to install the updates at once or postpone this to a later moment via a schedule or a reminder.

Update now or get started!

If you are already running v1, you can now go to support information and check for updates.

Are you new to Veeam Backup for AWS? You can easily get started today with one of the editions. It is available in three editions: free, paid and BYOL.

Veeam Backup for AWS Free Edition

Veeam Backup for AWS Free Edition is fully featured and allows you to back up 10 Amazon EC2 instances free.

Veeam Backup for AWS Paid Edition

Veeam Backup for AWS Paid Edition is metering enabled, so you only pay for what you use.

Veeam Backup for AWS BYOL Edition

Veeam Backup for AWS BYOL Edition can be granted from the Veeam Universal License that can be used universally across multiple Veeam products, both on-premises AND in the cloud.