Today marks another milestone for Veeam with the release of Veeam Backup for AWS. It’s already the 5th major version which adds new functionality to the products. It is available today via the marketplace, standalone AMI or the built-in updater if you are already using the product.

For a complete straightforward list of changes, I suggest reading up using the what’s new PDF.

What’s in it for you?

This version enhances several existing key features.

• Support for Aurora RDS instances and clusters: Veeam has added support for Aurora assuring you can protect both MySQL and Postgres instances and clusters with an easy-to-use and configured policy allowing you to create backups and replicas as needed.
• Enhanced EFS support: starting today, you can make indexes of your EFS file systems that can be used to easily search across restore points and pinpoint you to the right point in just a few seconds!
• Configuration backup & restore: while you could rely on an existing snapshot to recover from the appliance in case of a failure or the need for migration, Veeam has now enhanced this option. You can now export and import your appliance configuration from a repository or file and rest assured that everything works with a built-in check.

A beautiful new dashboard

The first thing you’ll notice after deploying or upgrading is the new refreshing dashboard giving you insight into your infrastructure 😍.

There are 6 different tiles available:

• Sessions in Last 24 Hours shows you how many sessions ran in the last 24 hours filtered by status
• Successful Policy Tasks clarify how many of the tasks within those sessions were successful. This will help you understand if certain archives, backups, replicas or snapshots failed.
• Protected Workloads is a comparison of what is in your production infrastructure and the backup infrastructure. Did you miss something? It will be shown by the numbers 😀.
• Storage Usage explains how much data is stored in the different storage classes (repositories).
• Top Policies will show you how the duration of policies is going and allow you to detect potential unexpected changes. If a policy suddenly takes longer than normal to run, you can investigate if something changed (maybe new resources or tags got added).
• Bottleneck Overview shows 3 potential bottlenecks whether the policies are oversized, regions that are hitting the vCPU quota limit within AWS or if the appliance is running out of disk space.

General enhancements

Every release contains general enhancements such as scalability and minor improvements that may go unnoticed but are key to making your life easier.

V5 now supports restoring multiple EFS file systems or RDS instances at once which can save you time in case of a recovery procedure.

However, there is another change that is quite important for everyone using the public cloud as it may impact your total costs at the end of the month.

Veeam will allow you to configure worker profiles starting version 5 making sure that workers are deployed with your preferred instance size that could not only lower the costs but also speed up the backup and restore procedure. This was a very popular request and I’m happy to announce that is it now available straight in the UI.

Get it today

Go and deploy Veeam Backup for AWS today!

Feel free to leave feedback here in a comment, on Twitter or using the Veeam R&D forums. Your voice is important to Veeam and helps the product grow.

And now I can focus again on the next release with new features and cool things that you’ll hear more about soon 😃.