Great news, Veeam Backup & Replication v11 is coming in February, and the 24th is the official presentation of this new Veeam Backup & Replication v11. The new Veeam Backup & Replication v11 is ready to be launched. This new version is another great step from Veeam on providing Data Backups (Virtual and physical) to another step.

You can register and watch the live event for the Veeam Backup & Replication v11 presentation HERE.

The year 2020 was a pandemic year (still is), but that didn’t stop Veeam research and development department from providing us great new products, new versions, new features.

Some examples:

As we can check in the image above, Veeam and their teams were busy during 2020. There are many new versions and new products, and here are not patches, but only the main updates or new products.

We cannot forget Veeam Backup & Replication v10 launched in 2020, a huge step in the Veeam Availability Suite product. You can check here what was new in that new v10.

Regarding the Veeam Backup & Replication v11, there are many new features and improvements in the product. Some are in the pipeline for a long time, and now it is official that they will be included (Continuous Data Protection (CDP), is one example.

Let´s check what is new in the new Veeam Backup & Replication v11.

What is new:

The version 11 is full is new features and improvements, but I will only focus on the main ones.

• CDP (Continuous Data Protection).

This feature launched/talked about in “public” since I think my first VeeamON in New Orleans. It has been postponed many times and now finally out in the v11.

What is CDP? It is a feature that does continuous replications I/O of a VM without the need to use create or use snapshots. CDP uses vSphere APIs for I/O filtering (VAIO).

CDP provides a minimum recovery time objective (RTO) in case of a disaster strikes because VM replicas are in a ready-to-start state.

Create vSphere I/O Filters.

Create a CDP Replication.

• Async Processing.

Veeam will enable async processing for all functionalities that read data from backup repositories. While this is beneficial for the enterprise-grade hardware mostly, this can be turned off via registry if there is no noticeable performance increase on your infrastructure.

• Instant NAS Recovery (with malware scanning object detection).

As the name says, it is a Instant Recovery feature. We know this feature from Backup/Restore VMs, where we can in seconds recover a VM. What it does is, mount the VM in the Veeam Server and power on and is immediately available from the Backup Repository.

In this case, it is similar, Veeam will mount your Backup File Share\files in Veeam Server, and you can search, copy, delete or move files on a fly inside your Veeam Server Backup Repository and/or restore in the source NAS.

• Instant MSSQL Recovery.

Again, this feature uses the same technology as the previous Instant NAS Recovery and VM Instant Recovery but now using SQL Server Databases.

We can put a SQL DB online immediately. It will automatically be in production and ready to use until we decide to fully restore and move back to the original Production SQL Server.

Note: Did not test this feature yet, so I don’t have any images or examples to show here. But plan to write one blog post about how it works.

• Native Plug-in for vCloud Director.

With this new plugin is now possible to add your Veeam Backup to your vCloud Director and manage backups from there. You can add VMs/vApps directly to Backup from the vCD GUI.
It is a great new feature this one.
I have also double-checked some of the bugs that I have mentioned in my previous blog post about Veeam vCD Portal, and some areas/bugs have already been fixed.

After your Veeam Plug-in for vCloud Director is installed, you start adding VMs to Veeam Backup.

• Hardened Linux Repository.

With this feature, Veeam took a big step to protect your Backup from any ransomware attacks and any unauthorized changes(eq delete files) to your Backup Repository.

How does it work?

First, this is a Linux Backup Repository. So to use this feature, your backups need to be stored in a Linux System.

It uses the Linux filesystem feature by using Linux file attributes(in this i). When Veeam sets these backup files with the attribute they cannot change or delete. These attributes are done at the backup level, and they will be shielded for any change or deletion until the period of immutability is set. Only after that period can files be changed or deleted.

We can set immutability as long as we want. The minimum is 7 days, and the maximum is 9999 days.

Using special service permissions to do this(non-root), even if an attacker has access to Veeam Server credentials, cannot change this, and the file changes cannot be done remotely.

So even your Backup Infrastructure is compromised. Your backups are still available to you, and you can build a new Backup Server and start restoring your infrastructure since the attacker could not access your Backup files.

Here is a quick example of Linux Repository files Hardened.

Image Copyright © Veeam

• File Level Restore (FLR) for Linux file systems without a Helper Appliance.

With this new feature(improved), you can now mount backup from any Linux. This will mount the Linux machine, and you will not need to use a helper appliance to mount/read the files.

In this improved feature, you can also recover files(and use the same process) from any Oracle Solaris or IBM AIX machines when are backed up with Veeam Agents.

• Linux backup proxies now support all transport types (NBD, SAN, FC, iSCSI, HotAdd, Snapshots).

After in the latest v10, Linux was included as Proxy Backups (but only with a few transport types). Now in v11, all transport modes are added to Linux Proxies. These new Linux Proxies with new options are perfect for customers who create Proxies with scripts on a backup job schedule.

In one of my environments, I will also replace some of the Windows Proxies for some Linux Proxies (open source and easy to maintain).

As we can see in the next image, is now possible to use a Windows or Linux Proxy to add a VMware Backup Proxy and both have all the transport mode included.

• New Veeam GUI views

Now we can create filtered views for different Infrastructure(Virtual, Physical, Cloud VMs, etc., or job types). With this, we can clean our view and separate the Backup Infrastructure views.

Check also Anthony blog post about the new v11 features for VCSP partners. This product is already RTM and was launched for VCSP partners.

Next products that will be launched or have already been launched:

• Veeam Backup for AWS v3
• Veeam Backup for Azure v2
• Veeam Backup for Google Cloud Platform v1

I show some of the important new features that Veeam Backup & Replication v11 is coming with the above details. As I said, there are more and more changes and improvements in this new version.

As I said, after the v9.5 update 4 and v10, this Veeam Backup & Replication v11 is another great version and full news that Veeam will launch. Don’t forget to register the live event for Veeam Backup & Replication v11 on the 24th of February HERE.

I hope this information was useful, shared if you think it is worth sharing. If you have any questions or comments, comment here, or contact me on Twitter.