A few days ago, Veeam launched a new update for Veeam Backup & Replication 11a with the build 11.0.1.1261. In this Veeam launched Veeam Backup & Replication 11a will try to highlight the main features added to this new version and the improvements as the bug fix.
Note: This version is still not GA(Generally Available) it means you can download it from the Veeam product list yet, and you need to download it from the KB Veeam page HERE.
This update can only be upgradable from 9.5 Update 4b (build 9.5.4.2866) or later. If you have an older version, you must upgrade to 9.5 4b at least, and then upgrade to this version. Also, If Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 is installed on the same server, it must be upgraded to at least version 5d (build 5.0.3.1033) before installing Veeam Backup & Replication 11a.
What is new in this Veeam Backup & Replication 11a
New supported systems:
- Microsoft Windows Server 2022 and Microsoft Windows 10 21H1
- Microsoft Windows 11 readiness
- Microsoft Azure Stack HCI version 21H2
- RHEL/CentOS 8.4, Ubuntu 21.04, Debian 11, SLES 15 SP3, OpenSUSE Leap 15.3, Fedora 34
- VMware Cloud Director 10.3 support
- VMware VMC 15 support
- VMware vSphere 7.0 U3 readiness
From the above list, I would like to highlight two important updates. First support to VMware Cloud Director 10.3 and Veeam Self-Service Backup Portal is supported for multiple Cloud Director servers. Meaning we can have more than one vCD using Veeam Self-Service Backup Portal.
This is a good improvement since we have this issue in the company where we have several vCDs assigned to different teams, and Veeam Portal can only manage one. Now we can add more and let multi-teams handle their environments.
Important note for Windows 2022: Avoid upgrading your existing Server 2019 based ReFS backup repositories to Server 2022 and/or mounting ReFS volumes from Server 2019 to new Server 2022 installs until Microsoft addresses the known regression in the ReFS format upgrade code.
New Cloud-native capabilities
- Native protection of additional services: Expand native backup and recovery to Amazon Elastic File System (Amazon EFS) systems and Microsoft Azure SQL Databases.
- Lowest cost archive storage: Achieve long-term retention goals for cloud-native backups within budgets. New support for Amazon S3 Glacier and Glacier Deep Archive, Microsoft Azure Archive Storage and Google Cloud Archive storage cuts data archival costs by as much as 50X.
- Increased security and control: Safeguard encrypted backup data from ransomware and other cyber threats. Integrations with AWS Key Management Service (KMS) and Azure Key Vault, as well as new RBAC functionality, increases security with streamlined control over access authorizations.
- Fully integrated Google Cloud Platform (GCP) support: GCP protection is now built directly into the Veeam Backup & Replication console. Further, with V11a, customers can now restore image-level backups created by ANY Veeam product directly to a GCE VM for cloud disaster recovery of any workload. With these additions, Veeam now supports centrally managed cloud-native backups and Direct Restore functionality for all three leading hyperscalers.
Adding Google Cloud Platform (GCP) into the portfolio support is a great move. We now can restore any backup to GCP, and Veeam now supports the three major Cloud providers.
In the above updates for Cloud, I don’t use in production Veeam in the Cloud for Backups or DR, so I cannot provide much feedback on the new supported features. Soon we will also see Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
More features added to Veeam Backup & Replication 11a
- Instant Recovery to Nutanix AHV
With the new Veeam Backup for Nutanix AHV v3 included in this update, Veeam expands its patented instant recovery functionality to additional hypervisors. Customers can now instantly recover image-level backups created by ANY Veeam product to a Nutanix AHV VM for instant disaster recovery of any workload – cloud, virtual, or physical. This functionality requires Nutanix AHV 6.0 or later.
- Centralized management for IBM AIX and Oracle Solaris protection
Veeam Agents for IBM AIX and Oracle Solaris jobs can now be centrally monitored and managed through the integration with Veeam Backup & Replication protection groups of the “Computers with pre-installed agents” type. In addition, you can now perform file-level recovery from such backups in Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager.
- Red Hat® Virtualization (RHV) support readiness
With support for a fourth hypervisor in a supported public beta, Veeam Backup & Replication v11a offers reliable integrated backup for Red Hat Virtualization (RHV) 4.4.7 or later so customers can create efficient backups of RHV VMs utilizing native change block tracking and be prepared for any disaster.
Since we know and notice that some customers are looking for cheaper hypervisor solutions and move from VMware because of license prices, particularly the hosting companies, and RHV is a good alternative, Veeam is already thinking ahead and includes RHV support.
- Kasten by Veeam K10 integration readiness
With the new integration released as part of Veeam Backup & Replication v11a, K10 and Veeam customers will be able to leverage existing investments in backup infrastructure. The upcoming Kasten K10 v4.5 will be able to direct backups of Kubernetes clusters that leverage VMware persistent volumes to a Veeam Backup & Replication repository where its lifecycle can be managed and additional Veeam features and capabilities leveraged. This article will be updated with any additional requirements once the integration is validated on the K10 v4.5 GA code.
Kasten is a new product for Veeam that acquired Kasten this year and is a Full integrated Backup Solution for Kubernetes and has been integrated with Veeam Products, in this case with Veeam Backup & Replication 11a.
This is a product that I didn’t check properly. It is on my list with the rest of the Kubernetes, but I didn’t have time to do it all. When I start, I plan to write a full review of this product.
Other Improvements and Enhancements
- Veeam Continuous Data Protect (CDP): improved performance and reduced CPU usage during the initial synchronization, added better monitoring and reporting for replication conveyor issues, added compatibility with a number of VMware Virtual Volumes (vVOLs) implementations, removed existing limitations on maximum I/O journal size for VMware vVOLs and VMware vSAN target storage.
Glad that Veeam fixed these “issues” with the limitations for vVOL and vSAN, and this is something that I need to test and double-check if Veeam did fix the limitation and improve the use of vVOLS.
CDP is a great feature, and everything that is done to improve performance in this feature is always welcome. We hope that Veeam continues to improve this awesome feature.
- Improved health check performance: storage-level corruption guard functionality will now also use the advanced data fetcher technology, which should significantly improve its performance on enterprise-grade backup storage hardware.
- Elliptic curve cryptography: in addition to data encryption, elliptic curve based keys are now supported for registering Linux servers with Veeam Backup & Replication using the SSH public key authentication method.
- Restore directly from Capacity Tier: when a restore process is initiated from backups stored in the Capacity Tier (using the Backups > Object Storage node), we will no longer read matching data blocks from the Performance Tier and instead use solely the data from object storage. This capability can be useful for performing periodic non-disruptive restore tests directly from the cloud without putting your Performance Tier into maintenance mode.
- Object storage compatibility: to help object storage devices with limited scalability, you can again enable your backup jobs to use the 8MB block size to reduce the number of objects created. To make this option visible, create the UIShowLegacyBlockSize (DWORD, 1) registry value under the ‘HKLM\SOFTWARE\Veeam\Veeam Backup and Replication’ key on the backup server. Keep in mind that this option significantly increases incremental backups size and requires an active full backup to be activated.
- External repositories: backup server will now detect the presence of new restore points as they appear, instead of having to wait for daily and/or manual rescan to be performed, thus addressing various inconsistencies in the user interface.
Another good improvement in this above feature. I need to do this almost daily a rescan to get the restore points listed.
- Microsoft Azure authentication library: we have switched from ADAL to the recommended and more secure Microsoft Authentication Library. Microsoft plans to discontinue ADAL support entirely in mid-2022.
- Microsoft SCVMM: we added the infrastructure caching service to improve the performance of SCVMM-integrated jobs and user interface operations in large Hyper-V environments registered with Veeam via SCVMM server.
This is an area where I have had a lot of issues with Veeam. Using Veeam with SCVMM and Hyper-V. I even have a blog post that has been in draft for a long time, waiting to fix some of these issues and adequately use SCVMM with Veeam for Hyper-V. I will try this in the following weeks and see if now those issues are resolved.
- VMware vSAN integration: the task scheduler now uses the dedicated threshold of a maximum number of open VM snapshots per vSAN datastores, with the default limit of 32 snapshots. You can control this setting with the VSANMaxSnapshotsNum (DWORD) registry value under the ‘HKLM\SOFTWARE\Veeam\Veeam Backup and Replication’ key on the backup server.
Resolved Issues
Version 11a includes over 2000 minor enhancements and fixes based on our customer’s feedback, the most significant of which are listed below. It also includes fixes from all cumulative patches for the original V11 release.
Veeam did fix a lot of issues with this new version, but also in the recent updates. I will not list all here. Would you mind checking the Veeam fix list?
Check also Veeam Release Notes for this new version.
Final Notes
I still didn’t test this new update properly. I updated one of my homelab Veeam Backup Server(unfortunately, now I have my homelab down with one of the main servers broken and my HP Brocade). I updated today one of our Veeam Backup in production. No issues updating to this new version, and now plan to test this update properly next week.
Check also other recent releases updates from Veeam
Next week, I will start a series of blog posts about Veeam that I will call Veeam Stories. I have worked with Veeam since 2007/2008 and have some good stories about full disaster recovery, complete data loss, and where Veeam entered and helped save some of my customers and made a full recovery.
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GoodSync and Gs Richcopy 360 are good alternatives to Veeam Backup for Azure blob and AWS S3
If you want to use it for personal files or something similar, maybe. For professional use and also for DR and VMs, sorry but not even close.