Backing up vCloud Director environment has been one of those hot topics lately, as not many backup vendors have mastered it yet. All the big players in town are promising a fully integrated solution by this year end, but we still to see a fully integrated solution. I believe within the next 6 months, we will have most major backup vendors offering different vCD backup solutions with varying integration levels.
Veeam has offered support for backing up vCD VMs, but not vAPPs & vCD metadata in the current release but this seems to change soon. Veeam seems to lead the league by planning to deliver the first real vCD backup that is fully integrated pretty soon with private betas even closer. It got me quite interested that I have setup an exclusive interview with Rick Vanover (product strategy specialist for Veeam Software) to get my readers the answers on what is Veeam will be really offering in their upcoming Veeam 7(Which is a lot to be excited about?). I don’t want to keep you any longer, below is the full interview questions that Rick was kind enough to share the answer with me.
Q: At what level is your vCD Backup working? Is it a provider or tenant focused? Would there be away for a tenant (vCloud Org Admin) to backup his VM without getting in touch with a provider?
A: The enhanced vCD support will be built into the Veeam Backup & Replication User Interface. This means it will still be targeted to the VM admin as the product has historically. There will be an additional extensible interface that we’ve not announced that will be of great interest to providers.
Q: How is your solution different/distinguished from others?
A: The main difference is vCD restore. This includes vApps and VDCs created in vCD so that the metadata is restored. Further, there are a lot of challenges to restore the vCD metadata by other products, v7 will make that simpler.
Q: Are you offering any new exciting features with your new release as you always have? Can you share some of them with us?
A: Tomorrow we are announcing the next piece, the vSphere Web Client for Veeam Backup & Replication. There will be 7 major features announced in the countdown at go.veeam.com/v7
Q: What of your existing advanced features will be compatible with vCD backup? VM Instant Recovery? Universal File-Level Recovery? SureBackup? U-AIR® (Universal Application-Item Recovery)?
A: Because vSphere is still underneath, all of those will still be supported. I am not sure however if Instant VM Recovery will go back to the vApp, but we can do IVMR.
The only notable missing feature will be replication, but if you think about it… doesn’t make sense in vCD.
Q: When will it hit the market? (If you can not share exact date, maybe a clue or estimate)
A: Q3, private betas before then
Q: Will your current customers be able to upgrade directly? Any extra cost?
A: The upgrade path hasn’t been finalized or announced
Q: Will the upgrade to the new version be as smooth as earlier versions or a rip & replace?
A: That is what is planned
Q: Will it allow customers to backup their vSphere VMs or vCloud Director vAPPs to a VMware vCloud Director based public Cloud? If not any plan on that?
A: If the public cloud is something we can see straight away and unobstructed, yes.
Q: Any extra info would you like to share with my reader? Videos? Images? demos?
Below are two good Videos to get you even more excited:
Veeam Backup & Replication V7 seems to offer the following extra functionality that is currently missing in the current release of Veeam & most other backup solutions out there:
– The ability to backup vAPPs, Organization and other vCD entities including metadata
– Display the vCD infrastructure directly in Veeam Backup & restore
– The ability to restore vApps and VMs directly to vCD
– It will support restoring fast-provisioned and thin-provisioned VMs.
Further to its vCloud Integration enhancement in V7, Veeam is introducing the below new features:
– Native Tape Support is one feature that I know many of Veeam customers are waiting for it patiently. Now this is coming with Veeam 7, so no longer you will need a separate software to push Veeam backup to tape.
– Backup from Storage Snapshots
– vSphere Web Client integration, where you will be able to monitor backups and backup infrastructure directly from vSphere, identify unprotected VMs, and simplify capacity planning.
– Virtual Lab for Replicas: SureReplica lets you automatically verify every restore point in every replica, and Virtual Lab for Replicas also delivers fast agent-free recovery of application objects(U-AIR) and On-Demand Sandboxes for testing, training and troubleshooting.
– Built-in WAN Acceleration: Remove the hurdles to offsite storage with automated, agent-free backup copy jobs and built-in WAN acceleration.
Hope this get you excited & make sure to visit http://go.veeam.com/v7 regularly to keep track of the major features announced during the Veeam 7 countdown.
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