Veeam Backup for VMWare – A Deeper Dive

2-in-1: Backup and replication combined

As virtualization increasingly handles mission-critical production workloads, organizations must be assured of effective backup and appropriately fast recovery of the virtual infrastructure. Balancing cost with flexibility is the key: some data requires replication to ensure business continuity, while other data is best backed up and recovered using less expensive hardware and techniques. Veeam Backup offers both techniques – backup and replication – through one interface, in one product, at one price.

Full ESXi support with & without VCB

With introduction of ESXi, Veeam was the first and only vendor to support ESXi both with AND without VMware Consolidated Backup (or VCB). Customers with and without shared storage are able to perform ESXi backups without having the additional overhead of deploying VCB. No ESXi FREE support – Learn More…

Heterogeneous file-level recovery in seconds

Backup is easy, but recovery can be hard – and that’s when the clock is ticking loudest. But with Veeam Backup & Replication, fast recovery is easier than you ever thought possible. Veeam’s fast file-level recovery feature allows you to restore individual files from your image-level backups and replicas in seconds to the latest state, or to a specific point in time. Veeam’s file-level recovery does not require extracting the full VM image to your local drive, or backing up your data twice in order to have both file-level and image-level recovery options readily available. Unlike competitive solutions, file-level restores are performed directly from image and support most of the major operating and file systems, including Windows, Linux, Unix, BSD and Mac.

Enterprise Management Console

NEW A new Enterprise Management Server allows distributed enterprises to manage multiple Veeam Backup & Replication installations from a single web console. This allows you to deploy Veeam Backup & Replication and manage backups and restores according to your administrative, business and security requirements and boundaries. While providing you with centralized backup, Veeam Backup & Replication 4.0 makes decentralized recovery and backup verification possible, thus addressing real-world enterprise deployment scenarios. For example, Exchange recoveries can be handled by the Exchange administrators group, while domain controller recovery requires another skill set, and is best performed by Active Directory administrators.

Native support for this distributed architecture also gives you the ability to easily scale your VMware backup infrastructure as your virtual environment grows – while still providing centralized management and reporting capabilities to senior IT management.

Native support for vSphere

NEW Veeam Backup & Replication now offers not just compatibility, but full and native support for VMware vSphere, including all new vSphere functionality:

• Native support for thin-provisioned disks for faster full VM backups and restores, and to reduce the amount of storage required to host your production VMs.
• Ability to leverage ESX4 changed block tracking for lightning-fast incremental backup. For instance, if a VM only had 5 percent changes since the last backup, the incremental backup time will be 20 times faster.
• Support for virtual applications (vApp) for more flexibility with job setup.

Veeam Backup also fully supports the new vStorage API – the next generation of VMware Consolidated Backup, the vStorage API for Data Protection is the recommended API for VMware vSphere backup going forward. For example, the backup of vSphere Fault Tolerant VMs will only be possible with the vStorage API. While Veeam is still committed to supporting VCB as long as our customers will require it, native support for the vStorage API makes Veeam Backup the most future-proof solution currently available on the market.

Near-CDP replication at a fraction of the cost

NEW Veeam Backup & Replication 4.0 leverages the new vSphere ESX(i) 4 functionality to be able to provide extremely fast incremental replication cycles. This ability to run replication jobs as often as every few minutes allows extremely low recovery point objectives, thus providing near-CDP replication at a fraction of the cost. Unlike competitive solutions, Veeam Backup & Replication does not require that replicated VMs run with open snapshots that prevent Live Migration and DRS.

Database-consistent backup for application recovery

Veeam Backup & Replication leverages Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) functionality to ensure consistent hot backups of the applications within your running virtual machines. Unlike other vendors featuring limited VSS support, Veeam provides the most complete implementation of VSS support, equipping you for proper restore of VSS-aware applications (e.g. Active Directory, Exchange) from the created backups.

Reduced storage costs with data de-duplication

When performing backups of multiple virtual machines, Veeam Backup & Replication de-duplicates similar blocks inside the backup file. De-duplication provides exceptional results when you back up multiple virtual machines created from a single template, or VMs with gigabytes of free space on their preallocated logical drives. Data de-duplication reduces disk space requirements for your backups, which results in significant cost savings. Veeam Backup & Replication also offers a compatibility mode for storage devices using hardware de-duplication.

Replica rollback

Backups and replicas produced with Veeam Backup & Replication can be easily restored to a particular point in time. This protects your infrastructure against both hardware and software corruptions – such as in the case of a virus – when software corruption is usually noticed only after a few replication cycles.