Veeam SureBackup

So today was D-Day for the announcement of the new feature set coming from Veeam. There has been a lot of speculation coming from my blog and other on what this could be and as far as I am aware no one hit the nail on the head.

Working for a Veeam partner I was lucky enough to learn about the new functionality last week, so have been keeping my mouth closed on the subject until now.

So what is it….

From Veeam’s Website www.surebackup.com

Veeam has developed patent-pending technology that will allow you to verify the recoverability of every backup—for every virtual machine (VM), every time. It’s the latest innovation in our SureBackup™ approach to data protection.
So instead of just hoping that you can recover from a backup, you’ll actually know that you can—because you already did so as a routine part of the backup process.

Now when I was first told this I thought hmm this doesn’t sound as interesting as I thought it would, with Veeam recovery being so easy, its simple to do test recoveries to check your backups. But then as I learnt more I found out the system would would automatically do these tests for you by directly mounting the compressed backup file, to an ESX host and verifying the backup! So no more test one machine once a week and hope the others are ok, you can now test them all every backup!

How it works…

How do we do it? By running VMs directly from backups. It’s an ingenious solution to an age-old problem that leverages the power of virtualization and the innovation of Veeam. We call this potent combination Virtualization-Powered Protection™, and it significantly enhances disaster recovery so you can fully realize the promise of virtualization.

Using new patent-pending technology, Veeam publishes the contents of the backup file as a datastore that an ESX host can connect to. During recovery verification, we automatically create VMs in an isolated environment and run them directly from the backup. We start each VM, boot the OS, and confirm that everything is running normally. You can even verify that applications are functioning properly and data is intact.

A key component of this innovative technology is the ability to run a VM directly from a compressed backup file. Since you don’t have to extract the backup, running a VM from the backup is fast and requires no additional storage. Minimal host resources are required and can typically be provided by existing machines—in production, a QA lab, or even your DR (disaster recovery) site.

What this means

No longer do you have to hope you backups are working in-between tests as they can be verified to be working not just valid every backup, the ability to be able to granularly restore elements from any applications by starting a VM from the compressed backup file. This also introduces lots of new possibilities for testing environments etc.

This new feature amongst others will be released with Veeam Backup 5 later on this year, personally I can’t wait for the release and to find out what else Veeam has done to make our life’s easier and less stressful when it comes to backups.

My further hope is that Veeam will build tools to assist us recovering granular items from Exchange and AD etc. As whilst I appreciate this new technology assists with this, nothing would beat a Veeam Restore style view of Exchange etc for mailbox / mail recovery within Veeam Backup 5.

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