When Veeam Backup & Replication v11 went available in February of this year, I had no idea how much of an impact this release would have on the market. V11 came in my 11th year here are Veeam, and while I knew it was the biggest release we’ve ever had — call me impressed!
Veeam Backup & Replication v11 overview
V11 ushered in over 200 new capabilities and enhancements. The headlining capabilities that continue to be deployed in the market include Continuous Data Protection (CDP), Hardened Linux Repository, new Instant Recovery capabilities for NAS, Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle databases, archive storage support in the cloud and more Veeam-powered Backup as a Service (BaaS) and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) options than ever.
We also took V11 as a great way to make the upgrade process easier (Check out my V11 Upgrade Center) by leveraging the Veeam Universal License and by having a cumulative patch after the General Availability (GA) of V11.
Veeam Backup & Replication v11 resources
The innovation doesn’t stop there, however. V11 has been updated yet again to not only incorporate any additional scenarios that have been discovered since GA but also to incorporate new capabilities that were ready. By the way, the best way to know the scoop on what’s going on is to sign up for the Veeam R&D Forums, there you will get a weekly report right from Anton Gostev (senior VP of Product Management) himself on what’s the latest state of products from Veeam. Another great resource to be plugged into is the Veeam Community Resource Hub, which has scripts, discussions and suage scenarios discussed by an active group of Veeam users.
The latest update has been packaged as V11a and brings the latest updates since the GA but also new capabilities. The most notable of those is continued iteration in the cloud providing updates for AWS, Azure and GCP. In addition, begin adopting and testing now with full Windows Server 2022 support. Speaking of deep integration, V11a now has the ability to have Kasten K10 backup storage managed by Veeam Backup & Replication repositories which was previewed at VeeamON. This is a very easy way to let the Veeam backup infrastructure manage the Kubernetes backups provided by Kasten K10 by Veeam.
Veeam Backup & Replication v11 beats ransomware
While all of this is great momentum with new capabilities to be excited about, we have to constantly be on the watch out for threats to data. Ransomware is something we all have to deal with and we have continued to drive innovation in our productst to provide more immutability options than ever. Since GA, two significant white papers have been published to provide you the information you need to be resilient against ransomware:
- Protect against Ransomware with Immutable Backups: a Veeam Guide (Includes SEC Rule 17a-4(f), FINRA Rule 4511 and CFTC Rule 1.31 (c)-(d) compliant configuration) by Hannes Kasparick in Veeam Product Management.
- 5 Ransomware Protection Best Practices – Veeam’s Definitive Guide for Data Protection by myself and Edwin Weijdema in Veeam Product Strategy.
These two resources are the way to ensure you have everything you need against the threats out there today.
What are others saying about V11?
Now that V11 has been out in market a bit, I had a chance to reach out to the Veeam Vanguards and Veeam Legends to see what their favorite V11 features are, here’s what they had to say:
Mildur, a Veeam Legend:
“My favorite feature is the new Linux Hardened Repo, it gives us an additional layer of security for the primary backup repository.
My second favorite feature is Linux FLR without the FLR Appliance. We can leverage our management linux VMs to do the FLR restore and don‘t need to add an extra vSphere or Hyper-V host to do the FLR restores. A good feature if you have only Nutanix AHV hosts in your environment.”
Frank Iversen, a Veeam Legend:
“My favorite feature is, without any doubt, the cloud-native backup options in AWS. With immutable backups we have a powerful defense against ransomware attacks.”
Didier Von Hoye, a Veeam Vanguard:
“The Veeam Hardened Repository in Veeam Backup & Replication v11 has improved our on-premises protection against ransomware significantly. No longer is only our off-site capacity tier on S3 object storage in the cloud protected via immutability. In addition, our on-premises Linux SOBR repository performance tiers, for both primary and secondary backups, now also benefit from immutability without 3rd party solution but on our hardware.”
James Kilby, a Veeam Vanguard:
“The Veeam Archive Tier and additional immutability options are excellent ways of protecting against site failure and site compromise.”
Michael Paul, a Veeam Legend:
“My favourite Veeam V11 feature is the expanded integration with Veeam Backup for AWS/Azure and coming in V11a, GCP. It’s time saving and enables new protection dataflows such as cloud to tape and cloud to Veeam Cloud Connect, ensuring 3-2-1 backup compliance.”
BertrandFR, a Veeam Legend:
“My first favourite feature is the Hardened Linux Repository, more security on performance tier.
My second favourite feature is CDP, the RPO at 15s to the second datacenter is awesome!”
Chris Childerhose, a Veeam Vanguard:
“My favourite Veeam V11 capability is the new CDP feature, it has allowed for another option for clients to have for DRaaS services.”
Al Rasheed, a Veeam Vanguard:
“The capabilities built into V11 provide stability, ease of use and peace of mind. With Veeam’s customer support, your modern data strategy is secure with minimal downtime or data loss.”
Geoff Burke, a Veeam Legend:
“One of my favorites is the persistent agent. There was a reg edit for Linux Agents before and it was dealing with those that I noticed how the constant injecting of agents could be detrimental in some cases. Since App aware backups in windows use an injected agent it is good to have the option to just leave it running in the guest OS.”
Joe Meixner, a Veeam Legend:
“My favorite feature is the Hardened Linux Repository. It gives you some more protection against encryption malware.
Second favorite feature is the backup job based on a VMware tag combination. It is a great feature to assign VMs to jobs automatically.”
vNote42, a Veeam Legend and Veeam Vanguard:
“My favorite Veeam V11 capability is the hardened repository. With it you can implement immutable backups on-prem seamlessly. It is used like a regular repository.
Also a great new feature in V11 is Persistent Guest Agent. It can be used to manage backup agents in a more secure way.”
Have you seen Veeam lately?
The reality is that V11 brings so many new capabilities, it’s sometimes hard to start and decide where to start and what to look at. Don’t worry as it is easier than you think to get started. You can download a trial very easily from the website and have a backup running in just minutes. Likewise if you haven’t upgraded to V11 yet, it’s easier than ever to do so. I’ve updated the V11 Upgrade Center to cover V11a and you can download V11a there.