I am happy to announce that NEW Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 is now generally available (GA) and ready for download! This latest version of our flagship product builds even further upon a number of enterprise enhancements introduced with v9 to help organizations meet today’s service-level objectives enabling the recovery of any IT service and related applications and data within seconds and minutes.
For a .5 release, 9.5 really stands out by adding a number of critical features designed to help enterprises scale more effectively and maintain Availability. To provide perspective on just how much new technology is being introduced, check out the What’s New in Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 and What’s New in Veeam ONE 9.5 documents for a complete list of each new feature with descriptions. For those of you who are just starting to familiarize yourself with 9.5, below is a list of blogs we have published to date on six of the more notable features being introduced:
- Enterprise scalability and more coming in Veeam Availability Suite 9.5!
- Advanced ReFS integration coming in Veeam Availability Suite 9.5
- Veeam Announces FULL integration with Microsoft 2016 Data Center Technologies in NEW Veeam Availability Suite 9.5
- Cloud Restore for ANY Veeam Backup coming in Veeam Availability Suite 9.5
- Advanced integration with Nimble Storage coming in Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 for VMware!
- Self-service backup and restore capabilities for VMware vCloud Director coming in Veeam Availability Suite 9.5
Enhanced enterprise scalability
To help scale up backup and replication activities, as well as shorten backup windows while reducing impact on production environments, Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 introduces a whole new collection of enterprise scalability enhancements. Enhancements include accelerated backup performance, faster restores of larger VMs and reduced loads on primary and backup storage, as well as virtual infrastructure servers.
Additionally, to improve performance and capacity efficiencies for large-scale datasets, 9.5 is also introducing Advanced ReFS Integration, which in all honesty is my favorite new feature. Advanced ReFS Integration will help ensure backup data resiliency and the protection of critical apps through fast cloning of Veeam backups — creating and transforming synthetic full backup files up to 10x faster. This will shorten backup windows and lower backup storage load, as well as reduce backup storage capacity consumption with spaceless full backup technology, and ensure backup archive integrity by monitoring background data corruption.
FULL support for Microsoft 2016
And continuing a Veeam tradition by being the first to FULLY support the latest technologies introduced by our partners, Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 also FULLY supports Microsoft 2016 Data Center Technologies. The integration not only includes support for Windows Server 2016 and Hyper-V 2016, but also the latest versions of Microsoft Active Directory, Exchange, SharePoint and SQL Server.
More great features
The list goes on! Direct Restore to Microsoft Azure delivers cloud restore for Veeam backups to improve scalability and increase efficiencies. With 9.5, you can restore backups directly to the cloud by leveraging Azure as an on-demand cloud data center for DR, taking full advantage of Azure’s flexible and scalable cloud resources. But if that’s not enough, we have also expanded our Storage Snapshot support for Nimble Storage users, including a new Veeam Explorer for Nimble Storage for fast recoveries, new chargeback and billing functionality in Veeam ONE to help better calculate the cost of compute and storage resources used within an organization or service offerings, and added VMware vCloud Director Support to empower tenants with self-service backup and restore capabilities, plus much more!
Download NEW Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 today!
Don’t wait! Download NEW Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 today to take full advantage of our latest and greatest technology and remember to join us for a LIVE webinar, Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 Delivers Enterprise Scalability: Now Generally Available!, hosted by Jeff Crum, Director of Global Product Marketing and Rick Vanover, Director of Technical Product Marketing on December 1, 2016.
But wait… as always, there’s More!
Yesterday, with impeccable timing, VMware announced the general availability of vSphere 6.5. As always, we started work on the full integration of vSphere 6.5 since its beta, however we now need adequate time to integrate the final VDDK code and then perform full regressive testing against the final vSphere 6.5 code to ensure reliability of our advanced vSphere integrations. Therefore, full support for vSphere 6.5 in Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 will be delivered as a part of Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 Update 1. And while an exact support timeline will depend on the results of our testing, historically we deliver support for new vSphere releases approximately two months after the final code availability.