Instant VM Recovery is a technology that has quickly become a fundamental requirement in the backup industry today. I’m happy to say that Veeam was the first to provide this technology to the market, and it is by far the most iterated and advanced implementation out there. In Veeam Availability Suite v10, our next-generation Instant Recovery engine has been significantly enhanced; effectively reinventing its use cases for you and your data. In this blog post, I’ll overview a number of the new improvements in v10.
Veeam Availability Suite v10
As far as major releases go for Veeam, we usually see improvements for Instant VM Recovery in every release. In this v10 offering of Veeam’s next-generation Instant Recovery engine, there are many under-the-hood improvements that significantly enhance the capability. The best part about the new enhancements is that they are there by default in v10; no need to configure or enable them! This includes intelligently optimizing the interaction with the backup storage, new caching in RAM of blocks to reduce latency, and a look-ahead, pre-fetch process for higher performance. While slight optimizations and improvements are normal, v10 breaks the norm by improving instant recovery performance by an order of magnitude! And even more importantly, these improvements enable the solid foundation for two new and very significant Instant VM Recovery techniques: Multi-VM Instant Recovery and the ability to instantly recover ANY Veeam backup to vSphere.
Simplify mass recovery with Multi-VM Instant Recovery
Let’s look at Multi-VM Instant Recovery. This is a very new, significant capability to restore many VMs concurrently and instantly in one action. This is a great way to rapidly recover in several situations, such as a critical application has failed and the best way to restore it is all the systems from the same restore point.
A major use case is if an entire host or storage system failed and many systems are offline; you can now quickly restore all the impacted systems with Instant VM Recovery technology at once per platform. This brings Instant VM Recovery technology to a whole new level of business value, by restoring a business service in its entirety by collectively restoring all the platform components needed. Quickly!
One of my small, favorite parts about this implementation, especially for testing use cases, is that you can dismount multiple Instant VM Recoveries at once as well. Multi-VM Instant Recovery is shown in the figure below:
Instantly recover ANY Veeam backup to VMware vSphere
The Instant VM Recovery technology improvements in v10 also bring a new restore option, restoring to vSphere from backups made by Veeam Agents or the Veeam Backup & Replication for Microsoft Hyper-V and Nutanix AHV, and even by our new cloud-native backup solutions. We have for a while now had the ability to do instant recovery of Windows Agent backups to Hyper-V and now the story is significantly expanded by enabling this to happen for additional backup types to vSphere. There are many use cases to restore a Veeam Agent backup to a hypervisor, most of which are centered around hybrid cloud DR. Some of the use cases are rather common and non-critical, while others are more critical, such as a physical server has failed, and hardware replacement time comes into play. Being at the mercy of shipping and installation time of replacement parts raises an important question: “What if we could instantly restore the backup NOW to a VM?” This is especially important if the system is already a candidate for virtualization, and if you can restore immediately — you have essentially achieved a quick migration from physical to virtual, achieving both goals at once.
We have seen this logic also with the ability to restore backups to AWS and Azure. Often, people restore to the new platform not because they want to, but because they must restore the system quickly. And in the case of Instant VM Recovery of ANY Veeam backup to a vSphere VM, you now have the ability to seamlessly restore to a VM in just minutes.
Bet on the innovation leader
The Instant VM Recovery engine is significantly enhanced in Veeam Availability Suite v10 with Multi-VM Instant Recovery and Instant Restore from any Veeam backup. This technology has been a game-changer since it was released to market in October of 2010 and will be a game-changer yet again into the future. Visit go.veeam.com/v10 for the latest information and take advantage of instant recovery with the company who started it all!