Veeam is a true pioneer of Instant Recovery. We all know that Veeam has brought many Instant VM Recovery capabilities to market and continued to innovate on this. Veeam Backup & Replication v11 continues to innovate on this cornerstone capability, now broadening the story to applications and file data.
Instant Recovery background
The Instant Recovery story at Veeam started in the v5 release in 2010, which seems like such a long time ago! Every release since has had some form of enhancement to the capability. Whether it is performance, scalability or new platforms. New platform support included Hyper-V Instant VM Recovery and allowing Agent backups to recover instantly as a VM. V10 also introduced multiple VM Instant VM Recovery alongside significant performance improvements. But Veeam isn’t going to stop there.
New Instant Recovery in Veeam Availability Suite v11
Let’s take what we have done in the market with and raise the bar. Enter Veeam Backup & Replication v11. Instant Recovery expands to some truly amazing use cases: SQL Server and Oracle Databases, NAS File Shares and any backup to Hyper-V. I’ll explain these use cases in this post but take away one key thing – Veeam will continue to innovate and iterate Instant Recovery.
Where to use Instant Recovery
Instant Recovery is a high-speed recovery technique that effectively reverses the traditional notion of recovery. Instead of waiting for data to be retrieved for use in recovery, Instant Recovery makes it immediately usable from the backup infrastructure. Organizations who understand Instant Recovery will in many situations just simply take this option in lieu of troubleshooting a problem as this is just a faster resumption of whatever business service is in question. In short, use Instant Recovery when you need a fast recovery.
How to use Instant Recovery
Instant Recovery is easy to use with Veeam and it sits alongside other recovery techniques such as file-level, application-item, whole system and other types. It is available in the user interface wizards as well as extensible through scripting such as PowerShell. The figure below shows an Instant VM Recovery launched from the wizard:
Veeam Backup & Replication v11 builds on the Instant Recovery success here at Veeam and now takes this experience to a number of new use cases:
SQL Databases
Veeam Backup & Replication v11 now allows Instant Recovery of a failed SQL Server database into the SQL Server it came from or even a different one. This is a powerful high-speed recovery technique if an enterprise application’s data is not available. This also allows a seamless and flexible way to schedule the switchover back to the production storage.
Oracle Databases
Oracle databases also get some love in Veeam Backup & Replication v11! A failed Oracle database can also benefit from Instant Recovery. If you ever have used the Publish capability in place with previous versions, this closes the loop in being a complete end-to-end high-speed recovery technique for databases.
If a file share or NAS system were to be completely offline, that could be a significant outage. Wouldn’t it be great if we could get access to the files until the device is back online? Well, that’s an area where Veeam Backup & Replication v11 can help as well. V11 introduces an Instant Publish of a file share backup for quick retrieval of critical data. This will offer an emulated SMB share contents from the backup storage to allow organizations to be back in business very quickly!
Virtual Machines
Last but not least, Veeam have made a significant innovation around a new recovery technique for Hyper-V VMs. Since V10, Veeam has had the ability to take any image-based backup and instantly restore that as a VM in VMware vSphere. Now, any image-based backup can be restored instantly as a Hyper-V VM. This opens up some interesting emergency recovery use cases as well as special test and development use cases.
Conclusion
The Instant Recovery enhancements coming in V11 are going to be great ways to quickly recover database, file shares and of course VMs. These enhancements are a great part of the story, but not all of it. Be sure to read up on all of the other great enhancements for V11 as well as download a trial!