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Veeam Availability Suite technical advantages for US Federal government customers

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ContentsIntroduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Executive summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Target audience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Components . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Benefits of Veeam Availability Suite . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Benefits in an enterprise environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Reduced management overhead and application protection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Optimal hypervisor interaction and support . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Parallel processing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Quick backup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

DirectNFS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11

Enhanced HotAdd processing “Virtual Appliance Mode” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11

(vCenter) Infrastructure Cache . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11

Backup from Storage Snapshot/off-host backup . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .11

No VM (disk) size limitation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Veeam supports the newest hypervisor versions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Reduced data flow . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

The Veeam way of deduplication/compression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

VM Pagefile + deleted files + folder excludes for image-level backups . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Integrated WAN Acceleration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Single image CBT level backup for OS and applications . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Veeam engine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Easy to use . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Enterprise scalability with load balancing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Bottleneck analysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Easy Veeam infrastructure DR . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

Transportable backup files . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13



Easy integration project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Veeam can be implemented in a handful of days and coexist with existing backup tools . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Minimal training needed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Integration into existing backup software (For example: scheduling and backup to existing tape) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Licensed per hypervisor populated host CPU socket . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Instant recovery . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Instant recovery out of backup or storage snapshots without shadow VM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

VM Failover . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Incremental restore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Proactive restore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Instant application access with Veeam Explorers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

SureBackup: Automated recovery tests . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

On-Demand Sandbox™ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

Veeam also uses VMware Storage API . What´s the difference? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

Backup/restore speed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

vCenter optimizations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

Using block cloning technologies at backup targets . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

About Veeam Software . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18



IntroductionThis technical brief provides an overview of the disaster and data recovery solutions Veeam® offers for VMware and Hyper-V environments and Veeam’s unique feature set .

Executive summaryAs enterprise companies add all kinds of workloads — including their most important tier 1 applications — to their virtual environment, they’ll need high-end scalability, reliability and Availability to address 24x7 workload needs . Virtualization and many servers result in gigantic data volumes, and using the best tool to back up virtual machines (VMs) is imperative . With features that set it apart in the VM backup market, Veeam Software offers the added value that is needed to enable Availability for the Always-On Enterprise™ . One highlight is Veeam’s ability to restore a server and its services to users in just two minutes, plus the time for the operating system to start — regardless of the VM size . This feature has been part of Veeam Backup & Replication™ for more than five years .

Specifically, this white paper illustrates the challenges that big virtualization systems bring and how Veeam addresses those with market-unique features . It also documents why VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V API-based backups are “not the same” across multiple backup vendors and why it’s important to enhance those APIs for better performance and virtualization support .

Target audienceThis white paper’s target audience includes customers, potential customers and partners who want to integrate Veeam Availability Suite™ in their enterprise IT environment, understand why Veeam is a good fit and learn more about the unique features .

ComponentsVeeam Availability Suite Veeam’s backup and disaster recovery software suite

Veeam Backup & Replication

As part of a Veeam Availability Suite, Veeam Backup & Replication offers quick and reliable backup and restore of VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V VMs and data . This includes combining VM backup and replication in a single solution . Veeam Backup & Replication is built for virtualization and it takes full advantage of virtualization to redefine backup and restore, setting new standards in the process .

Veeam ONE™Monitoring, reporting, change documentation, charge back and optimization analysis for backup and virtual environments .

Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows and Veeam Agent for Linux

Back up for physical and public cloud servers .



Benefits of Veeam Availability SuiteData centers with VMware infrastructures are now confronted with immense virtual infrastructure growth . This is because companies constantly require more and more applications, which are usually installed on virtual servers . This is also true for existing, business-critical applications, which are also virtualized .

Existing backup concepts based on (virtual) server agents are no longer appropriate because they can’t meet today’s requirements for restore flexibility and recovery times . Available resources for the backup processes commonly installed on server systems are used (indexing and checking for changed files) . These free resources are a limited commodity in virtualization . Because backups are often started at the same time, the scan processes for changed files and backup streams can overload the server or storage systems . The load is at least one factor that reduces overall performance in that timeframe .

Agents consume many resources on individual VMs, and this can require additional hardware and virtualization licenses . Agents also need to be managed and maintained by IT staff . In addition, virtualization resources are shared, including networking . Since agents all send their data out of shared network resources, this commonly becomes a bottleneck for backups .

Traditional backup tools are often organized horizontally and many different teams work with their layer of restore . It can take a long time until the storage, virtualization, OS/bare-metal (VM) restore and application teams make it to the point where a service is back online quickly in case of an emergency . The whole market is shifting to a software-defined data center approach and customers with a 24 .7 .365 uptime demand will being leaning this way . It’s key to organize the admin teams vertically with access and knowledge to all layers of IT to provide tactical power in case emergencies . Veeam fit perfectly in this approach with its powerful backup, restore and disaster recovery (DR) features, while also providing support for the newest virtualization and storage technologies .

Veeam uses hypervisor APIs and optional Storage Snapshots to create image-level backups that protect whole VMs, including the hypervisor VM configuration, boot disks, data disks and applications . It leverages VMware Change Block Tracking, Hyper-V Resilient Change Tracking (Hyper-V on Win 2016) and Veeam Changed Block Tracking (CBT) (Hyper-V on Windows 2012 R2 or older Windows Versions) to create incremental forever backups . It only backs up the changed blocks, which is less than 3% of the used data for an average customer . This approach is used to backup Server OS, applications and databases within a single backup run leveraging Veaam’s unique agentless application aware backup technology . This means there is no need to install agents for any application . The following restores are available from a single backup run:

• VMs: Instant VM Recovery® can bring up your applications in two minutes, plus the time for the OS to start . Incremental restore can be used to restore only the changes from the last backup on the disk block level to the original VM .

https://helpcenter.veeam.com/backup/vsphere/incremental_restore.html




• VM disks: If you install the wrong software or patch, you can revert for example the OS disk changes with Quick Rollback, which is very fast and will preserve the data disks and application databases .

• File restore for Windows/Linux: Veeam supports over 18 file systems, including Windows GPT, dynamic disks, extended disks, Windows Software Raid, Windows deduplication within VMs and Linux LVM (Logical Volume Manager), including friendly name tagging at restore wizards .



• Application item restore: for Active Directory, Exchange, SharePoint, MS SQL Server (Table restore, for example) .



• Database point-in-time or point-of-transaction restores for MS SQL Server and Oracle (Version 11/12 on Win/Linux): Veeam uses additional transaction log or archive log backups to optimize RPOs .

• Universal restore: If Veeam does not support a specific file system or application, a VM or a group of VMs can be started in an On-Demand Lab that is network protected (Sandbox) . You can use standard OS tools, any third-party application (like database development tools) or tools from that came with the databases to export data and import into production .

Veeam uses a self-service web portal to allow VM administrators to restore their own objects and to give VMware vCloud Director organization admin control over their individual backups in a hosting environment .

Benefits in an enterprise environment Reduced management overhead and application protection

No agents in VMs/VMware

Veeam Availability Suite uses no agents inside VMs . This saves a tremendous amount of admin resources . In a lot of situations agent updates are planned and rolled out over a long period of time in separate projects with a lot of people involved . But with Veeam, the update is done almost instantly by updating the Veeam Backup & Replication (management) server within 10-20 minutes, while the next backup run uses the new application aware processing engines .

Automated application-aware backup

Veeam uses its in-guest processing to identify applications and start application-aware and application-consistent backups per detected applications . Other vendors typically install backup agents within every VM or use VMware tools’ quiescence to achieve the same or less functionality . Restore awareness modes are set for applications so that Active Directory will automatically start into Non-Authoritative Restore Mode, or Exchange databases are prepared with VSS Recovery before they become attached into production, for example . Veeam also supports the newest applications such as SharePoint 2016, Exchange 2016, MS SQL 2016 and Windows 2016-based Active Directory as of Veeam Availability Suite 9 .5, which became generally available in November 2016 .



Storage latency control

Typically, backups are scheduled during evening hours to avoid harming applications and storage systems with the extra backup load . Veeam Storage Latency Control monitors datastore latency and can reduce the backup load if needed to protect your applications . This gives you a chance to optimize RPO time windows and back up applications during production hours — a good feature if you have 24/7 workloads .

Additional logfile/archive log backups

Veeam does logfile and archive log backups in addition to image-level backups to allow point-in-time or point-of-transaction restores for individual databases to optimize the database RPO time .

From the database view, Veeam’s incremental forever image-level backups are full backups, because all disk blocks that belong to the database are held within the backup chain . This gives customers the ability to frequently create “full” backups of the database, while just the real changes are backed up to Veeam . These backups are used together at restore with the Archive Log backups to roll forward to a selected point in time .



Application restore out of crash-consistent backups, storage snapshots and replicas

In addition to traditional backups, many customers create crash-consistent snapshots for lower RPO times . Veeam can access those snapshots and use them for VM, file, application and database restores . A pretty common example is NetApp customers who schedule a crash-consistent storage snapshot of their Exchange server every 10 minutes, which can be used with Veeam for restoring a single email or the whole server .

Optimal hypervisor interaction and supportParallel processingOne of the key goals for a hypervisor-based backup is the avoidance of long VM snapshot lifetimes . Snapshots that are open longer can result in having more data written to them and, specifically for VMware, a snapshot commit needs a large amount of resources and I/O . With parallel processing, Veeam backs up all VM disks in parallel instead of sequentially, which significantly reduces the snapshot lifetime and backup times .

Quick backupVM snapshots are often used by the virtualization team to freeze a stage of a VM-based server before an update . Over time, managing and deleting those snapshots can be quite time-consuming . Chances are that a snapshot will grow over time and completely fill up a data store, resulting in a production outage . Veeam’s workflow integration into the VMware vSphere Web Client gives admin the chance to create a quick backup instead of a snapshot . This QuickBackup is a real backup that is held at the backup software, instead of a VMware Snapshot . QuickBackups only save the last block changes from the last backup to the actual time, so it can be created quickly . Incremental restore and Instant VM Recovery technologies can be used to revert to the QuickBackup time in just a few minutes . Plus, Veeam’s On-Demand Sandbox™ labs (see below) will give you a test environment of the production environment so you can test updates and changes before they get applied in production . This allows you to test them under real conditions, so production rollbacks after failed changes are completely avoided .



DirectNFSVMware APIs do not support any direct storage-based backup methods for NFS-based VMs . Veeam created the DirectNFS protocol to read VM data directly from storage, including Change Block Tracking support . Parallel processing and asynchronous read/write makes DirectNFS one of the fastest ever VMware backup methods . It is only limited by the storage itself .

Enhanced HotAdd processing “Virtual Appliance Mode”Like every backup vendor, Veeam integrates a VMware Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK) into its software for API interaction . Specifically, for HotAdd Backup Mode processing, Veeam bypasses this VDDK Kit for better reliability, reduced IO needs and more parallel processing . In version 9 .5, Veeam added more speed enhancements such as asynchronous read/write usage .

(vCenter) Infrastructure CacheBacking up thousands of VMs can bring a peak load to the VMware vCenter . It is not ideal to read all backup-relevant information directly from vCenter because it is so time consuming . Veeam added a VMware vCenter Cache held in the RAM in version 9 .5 .

This reads out all backup-relevant vCenter information and holds it in a RAM cache . It uses vCenter subscriptions through the VMware Web Services API to automatically update itself over time about all changes that have occurred within the vCenter . As Veeam interacts with the cache instead of the vCenter, it dramatically reduces the vCenter peak load compared to other backup tools that use VMware API backups .

Backup from Storage Snapshot/off-host backupHypervisors are shared resources, so each load taken from them can have significant positive effects . With Veeam off-host backup for Hyper-V, hardware VSS provider-initiated storage snapshots are used to read backup data directly out of the storage, without passing it through the production Hyper-V hosts . At VMware, a VM snapshot’s lifetime can be reduced to just seconds when Veeam creates a VM snapshot and releases it immediately after the Veeam-initiated storage snapshot creation . This way, the data in the snapshots can be committed without problems . Both backup methods support Change Block Tracking-based incremental forever backups . No ESXi host is temporarily used to mount the data store and VMs .

Snapshot hunter

To leverage VMware Change Block Tracking and the VMware Storage API, Veeam needs to use VMware VM Snapshots . Standardized VMware commands are used to create and release snapshots . Sometimes, VMware will acknowledge the deletion of a VM snapshot while it stays on disk . This is called an orphaned snapshot . Veeam’s snapshot hunter scans for VMs with a “disk needs consolidation” flag, and if it finds such an orphaned snapshot, the snapshot hunter will delete it .



Restore without vCenter

In a DR situation, it is very important to be able to restore the infrastructure system, including the vCenter server itself . All Veeam VM restores can work with and without vCenter .

No VM (disk) size limitationVeeam has no VM and VM disk size limitations other than those from the hypervisors and their APIs themselves .

Veeam supports the newest hypervisor versionsMicrosoft Hyper-V 2016, including Nano Server/ReFS3 .1/Resilient Change Block Tracking/SMB3 and VMware vSphere 6 .5 are supported . Historically, Veeam has provided support for new hypervisor versions within two months after the General Availability of the final code .

Reduced data flowThe Veeam way of deduplication/compressionInline deduplication and compression is used on a job or per-VM level to achieve an optimal balance between backup and restore (including Instant VM Recovery) speed and data reduction . All metadata, including deduplication information, is stored within the backup files so it can easily be imported into another Veeam Backup & Replication server . The Veeam database contains only information about the job settings and the history . If Veeam Backup Files are copied to tape, they will keep their reduplicated and compressed format . Inline deduplication and compression on the Veeam proxies that read data from the hypervisor will optimize/reduce Veeam’s internal dataflow and target storage interaction . Deduplication storage systems are supported, including special protocols like Data Domain Boost and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) StoreOnce Catalyst . In addition, there are special integrations with other deduplication storage systems like ExaGrid .

VM Pagefile + deleted files + folder excludes for image-level backupsFor Windows, Veeam reduces the backup amount by not backing up Windows Pagefile, hibernation file and deleted files within VMs . Folders with high block change rates that are not relevant for backup, for example, the DFS Temp folder, can be excluded as well .

Integrated WAN AccelerationRemote office/Branch office (ROBOs) backups are often connected by very small network connections . Local backups with backup copy jobs are used to create second off-site backups at the headquarters or regional data centers . To reduce network traffic, Veeam Software WAN accelerators can be used . They are completely integrated into the backup dataflow, and this allows them to consider the data stream and prioritize data for the caches . For example, OS blocks are kept more prominent in the caches . The last restore point within the backup files is also used as an infinite cache . The WAN accelerator can be used with AES-256 encrypted backup data and transport encryption .

Single image CBT level backup for OS and applicationsVeeam’s backup method involves backing up a whole VM, including all volumes and hypervisor metadata (vApp, VXLAN settings, tags and storage profiles for VSAN) . CBT is used to enable incremental forever backup . From this single backup run, Veeam can restore the VM, guest files, application items and databases . A separate (full) backup of databases is not necessary and which saves backup window time and increases application uptime .



Veeam engineEasy to useVeeam’s UI in the self-service portal can be used without much training . This portal is helpful for implementing and rolling out Veeam as a second virtual environment backup solution without the need for a major implementation project . In many cases, Veeam is implemented in less than a week, including backing up the first 1,000 VMs .

Enterprise scalability with load balancingVeeam components that read and write can be rolled out multiple times . Automatic load balancing is used to spread the load across them . No admin selection or script is needed to spread the load across the Veeam infrastructure . Veeam’s Scale-out Backup Repository™ can be used to spread backups across multiple storage systems for maximum throughput .

Bottleneck analysisAt each backup run, Veeam automatically examines potential bottlenecks and displays them (Source/Proxy/Network/Target) . This allows an admin to work on specific parts of the backup process if he is not satisfied with the backup time .

Easy Veeam infrastructure DRBecause the Veeam database does not include backup metadata that’s relevant for restore, a new backup and replication server can be installed and a small configuration backup can be imported . Best practices suggest replicating the management server to another data center for failover if there’s a disaster .

Transportable backup filesVeeam backup files include everything for restoring relevant metadata . They can be copied to another system and tape, and can be imported from disk within seconds to a new backup and replication server to immediately start restores .



Easy integration projectVeeam can be implemented in a handful of days and coexist with existing backup toolsBased on agentless technology, a distributed and load-balanced infrastructure and the easy-to-use interfaces, many customers add Veeam in a very short time, in addition to the existing agent-based backup methods .

Minimal training neededVeeam’s tradition to build tools that can be used easily by administrators also helps enterprise customers reduce the cost of training . An official Veeam Certified Engineer (VMCE) course and certification takes three days . This can also be extended to five days for the advanced level . Veeam also offers one-day operator training packages held on site at customer locations .

Integration into existing backup software (For example: scheduling and backup to existing tape)Many customers integrate backup software into software and OS deployment managers, external schedulers like UC4/TWS and monitoring tools . Veeam is completely open to being controlled externally by PowerShell or RESTful API (for Cloud Portals) . Veeam backup files contain all restore-relevant metadata and they can be brought to tape by Veeam`s own tape feature or by third-party backup tools .

Licensed per hypervisor populated host CPU socketThe host CPU socket model is easy to calculate . Data growth, additional restore points, additional VMs/applications or additional Veeam infrastructures are all automatically included .

For hosting, there is an additional license model that is licensed per-VM usage .

Instant recoveryInstant recovery out of backup or storage snapshots without shadow VM If you lose one or more servers, Veeam can boot these up out of the backup files or storage snapshots in two minutes plus the VM boot time . Veeam’s patented method gives you full control over the data flow and the option to transport data later to production after you have repaired the issue . Veeam does NOT use shadow VMs or iSCSI technology to start the VM instantly .



VM FailoverBeside backing up, Veeam gives you the ability to replicate at the VM level . With Veeam, you can replicate your complete data center to a second place . This can also be used for VMs with very low RTO and high I/O requirements . A replica VM failover will boot a replica VM directly out of production disks (two minutes plus the OS boot) and almost instantly give you the full disk power of the used data store for your recovered VM .

Incremental restoreA VM or single VM disk can be reverted to one of the last restore points . Because only the last disk changes are restored to the former stage, the restore time is optimized . This can be used in situations when the storage is still operating normally, but something within the VM was changed . Examples of such situations are manual changes, failed updates or virus attacks .

Proactive restoreVeeam can create a replica of a VM out of backups, including secondary backups . The VM is updated over time and the changes are stored within the backup chain . This can help optimize RTO times for the most critical servers, or to create a tertiary backup at a third destination .

Instant application access with Veeam ExplorersVeeam’s application restore wizards can access backups, storage snapshots and VM replicas to mount application data instantly without needing to restore any data beforehand . You can select the needed application objects, files or databases and start individual restores .



SureBackup: Automated recovery testsVeeam uses the Instant VM Recovery process, together with a Veeam Virtual Lab (network) Sandbox environment, to test boot, network connectivity and application Availability in an automated process . It will test the backup and restore process themselves, as well as any misconfigurations or problems detected in the original VMs . If one boot file is corrupted within a production VM, then all backups (Veeam and other backup vendors) will backup that VM with the corrupt file, but report a successful backup . You will likely recognize that there is the same problem within the backup after the restore . With Veeam, you can perform restore tests automatically in the background and Veeam Availability Suite will create test documentation to comply with legal requirements .

On-Demand Sandbox™The same test functionality used in SureBackup® can be used to let the test VMs stay online for further manual testing . You can install patches, test scripts, test upgrades, etc . — whatever you want . It takes two to five minutes per VM, plus boot time to bring this environment up . And, because the backups hold a copy of the OS, data and databases, you have a complete test environment with near-actual data from the last backup .

Veeam also uses VMware Storage API. What´s the difference?As described above, over the last 10 years, Veeam has developed a lot of patented technology to increase performance, work around given technological limitations and add stability to it . Even if you consider Veeam enhancements as glitter, the following three performance enhancements built for customers with 10 .000+ VMs are truly unique, with many of the enhancements protected by Veeam patents .

Backup/restore speedModern storage controllers and raid controllers are built to optimize disk throughput . While VMware APIs are built to process read and write synchronously (send block and wait for acknowledge, then send next block), Veeam’s Direct NFS Access, Backup from Storage Snapshots and Virtual Appliance mode (which is comparable to VMware HotAdd processing) uses asynchronous read and write . Veeam sends multiple read or write requests that give the storage controller the chance to optimize the disk interaction and data flow and resulting in a much higher performance .




vCenter optimizationsVeeam caches all the backup relevant information from vCenter in its RAM and uses VMware API-based subscription to get all the changes from vCenter . This way, the Veeam UI, and all tasks that need vCenter information, collect the information from this cache, instead of requesting it from vCenter or ESXi hosts . Think about how long it takes when a load is created at vCenter and its hosts when the backup software collects metadata information for 10 .000 VMs over a short time window . How much time will vCenter need to answer those SOAP connection requests? Veeam will do this nearly instantly from its cache in the RAM .

Using block cloning technologies at backup targetsOne benefit of deduplication appliances is that the data mover “knows” which blocks are already in the deduplication appliance, and it only creates links to them . Because this is used together with global deduplication within the dedup storage, these boxes have performance limits at backup, but more importantly, at random read when you perform restores or instant restores . Veeam’s integration and the newest Windows 2016 technologies allow Veeam to use the same block cloning technologies to optimize throughput and space . For example, incremental forever technologies need some housekeeping (reclamation/merge/synthetic full) processes . With this integration, these processes are now only file system metadata updates . In the case of Veeam forward incremental, it saves Veeam two of three I/Os at backup target . When Veeam saves backups over a long period (GFS restore chain), it uses well block clone technologies to save space without deduplication (and its performance impacts) .



About Veeam SoftwareVeeam® recognizes the new challenges companies across the globe face in enabling the Always-On Enterprise™, a business that must operate 24 .7 .365 . To address this, Veeam has pioneered a new market of Availability for the Always-On Enterprise™ by helping organizations meet recovery time and point objectives ** (RTPO™) of less than 15 minutes for all applications and data, through a fundamentally new kind of solution that delivers high-speed recovery, data loss avoidance, verified recoverability, leveraged data and complete visibility . Veeam Availability Suite™, which includes Veeam Backup & Replication™, leverages virtualization, storage, and cloud technologies that enable the modern data center to help organizations save time, mitigate risks, and dramatically reduce capital and operational costs, while always supporting the current and future business goals of Veeam customers .

Founded in 2006, Veeam currently has 49,000 ProPartners and more than 255,000 customers worldwide . Veeam’s global headquarters are located in Baar, Switzerland, and the company has offices throughout the world . To learn more, visit http://www .veeam .com .

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