Veeam B&R v8 – “Little things mean a lot” (part 1/2)

* Note: this is the first of a 2-part post. Read part 2 here.

I’ve always been attentive to detail – yes, at times you could also say “pedantic” 🙂 – and if you’re anything like me, you’ll be happy to know that Veeam Backup & Replication v8 has “quietly” introduced some very nice improvements.

These may easily have escaped you, since webinars and public announcements / blog posts are usually about the “bigger” features. Currently there is an ongoing series of posts in the Veeam blog, called 8 Gems in Veeam Availability Suite v8 which focuses on less known enhancements and is very interesting.

But here, I’ve decided to show you some more, different little things. That gives you an idea of how big was this release in terms of new features! All the changes, big and small, are listed in the What’s New document.

I’m splitting this post in two parts since there’s a fair amount of content… let’s start!

1. Guest File Indexing for Linux VMs

To me personally, this shouldn’t even be considered a “minor” feature! You can now browse the file system, search and restore items with a single click also for Linux VMs, directly from the Enterprise Manager.

This feature requires mlocate in order to work. As usual, enabling it means clicking on a single checkbox – but you can customize the settings and define exclusions, for example.

2. WAN Accelerator Cache population

This neat little option can greatly reduce the duration of the first run of a job involving WAN accelerators. As you may know, this technology relies on a caching mechanism to save bandwidth. The first time a job is run, the cache needs to be populated (and blocks need to be hashed) – this can be a time consuming task.

In v7, the trick was to run a job with two local WAN accelerators. Then you could “seed“ (manually copy) the cache folder to a remote accelerator.

In v8, cache population can be conveniently launched at any time. Naturally, ensure you have backup files locally to the WAN accelerator you wish to populate.

3. Credentials test

This somewhat has a special meaning to me since I, among many others, requested this feature some time ago. In previous versions, the only way to know if the credentials used for guest processing / indexing were correct, was to run the job.

In v8, you can test the credentials directly in the job wizard. It works for Windows and Linux guests of course – and for VMware environments, it checks the credentials both over the network and via VIX.

4. Session type in statistics and history view

Another small step for the UI, but quite a leap for time saving!

You can instantly see what type of session (Full, Incremental, Reversed Incremental, Synthetic Full, etc.) you’re looking at, in the job statistics or the session history view.

5. Snapshot commit progress indicator

Every time a VM snapshot is removed/committed, you now see a progress indicator in the job statistics, displaying the status (in percentage) of the task.

No more switching to the hypervisor client tools to see what’s going on!