Here's highlights of Veeam's recent announcement that I received from Clint Wyckoff (@ClintWyckoff), Product Strategy Evangelist at Veeam:
As you probably know, we’ve recently announced a number of features of Veeam Availability Suite 9.5. Today, I’m happy to announce that version 9.5 is here!
I highly recommend checking out the What’s New in 9.5 document, as it fully covers all new features and enhancements in v9, including:
• Full integration with the Microsoft 2016 Data Center Technologies
• Integration with Nimble Storage
• Cloud Restore for ANY Veeam backup to Microsoft Azure
• Enterprise scalability and more
Turns out the question of what backup solution to use to protect a home lab's VMs in a home lab comes up a lot here at TinkerTry, especially when a major new release of vSphere arrives on the scene. It's become such an important thing for IT Pros working off the NFR code (non-time-bombed) code in their home labs that they might even hold off on upgrading, not until their backup solution is ready.
So I asked Clint if he could clarify.
Hey Clint! Naturally, everybody is wondering about how soon vSphere 6.5 support is expected to arrive, do you have something definitive I can publish? I realize it will just be an estimate, and that things happen.
Getting this question a lot, which is good! Seen here for example [from just 15 minutes ago]:
It's really tough to gauge as you know, there is many factors that play into this….
1.) How many bugs we find when we test against the GA code of vS 6.5
2.) How many bugs are in v9.5 that we ourselves need to fix which would warrant an update 1
But generally speaking we aim to provide support within a few months.
Just because Veeam 9.5 could (sort of) work with ESXi 6.5 doesn't mean you should, see @gostev's comments in the Veeam Community Forums:
Gostev » Tue Nov 15, 2016 5:26 pm
Thanks for the note, Chris.
Basic stuff may work, but advanced functionality will definitely be impacted because of a few major changes in vSphere 6.5 "under the hood". It really is NOT a dot release from this perspective. For starters, it has the new VMFS version with what it seems to be very different internals (not just some minor changes and tweaks).
So, it would be wise not treat vSphere 6.5 as a minor release from the upgrade perspective. Even the fact that it took well over 1.5 years to release kind of hints that ;)
We're planning to support vSphere 6.5 in Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 1. As far as timelines for the latter, historically we needed on average 2 months after vSphere GA.
Here at TinkerTry, I'll be testing out Veeam Availability Suite 9.5, Veeam Agent for Windows, and Veeam Agent for Linux in my vSphere 6.5 home lab when time permits, along with other home-lab-friendly VM backup solutions.
Meanwhile, I was also asking Clint about the old 9.0 NFR request site redirecting to a Veeam 9.5 non-NFR request page. Well guess what just arrived? The new portal for requesting your 9.5 NFR code! Works great with vSphere 6.0U2 and many prior releases too, of course.
Not-For-Resale means you have 1 year, but historically, they release major new versions much more often than that, so your coverage should remain continuous. There are a few other limitations:
Veeam® is happy to provide a free NFR license (1 year, 2 sockets) to all VMware vExperts, MVPs, VTEC members, Certified Engineers and Trainers*. This license allows for non-production use of Veeam Availabilty Suite™ 9,5 in your home lab, without any feature limitations. The license works for both VMware and Hyper-V environments.
*Only for vExpert, VCP, VCAP, VCI, VCDX, VMUG Leader, VTEC, VMCE, MVP, MCSE, MCSA, MCT, Cisco Champion, PernixPro Member and others.
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There are many new technical advances in Veeam's Backup & Replication, and Anthony Spiteri (@anthonyspiteri) really dives into each of them, including ReFS. If you like to geek out about tech details, it's likely you'll enjoy his new article:
In general there has been a doubling of I/O performance that can shorten backup windows by up to five times while reducing the load on core virtualisation platform components such as vCenter and storage arrays.
Advanced Data Fetcher: This improves backup performance for individual virtual disks while reducing the load on primary storage due to the reduced number of I/O operations required to complete a backup. This is a VMware feature and is used by Backup from Storage Snapshots, Hot Add and Direct NFS modes.
VMware vSphere Infrastructure Cache: This maintains an in RAM mirror of vSphere infrastructure hierarchy to accelerate the Building VM list operation when creating or modifying a job. This also removes load from vCenter. The cache is maintained up-to-date with real-time updates via a subscription to vCenter Server infrastructure change events.
Apparently folks in Australia don't seem be to busy with Thanksgiving preparations today ;-)
Bumped into Clint Wycoff at VMworld 2016, where he gave me permission to publish this video of Veeam's legendary Anton Gostev talking about Windows Server 2016's ReFS 3.0, making Veeam v9.5 much faster. It's all featured here:
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After 6 successful years testing then shipping well over 1,000 Xeon D Bundles, Wiredzone had to stop selling them in mid-2021 due to cost, supply, and logistics challenges. So far, Xeon D-1700/2700 (Ice Lake D) was a minor refresh for 2023, with Xeon D-1800/2800 (Granite Rapids D) refresh looking a little better for 2024. More cores, but still just PCIe Gen4 and DDR4. Looking ahead, I'm glad it's Pat Gelsinger at Intel's helm. I'm also grateful to have had the honor of working at VMware when Pat was the CIO there. I'll leave it at that, given the whole Broadcom thing.
