My 3 Favorite Improvements in Veeam Backup & Replication 6.5
Veeam has recently announced the release of Backup and Replication 6.5, which boasts a number of improvements. As the engine that runs my Home Lab backups, I figured it would be worthy of an upgrade and blog post to cover some of the improvements. I was surprised, however, by some of the things that I was most excited about – as I’ve stated before, I’ve been using Veeam for over 3 years now. This post goes over my top 3 favorite improvements after migrating from 6.0 to 6.5.
Disclosure: Veeam is a paid sponsor of this blog. The content of this post is entirely of my own creation and expression of their product from the standpoint of someone who has and continues to use it.
Performance Improvements
As I moved around the interface, I noticed that the various trees and views loaded very quickly. One part in particular jumped out at me – the loading of a tree view for modifying backups. As shown below, I fired up the object tree view of my VMs – this normally takes a while to build but was instant after upgrading. I’m a stickler for quick load times and snappy GUI response, making the upgrade an instant hit for me.
Additionally, the backup process has been altered to perform with less fuss. Here I have run a backup job on my “lab” section of the Home Lab and noticed that the kickoff times to begin the actual backups are dramatically reduced. For example, the duration timers below are all a matter of seconds (with the exception of the actual full backup job). This will shave off a significant amount of time from the backup job.
I noticed a savings of a few minutes per VM which quickly add up in a larger environment.
User Interface Polish
The GUI looks almost nothing like it used to and has a much more grown up and sleek look to it. The side panel of objects has been replaced with relevant objects for the specific environment you’re working in. As shown below, when I select the “Virtual Machines” environment I am greeted with only information on my virtual hosts and guests. For demonstration purposes, I went ahead and added one of my Hyper-V servers to the mix.
I’m really digging the new layout. It was both intuitive to learn (I wasn’t searching for any features and feeling frustrated) and much improved. Things just were “where they belonged” to me.
Chained Job Schedules
Probably the improvement that received the most “Wow” from me was a tiny little addition to the schedule options: chained job scheduling!
As those who are veterans can attest, typical chaining prior to 6.5 involved either post-job scripts that referenced long UID values or PowerShell scripts. Now, you can just inform the schedule what job to follow and Veeam does the rest. Such a small improvement that boasts a huge amount of happiness from me.
Thoughts
There are a kitchen sink full of other improvements, but these are what struck me immediately after upgrading as making life easier for the day to day administrator. Are there any improvements you found to be of the same caliber? Have you gone ahead and upgraded to 6.5 yet and want to share your experience?
Chris – I actually picked up veeam at home when you first started talking about it a while back and once I was more comfortable with it, I brought it up at work. Long story short we have about 40-50 cpu licenses worth now and I really love its simplicity.
I am loving the “after this job” in theory but I wish there was a better way to sort your jobs once you take the plunge and implement the “after this job” feature. I love the inovation but something about the way it works feels backwards to me when viewing the backup jobs list.
Thanks again for the great info!
Glad to hear you are enjoying Veeam. It was a real pioneer for its time and has continued to innovate. Hopefully a Veeam employee will pick up on your suggestion on sorting the jobs and include it as a feature request in the future.