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?