To Recover or not – that is the question?

Today I sat in on a first look at what’s new in Veeam’s revolutionary new backup product – Veeam Backup and Replication 5 (Sure Backup).

Initially when I heard about this product some months ago I was excited and trawled the usual forums and social networks to read peoples expectations. When I got the mail shot on that eagerly awaited March 22^nd (and believe me it was eagerly awaited) I felt somewhat dismayed.

But today after listening to the Veeam tech guys it just reinforces Veeam’s ability to deliver time and time again to the virtual backup and recovery market a brilliant cost effective product.

The new feature included in Backup and Replication 5 answers a question which always sits at the back of IT managers  minds – ‘in an emergency can I recover from my backups?’ We all have our DR drills and undertake regular test restores and rebuilds in a lab. But on the whole, if the backup product says it was successful then we trust it.

Veeam are going to stop that niggling question for machines in your virtual environments forever. Backup and Replication 5 will not only backup your machines at the high speeds seen in version 4, but now also test those backups will boot for you. Now you know they are there when you need them in a crisis.

The way it works is to create a Veeam snapshot backup with the amount of restore points you choose for that backup set like you would in version 4 of the product. After backups are complete you can then create a scheduled test window for your backups to be verified as working. Veeam will then attach a temporary VM to a chosen host booting the VM straight from the compressed backup file in a read only format so you can see your backups are 100% reliable.

This whole process is fast and automated as part of your backup job, and you also create the settings for test if required. You can specify application groups such as a domain controller and exchange server to test your exchange environment. Then apply boot conditions on the job so the domain controller boots first followed by the exchange server. This allows application dependencies to be in place for the test to be successful. Scripts can be added to tests that will be run within the operating systems when they boot. You can choose resources such as a host or even resource pools stored in Virtual Centre so your tests don’t affect the performance of production machines. Veeam’s claim is that a 150GB Exchange server hosting 200 mailboxes can be booted from the compressed file in 2 minutes.

So in brief here is a step by step process of what would happen:

1)      Backups taken in normal backup Window and finish successfully

2)      Backup test windows start

3)      Veeam Backup and Replication  creates test networks

4)      Veeam Backup and Replication creates temporary VM’s for backed up servers within resource pool and on chosen host

5)      The servers are booted read only from the backup files.

6)      Scripts and tests are run as requested.

7)      Servers are shutdown and removed from your environment

8)      You are notified with the result

Veeam have also announced that this method will support your previous backups in version 4 of Backup and Replication, so the transition should be quite painless. They are also providing support for ESX 3.0 upwards so no need to go out and overhaul your current VMWare environment at additional cost.

One question I did pose to the team was that if we can run operating systems from compressed files to test backups, then why not use this as a disaster recovery product? It would remove the need to replicate servers which need high availability. The answer is that it is not included in this release but watch this space.

Veeam Backup and Replication 5.0 will be available to partners from second quarter of 2010 and estimated release dates of late 2010.

I will post again when I have managed to put this product through its paces and can let you know my full conclusion. If it lives up to what it says on the tin then this will be a must for any IT managers toolbox.

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