Despite multiple day, Veeam has finally launched it’s flagship product Veeam Backup & Replication version 6.

One of the most useful features I found is “One Click Restore”, because most of the time we do not have the root password of our client’s servers and often clients ask for mistakenly deleted files, so this enhancement is definitely the key reason for anyone to upgrade to v6.

Besides new improved replication is now 10x faster (see this appreciation post), together with throttling bandwidth capping, finally, we can replicate smoothly over our 100Mbps link between production and DR sites.

Last but not least, the scalability of backup agents (server in Veeam’s term), Veeam B&R 6.0 now utilizes proxy concept, so you have a group of backup agent/proxy or bots that will evenly distribute the loading among them. What’s best, you no longer have to login to each backup server (or agent) and you can manage all of your backup jobs on all proxies from a single panel, isn’t this just beautiful!

What about v6 now supports Hyper-V? Dohhhh…Hper-V in my own opinion is still not a mature product and it’s fine for lab use, for enterprise? No Way!

After losing a lot of sleep over the weekend working out the kinks and fixing my mistakes, v6 is running great and I can’t believe the speed increase!

Just a few examples:

• Replicating a file server with 750GB of data, down to 25 minutes total (replicating the data disk only took 6:30)!
• Replication job on my Exchange server w/ 400GB of mailbox data… 20 minutes
• Backup job with 6 VMs ranging from 50-120GB, 35 minutes
• Replication of a 60GB VM running Accounting software over a 20Mbps WAN… wait for it… 4 1/2 minutes!

The kicker here is I’m running 3-4 jobs in parallel now. My backup window has gone from 6+ hours to around 2 hours for nearly 3TB of VM data and I’m finally saturating my disk writes on the backup target. There are, of course, a few minor bugs, but I’m impressed with the quality for a first release after such major architecture changes.