Veeam upgrades Availability Suite to support VMware VVOLs
Virtual machine backup specialist Veeam upgrades Availability Suite version 8 to support VMware Virtual Volumes
Specialist virtualisation backup and data protection software maker Veeam has announced it has upgraded its Availability Suite version 8 to support VMware Virtual Volumes (VVOLs), Virtual SAN (VSAN) and other features in vSphere 6.
Version 8 of Veeam Availability Suite – which is a combination of backup software Backup & Replication control and monitoring suite Veeam One – was released late in 2014, while VMware released vSphere version 6 in February this year. Key among the new features are VVOLs and an updated VSAN.
VVOLs enable the application of policy-based metrics to storage for individual virtual machines (VMs), rather than at the datastore level. This has been touted as a potential paradigm shift in the management of storage and VMs that will simplify operational tasks, boost resource utilisation and allow more granular control of service levels.
Veeam Availability Suite update 2 will include support for VVOLs and will also support version 2.0 of VMware’s VSAN storage virtualisation feature.
VSAN allows server-attached disk drives to be aggregated into a single pool of storage. The resulting pool can comprise spinning disk hard disk drives (HDDs) with flash disk obligatory for high-speed metadata, or with version 2.0 can be formed into an all-flash array using only solid-state drives (SSDs).
Read more about virtual machine backup
- Virtual machine backup is a priority for many datacentres. We examine the key choices, and whether to use agent-, hypervisor- or array-based backup.
- Specialist virtual machine
backup products vary in many ways, including hypervisor and application support.
Veeam has undergone a rapid rise since virtualisation swept datacentres. Initially, many backed up virtual machines using existing traditional backup products, with an agent in every physical server. This method has inherent limitations, due to the bottlenecks in data movement it causes, so specialist virtual machine backup suppliers, such as Veeam, started to offer products that worked at hypervisor and VM level.
The major backup software makers – Symantec, IBM, EMC, HP and CommVault – then began to add VM backup to their existing physical server backup expertise.
Remarkably, Veeam rose through this competition to achieve number two customer choice of backup software product in last year’s TechTarget European Purchasing Intentions survey.
