The Veeam Data Platform has experienced significant growth in recent months. Indeed, the platform must continue to function as the foundation for data protection and resilience. Infrastructure developments require a high pace of innovation. We talked about the recent product updates with Senior Systems Engineer Rob Turk and Presales Director for Benelux & Nordics Sander Schreven.
Behind every Veeam innovation is the intention to better protect organizations’ data. Backups are at the core, allowing companies to recover from incidents affecting their digital operations. This mainly revolves around cyber attacks, which get many companies out of business for days to weeks. In addition to backups, which ultimately enable recovery, the Veeam Data Platform provides additional options for reporting and monitoring. These help comply with data regulations. There are also options for infrastructure automation within Veeam, allowing for smoother resolution of data issues.
Number of hypervisors grows
However, the world of infrastructure is changing considerably. VMware developments are causing concern among users because of the plans the new owner Broadcom has for the products. Virtually every large organization runs on the VMware hypervisor vSphere. While VMware will not disappear from corporate infrastructures overnight, many organizations are looking at alternatives. Veeam continues to support vSphere, in addition to existing support for Microsoft Hyper-V, Nutanix AHV, and Red Hat Virtualization. Earlier this year, Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager was also added.
Turk and Schreven indicate that more organizations are considering the open-source variant Proxmox. This prompted Veeam to build support for Proxmox so companies can also do backups there. The addition of Oracle and Proxmox support are among the most important innovations of the Veeam Data Platform in 2024. Developing hypervisor support takes much development time but allows companies to choose from one of the seven most commonly used hypervisors, making migration easier.
Making backups
In a presentation just before our conversation, Turk explained how support for Proxmox works. It’s similar to support for other infrastructure products. Someone familiar with making backups in Hyper-V or vSphere will be fine with Proxmox as well. The functionality for replication and virtual machine (VM) recovery is similar.
In Proxmox, the environment runs on one or more hosts in a cluster, along with a Veeam backup server that includes a plugin for Proxmox. The third component, a repository, stores the backup files. Creating a backup activates the Proxmox plugin, which generates a list of VMs for snapshots. The plugin translates this list into API calls so Proxmox knows which VMs to select for snapshots. These snapshots are then processed by a “worker,” a small Linux-based instance on the Proxmox hosts. The worker, which is by default turned off, is enabled for the backup task and causes the data to be moved to the repository.
Veeam has also optimized Nutanix AHV, which works slightly differently. The basic architecture remains the same: a cluster, backup server, and repository. However, because of the control plane Nutanix Prism, a backup appliance is added within the Nutanix cluster. This appliance initiates the backup task, reserves resources, and creates snapshots. Finally, the worker brings the data to the repository.
Newer releases: simplicity and strategy
Veeam regularly releases updates for its platform, so users can always count on new features. The latest version, 12.2, includes the discussed Proxmox and Nutanix functionality. Both hypervisors also have interesting additional features. For example, the Proxmox plugin has Change Block Tracking (CBT), which allows the Veeam Data Platform to see which blocks have changed since the last backup. This speeds up the process by transferring only the changed data to the repository. Turk notes that not every file system supports CBT at VM startup, so the feature sometimes doesn’t work.
On the Nutanix front, Veeam also has an upgrade. Companies with large Nutanix environments can now more easily backup VMs belonging to specific applications. They can also label VMs with tags so they can protect them at once with policies or additional backups.
Adding new hypervisors and additional support aligns with the message of data freedom that Veeam wants to offer businesses. By this, the backup vendor offers choice flexibility with data platforms. The list of integrations has increased dramatically in recent years, and now it looks like this.
Veeam thus supports common enterprise workloads. Most need no explanation, but object storage may deserve extra attention. Turk gives the example of a large organization with several small offices or factories. Those locations often do not run large servers but a prosumer NAS server. This can often make backups through an object cloud provider, making two copies: one in production and one in the cloud. However, this does not meet the 3-2-1-1-0 best practice. With object storage buckets, Veeam can still achieve a backup copy.
All in all, Veeam is keeping up the pace of innovation. The Veeam Data Platform is ready to respond to businesses’ changing infrastructure needs and will continue to increase the pace of innovation in the near future so that businesses can become more resilient to data loss.
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