Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 3a Released

Veeam has released Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 3a, which has support for VMware vSphere 6.7 and VMware vSphere 6.5 U2 preliminary support.

What's new:

Platform support

• VMware vSphere 6.7 support. Includes the new HTML5 version of vSphere Web Client plug-in for Veeam Backup & Replication, and asynchronous NBD/NBDSSL support for improved read performance of network transport mode with ESXi 6.7.
  
• VMware vSphere 6.5 U2 preliminary support. This update addresses all outstanding U2-specific compatibility issues that can be managed from the Veeam side. However, there is a major regression in ESXi 6.5 U2 code that makes the vSphere API fail randomly during high host CPU load periods, consequently impacting a variety of Veeam Backup & Replication functionality. VMware is currently troubleshooting this bug, and fixing one will most likely require the new ESXi 6.5 U2 build issued.
  
• VMware vCloud Director 9.1. Update 3a provides compatibility for existing vCloud Director support functionality.
  
• VMware Cloud on AWS version 1.3 support and preliminary out-of-the-box compatibility with future VMC updates through removal of the API version match requirement.
  
• Microsoft Windows 10 April 2018 Update. Includes support as guest virtual machines and for installation of Veeam Backup & Replication and all of its components.
  
• Microsoft Windows Server 1803. Update 3a provides Windows Server 1803 support as guest virtual machines, for installation of Veeam Backup & Replication remote components, and as a domain controller for Veeam Explorer™ for Microsoft Active Directory.
  
• Microsoft Windows Server Hyper-V 1803. Update 3a provides Hyper-V 1803 support as a hypervisor host, including support for processing VMs with virtual hardware version 8.3.
  
• Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 1801 support.
  

VMware vSphere

• Performance of Direct Storage Access (DirectSAN) and Virtual Appliance (Hot Add) transport modes has been improved for backup infrastructure configurations through optimizing system memory interaction.
  

Microsoft Azure

• Added support for Direct Restore to Microsoft Azure for environments with ExpressRoute or site-to-site VPN connectivity to Azure, in which case proxy and helper appliances may have private IP addresses only. To enable, create AzurePreferPrivateIpAddressesForProxyandLinuxAppliance (DWORD, 1) registry value under HKLM\SOFTWARE\Veeam\Veeam Backup and Replication key on the backup server.
  

Linux File Level Recovery

• Added support for Linux SUID and SGID preservation to "Copy To" operation.
  
• Added support for Btrfs volumes located on an LVM volume.
  

Primary Storage Integrations

• Installing Universal Storage API plug-ins on each backup console (in addition to the backup server) is no longer required.
  
• Storage snapshot-only vCloud Director backup jobs are now supported for all storage integrations which support storage snapshot-only jobs. Previously, it was supported for NetApp only.
  
• Cisco HyperFlex integration will no longer delete the base sentinel snapshot during each job run to improve processing performance and reduce storage load.
  

Tape

• Improved performance of enumeration in File to Tape jobs with very large number of files.
  

Veeam Cloud & Service Provider partners
Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 3a also includes enhancements and bug fixes for service providers offering Veeam Cloud Connect services, and managing backup servers with Veeam Availability Console. For the full change log, please see this topic on the private Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) forum. Not a member of the VCSP forum? Click here to join.

Update 3a also resolves the following common support issues:

• User interface performance has been improved for large environments, including faster VM search and lower CPU consumption while browsing through job sessions history.
  
• Restores through Direct NFS transport should no longer produce corrupted VMDKs on storage devices with advanced NFS server implementations.
  
• VeeamZIP™ operations should no longer consume a license.
  
• Backup copy job should no longer trigger health checks outside of the scheduled start time when GFS retention is in use, and will behave more reliably in a few corner cases.
  
• Incremental backup runs should no longer keep setting ctkEnabled VM setting to "true", resulting in unwanted events logged by vCenter Server.
  
• SATA X:7 disks should no longer be skipped with backup jobs by default.
  
• Windows file level recovery (FLR) should now process large numbers of NTFS reparse points faster and more reliably.
  
• Linux FLR should now correctly process directories with . and \ symbols in their names. In addition, encountering a named pipe object should no longer cause FLR to hang.
  
• Direct Restore to Microsoft Azure should now process Linux machines with EFI boot more reliably.
  
• Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows’ jobs should no longer fail when the backup server uses custom certificate.
  
• Veeam Explorer for Storage Snapshots now supports VMs located on LUNs larger than 16TB.
  
• An HPE 3PAR integration should now handle large number of concurrent jobs more reliably, thanks to multiple improvements implemented based on support cases.
  
• An HPE StoreOnce Catalyst SDK host process will now be restarted automatically when a Catalyst API call hangs, preventing Veeam jobs from hanging as a result.
  
• IBM SVC integration should no longer fail at collecting iSCSI adapters.
  

See the full Veeam KB here: https://www.veeam.com/kb2646

UPDATE (July 17th 2018)

There are som changes to the SQL application aware process, that can result in warnings/error, see updated info here: https://www.virtual-allan.com/veeam-and-sql-backup-truncate-log/

There may also be a problem with HotAdd and VMs with many disk, that takes much longer to backup: https://forums.veeam.com/post287191.html Veeam says that they only have about 10 support cases about this, so this is properly environment specific.