Veeam V100: Enterprise plugins enhancements
Veeam V100: Enterprise plugins enhancements
The VeeamON 2024 session that resonated most with my current area of work was the one presented by Petr Makarov, focusing on the latest advancements in backup through the Enterprise Plugins.
Throughout my previous career, I had always steered clear of backup — until virtualization and Veeam came along. And I have to say, I stand by this sentiment: working with fully virtualized machines and their backups is far more enjoyable and exciting. Unfortunately, the real world is full of much less fun stuff we still have to deal with. 😉
In this area, some key enhancements include the ability to use object storage as a primary backup target for plugins such as RMAN, along with other optimizations like adjustable write block size — which, in turn, enables immutability support.
Equally important — although it tends to go unnoticed until disaster strikes — is the new capability to rebuild lost metadata with a simple repository rescan. A small change that can make a huge difference in recovery scenarios.
The improvements to the Microsoft SQL plugin were also noteworthy, although… in my opinion, you should avoid having to use it altogether: design your clusters without shared disks and treat your VMs as VMs!
A couple of fun notes… During Petr’s rundown of the supported operating systems (which, surprisingly, still includes the already “dead” Windows Server 2012), Rick Vanover asked: “Why are we still doing this??” That was my cue to overcome the shyness and chime in — I explained that in the real world, even some of my largest enterprise customers are still running 2012, and even 2008 servers… and yes, some that are even older. Rick’s eyes widened a bit, but I think this kind of feedback is important.
I also followed up with Petr — just like I did last year — about GFS support for RMAN backups (something a former client of mine had asked for) and PostgreSQL cluster support (something I’m personally interested in now). In both cases, the answer was: “We’re working on it, but no ETA at the moment.”
Still, I hope my questions helped add a little pressure to keep those features moving forward. 😊