The awesome 8th feature of Veeam B&R v7: ‘Backup copy job’

So Veeam B&R v7 has been announced. For me, the 7 pre-announced features (support for vCloud Director, vSphere Web Client, the Veeam Explorer for Sharepoint, Virtual Lab for Hyper-V and replicas, archive to tape and finally self-service 1-click restore) are good enhancements to the product, but not earth shattering. There are, however, two features that you could call just that. In this three-part blog post, I’ll dive into each of them while also shedding some light on the licensing and offering my own insights and conclusion. Let me start with the beginning of this saga, the status quo:

Using Veeam for on- and off-site backup storage

I use Veeam a lot to provide both on- and off-site backups for many of my customers. The v6.5 Cloud Edition release was a great first step towards long-term archival of backups and replication of backup files on the primary backup repository to a secondary off-site repository (be it a 2nd Windows server or Amazon Glacier-alike services), but was rather limited in its features and options. The best part of these v6.5 ‘Cloud Backup’ and v7 ‘Archive to tape’ features is that you can have a 2nd copy of your backup filewithout touching (snapshotting!) the source (production) Virtual Machine twice. For some shops, the ‘archive to tape’ feature in v7 will be what the v6.5 Cloud Backup feature was to others. To me, the features are very alike (apart from the physical medium: tape or ‘cloud’) but are still too limiting for many shops. I do really hope that the ‘archive to tape’ feature in v7 doesn’t require touching the source VM; I hope its source is the backup file (created by the regular backup job) instead of the production VM.

--> Please see the rest on the blog : http://www.virtuallifestyle.nl/2013/05/the-awesome-8th-feature-of-veeam-br-v7-backup-copy-job/