Veritas NetBackup 8.0 is GA - my favorite features.

By | December 6, 2016
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Veritas released a new version of their core product - NetBackup 8.0. This version provides some interesting features. Let's see what NetBackup introduces for VMware 😉

  • NetBackup Virtual Appliance for Remote Office - this is a virtual machine (provided as an ova file) that can be used to backup data in ROBO. The virtual machine must be Master/Media (a new NBU domain) and max 2TB Front end licensed and 2TB Backend Storage. You can replicate your backups from ROBO via NetBackup Auto Image Replication.
  • VMware vRealize plugin for NetBackup Self-Service - a long-awaited integration. Veritas prepared a plugin for VMware vRealize Orchestrator and now it is possible to integrate NetBackup Self-Service not only with vCloud Director but also vRealize Automation (requires version 7.0).
  • Extended support for individual VMware virtual machine disk restores (only via CLI) - Now, a target VM to restore individual VMDK can be original VM or an alternate existing VM. If a VMDK with the same UUID exists on the VM at the time of restore, you have an option to overwrite it or restore with the VMDK with a new UUID.
  • Support for VMware fault tolerant VMs - NetBackup supports backing up and restoring primary fault tolerant virtual machines. (NetBackup does not backup or restore the secondary VMs.) If you choose to overwrite the VM during the restore, NetBackup deletes both the primary and the secondary VMs during the restore process. NetBackup then restores the primary VM and FT is not enabled on the restored VM.

NetBackup 8.0 supports vSphere 6.5 (this version of vSphere introduced some cool features), however, this is not a new information as just VDDK supports N-2, N, and N+1 (without new features) version of vSphere. I explained it detailed here.

Microsoft Hyper-V is chasing VMware and recently Veritas started to focus on functionalities for this hypervisor. NetBackup 8.0 introduces:

  • NetBackup Accelerator for Microsoft Hyper-V based on Microsoft's resilient change tracking (RCT). NetBackup Accelerator is a cool feature that already I explained earlier - now we can backup not only Windows File Server, NDMP or VMware but also Hyper-V.
  • Block-level incremental backup with RCT.
  • Support for Windows Server Message Block (SMB) 3.0 file shares, and Windows Storage Spaces and Storage Spaces Direct.

There are some important features in the core of NetBackup:

  • Certificates -  This feature definitely requires a separate post. Now (at last) NetBackup can authenticate clients based on Certificates (not mapping IP-->DNS). Master Server assigns Certificates to Clients based on UUID and it makes sure that communications between Clients and Masters are trusted.
  • REST API -  now many additional tasks can be done via API.
  • Host Database (HOSTDB) -  a new database is created that keeps count of hosts in an NBU domain. Also used during delivering certificates for Clients.

There are a lot of improvements or support for the cloud. For more information please follow the Release Notes.

Useful resources: