VMworld: Veeam offers virtual machine instant recovery

Veeam is expanding the capabilities of its Backup & Replication tool for VMware infrastructure to support instant recovery of downed virtual machines, plus other features such as the ability to extract individual items from a virtual machine backup.

Announced today at the VMworld conference in San Francisco, the new capabilities are collectively being dubbed vPower technology by Veeam, and build on the SureBackup Recovery Verification features the firm disclosed earlier this year.

However, only customers of the Enterprise Edition of Backup & Replication will get all of the new features, Veeam said.

The most significant is Instant VM Recovery, which can restore a virtual machine from a backup file in minutes, should the worst happen. Users can then remain productive while the IT team troubleshoots the problem, according to Veeam.

"What we're doing is based on the ability to boot a virtual machine directly from a backup file, without having to do a full restore," said Ian Wells, Veeam's regional director for northern Europe.

The technology to boot from a backup file was developed for another Backup & Replication feature, SureBackup, where it is used to automatically verify every new backup to ensure that each virtual machine can be successfully recovered from the backup file, should the need arise.

Customers can also create a sandboxed virtual machine from any stored backup, to troubleshoot problems or test new patches or applications against a clone of an actual production system.

"We call this the 'virtual labs'," said Wells.

Another vPower feature is universal application-item recovery (U-Air), which enables customers to retrieve items from any application inside a virtual machine backup, such as records from an SQL database or individual emails from a Microsoft Exchange account.

In addition, customers can recover individual files from virtual machine backups, regardless of operating system or file system.

A limited release of Veeam Backup & Replication 5 will be available in September, with general availability in October, the firm said.

Pricing for the Enterprise Edition with vPower is £682 per host processor socket, while the Standard Edition costs £454 per socket.

Only the Enterprise Edition includes U-Air, automated verification, and sandboxed virtual machine recovery, Veeam said.