Veeam Essentials

2-in-1: Backup and replication combined
As virtualization increasingly handles mission-critical production workloads, organizations must be assured of effective backup and appropriately fast recovery of the virtual infrastructure. Balancing cost with flexibility is the key: some data requires replication to ensure business continuity, while other data is best backed up and recovered using less expensive hardware and techniques. Veeam Backup offers both techniques – backup and replication – through one interface, in one product, at one price.

Full ESXi support with & without VCB
With introduction of ESXi, Veeam was the first and only vendor to support ESXi both with AND without VMware Consolidated Backup (or VCB). Customers with and without shared storage are able to perform ESXi backups without having the additional overhead of deploying VCB. No ESXi FREE support

Heterogeneous file-level recovery in seconds
Backup is easy, but recovery can be hard – and that’s when the clock is ticking loudest. But with Veeam Backup & Replication, fast recovery is easier than you ever thought possible. Veeam’s fast file-level recovery feature allows you to restore individual files from your image-level backups and replicas in seconds to the latest state, or to a specific point in time. Veeam’s file-level recovery does not require extracting the full VM image to your local drive, or backing up your data twice in order to have both file-level and image-level recovery options readily available. Unlike competitive solutions, file-level restores are performed directly from image and support most of the major operating and file systems, including Windows, Linux, Unix, BSD and Mac.

Enterprise Management Console
A new Enterprise Management Server allows distributed enterprises to manage multiple Veeam Backup & Replication installations from a single web console. This allows you to deploy Veeam Backup & Replication and manage backups and restores according to your administrative, business and security requirements and boundaries. While providing you with centralized backup, Veeam Backup & Replication 4.0 makes decentralized recovery and backup verification possible, thus addressing real-world enterprise deployment scenarios. For example, Exchange recoveries can be handled by the Exchange administrators group, while domain controller recovery requires another skill set, and is best performed by Active Directory administrators.

Native support for this distributed architecture also gives you the ability to easily scale your VMware backup infrastructure as your virtual environment grows – while still providing centralized management and reporting capabilities to senior IT management.

Native support for vSphere
Veeam Backup & Replication now offers not just compatibility, but full and native support for VMware vSphere, including all new vSphere functionality:

• Native support for thin-provisioned disks for faster full VM backups and restores, and to reduce the amount of storage required to host your production VMs.
   
• Ability to leverage ESX4 changed block tracking for lightning-fast incremental backup. For instance, if a VM only had 5 percent changes since the last backup, the incremental backup time will be 20 times faster.
   
• Support for virtual applications (vApp) for more flexibility with job setup.

Veeam Backup also fully supports the new vStorage API – the next generation of VMware Consolidated Backup, the vStorage API for Data Protection is the recommended API for VMware vSphere backup going forward. For example, the backup of vSphere Fault Tolerant VMs will only be possible with the vStorage API. While Veeam is still committed to supporting VCB as long as our customers will require it, native support for the vStorage API makes Veeam Backup the most future-proof solution currently available on the market.

Database-consistent backup for application recovery
Veeam Backup & Replication leverages Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) functionality to ensure consistent hot backups of the applications within your running virtual machines. Unlike other vendors featuring limited VSS support, Veeam provides the most complete implementation of VSS support, equipping you for proper restore of VSS-aware applications (e.g. Active Directory, Exchange) from the created backups.

Reduced storage costs with data de-duplication
When performing backups of multiple virtual machines, Veeam Backup & Replication de-duplicates similar blocks inside the backup file. De-duplication provides exceptional results when you back up multiple virtual machines created from a single template, or VMs with gigabytes of free space on their preallocated logical drives. Data de-duplication reduces disk space requirements for your backups, which results in significant cost savings. Veeam Backup & Replication also offers a compatibility mode for storage devices using hardware de-duplication.

Replica rollback
Backups and replicas produced with Veeam Backup & Replication can be easily restored to a particular point in time. This protects your infrastructure against both hardware and software corruptions – such as in the case of a virus – when software corruption is usually noticed only after a few replication cycles.

CMDB integration
Many enterprises have implemented IT configuration management processes through a centralized configuration management database (CMDB). Veeam Reporter Enterprise integrates your VMware environment into this standard configuration management process. Reporter Enterprise provides a PowerShell Extension to run scripts that automatically export virtual infrastructure data (both for the current state and earlier points in time) into your CMDB. This eliminates the manual work of creating inventory spreadsheets, and automatically keeps your CMDB up-to-date. In addition, running your PowerShell scripts against the Reporter Enterprise server instead of vCenter removes a processing burden from vCenter, providing for better availability of this critical Virtual Infrastructure element.

Change management
Veeam Reporter Enterprise gathers infrastructure data periodically, which allows for configuration change reporting. Administrators can get point-in-time views of their virtual environment, and generate reports to analyze configuration changes over time for configuration drift, security auditing and troubleshooting. Or, you can simply opt to receive an e-mail with all changes to the virtual infrastructure since the last data collection.

Compliance and best practices
When managing a dynamic, large-scale environment, it is important to have up-to-date reports on the configuration of all the elements of your virtual infrastructure. Reporter Enterprise helps you comply with your internal and external requirements and regulations, as well as IT best practices.

Unattended data collection
Veeam Reporter Enterprise provides unattended data collection, as well as centralized data storage to help you discover, document and report on all the objects within your VMware Virtual Infrastructure right now, and at any point in the past. It collects information about your VI3 environment, its components and configuration setting, on an ongoing basis. Reporter Enterprise separates the data collection and report generation operations, so you can set automated collection to occur at specific intervals, ensuring an up-to-date view is ready at any time.

PowerShell access
Reporter Enterprise provides a PowerShell Extension to run custom queries against the collected virtual infrastructure data, both for the current state and data from earlier points in time. Running your PowerShell scripts against the Reporter Enterprise server instead of vCenter allows you to offload script processing activities from vCenter, providing for better performance and availability of this critical Virtual Infrastructure element.

The Veeam PowerShell Extension is fully compatible with the standard VMware PowerShell Extension and uses the same data structures, allowing you to run your existing PowerShell scripts against the Reporter Enterprise database with few, if any, modifications.

VM sprawl control
The ease with which VMs can be created leaves some organizations with a problem called virtual machine (VM) sprawl. VM sprawl affects storage requirements, due to backup demands, as well as infrastructure capacity. With Veeam Reporter Enterprise, VMware administrators can easily see all VMs recently added to the infrastructure, so they can verify the owner of a given VM and confirm if it is really needed.

Reporting content

Network
Discover your virtual network structure, including ESX/ESXi servers, virtual networks and virtual machines. Identify possible problems caused by erroneous network configurations by looking at simple and easy-to-understand Microsoft Visio diagrams.

Storage
Discover all existing local and shared datastores, and the virtual machines that reside on them. Analyze and plan your storage with detailed statistics provided by Veeam’s unique Storage Capacity reports which helps you quickly understand what virtual machines are running out of free space on their logical disks.

VMotion
Check the current VMotion configuration from a specific VM standpoint, or plan your VMotion strategy by reviewing potential VMotion target hosts. Understand why specific VM cannot be included in VMotion by simply reading the reason in a Visio callout.

Configuration
Check various configuration settings on all the objects in your virtual infrastructure, such as the resource pool’s CPU and memory sharing settings.

Inventory
Get the full inventory reports of your VMware infrastructure in your preferred format: Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Word or PDF.

Raw data analysis
Easily export many of the common settings of your infrastructure into an Excel spreadsheet, allowing you to create your own custom reports using the pre-defined report templates you supply. With this data you can also formulate your own charge-back analysis custom-tailored to your business needs.

Veeam Business View integration
Veeam Business View uses custom attributes to group, view and manage VMs based on business criteria such as business unit, department, location, purpose, SLA etc., instead of their VMware infrastructure location. Business View helps you prioritize resource allocation, perform chargeback and control VM sprawl.

Business-centric monitoring
Veeam Monitor leverages Veeam Business View integration to enable performance monitoring, alerting, reporting and capacity planning for virtual machine groups based on criteria such as business unit, department, location, purpose, service level agreement and other. This ability to perform business-centric monitoring helps to identify the business impact of a virtual infrastructure’s performance and respond accordingly. It also allows you to create flexible alerts based on known server type characteristics and the potential business impact of an outage for more granular service-level management. You can also create targeted reports showing only the data relevant to specific business units, departments or types of server.

Virtual infrastructure performance analysis
Veeam Monitor shows comprehensive resource consumption and workload data, for hosts, clusters, and datastores, with visibility all the way down to the individual VM level and applications running inside of it. Find out at a glance which components of your VMware infrastructure are the largest resource consumers, and which ESX hosts are least loaded – right now and over time. View actual cumulative I/O load on a particular datastore to determine whether it is overloaded, or can handle more VMs. Drill-down into Windows and Linux VMs, ESX hosts and vCenter servers to monitor resource usage for specific applications. These capabilities speed up analysis and troubleshooting, and help you determine potential resource bottlenecks for both virtual server and VDI workloads.

Storage monitoring
Veeam Monitor 4.0 provides full storage monitoring capabilities, including disk space, disk issues and datastore monitoring. The latter allows for viewing datastore load information aggregated from disk utilization statistics of all VMs and hosts using the specific datastore. This allows you to see the actual cumulative load on a particular datastore, and set up an alarm that fires off when the datastore load is above a specified threshold. Datastore I/O monitoring is a unique Veeam Monitor feature not available from other VMware monitoring applications.

Hardware monitoring
To provide the most complete picture of your virtual datacenter, Veeam Monitor provides you with ESX server hardware sensor information. This allows the VMware monitoring team to track physical hardware status (including ventilation, enclosure, power and other subsystems status) directly in Veeam Monitor. This eliminates the need for service-console-based hardware monitoring agents, which are not supported on ESXi servers.

Capacity planning and trend analysis
All resource usage views support consumption trending and capacity planning, providing you with the historical data you need to proactively plan the growth and deployment of new virtual machines. Generate detailed graphical Excel or HTML performance and uptime reports for any period of time to review SLA for specific groups of virtual machines, analyze resource consumption trends and plan capacity, or to use this information for chargeback. Both manual and automatic report generation is supported, and options are provided to publish these reports to a file share, SharePoint library or other locations.

Advanced alerting and flexible alarms with modeling
Veeam Monitor provides comprehensive alerting with custom alarms that can be based on many sources. You can easily set up e-mail notifications or SNMP traps for important events such as a given number of running VMs is exceeded, host hardware status changes, a specific event is generated by vCenter, etc. Being alerted on such events allows for faster administrator response to critical issues, helping you maintain better health and uptime of your virtual infrastructure. The Alarm Modeling feature lets you quickly ensure that you have correctly set alarm benchmarks and thresholds by testing a newly created alarm using historical data.

Correlation of event and performance data
Veeam Monitor helps you understand how virtual infrastructure activities affect your VM performance, and solve resource usage mysteries with real-time monitoring graphs displaying known virtual infrastructure events, such as VMotion, snapshot creation and deletion, or backup activities, directly on the performance graphs.

Scalable architecture
Veeam Monitor is an enterprise-level application that enables multi-admin access to performance data without affecting ESX server or vCenter performance or changing your access policies. It gathers all performance information into a SQL Server database, allowing users to access infrastructure-wide performance data and reporting as needed.

Veeam Monitor is integrated with VMware vCenter to provide cluster-aware monitoring of your virtual machines. Veeam Monitor supports and extends VMware’s management framework, offloading the monitoring burden from vCenter for enhanced VC performance. And with support for multiple vCenters, Veeam Monitor shows performance data from your entire virtual infrastructure on a single screen – no matter how large your VMware deployment is.

Manage your VMs from a business perspective
Veeam Business View uses custom attributes to group, view and manage VMs based on business criteria - helping you prioritize resource allocation, perform chargeback and control VM sprawl.

Prioritize resource allocation and utilization across your business
Business View’s unique dashboard view allows you to see at a glance the number of VMs, vCPUs, amount of memory and storage used by each business unit, department, and purpose, as well as in other business terms.

Control VM sprawl
Business View helps you control VM sprawl by and assigning all the VMs in your datacenter. Unassigned VMs and the resources they use can be immediately seen on the web-based dashboard.

Define your chargeback model
Together with Veeam Monitor and Veeam Reporter Enterprise that provide comprehensive resource utilization and allocation information, Business View gives you the flexibility to define a chargeback model the way you want. In addition, you can easily export the VM groups’ information to a Microsoft Excel document for reporting or integration with other chargeback, inventory, or billing systems.

Leverage your investments in Veeam
Get even more value from your investment in Veeam products with Business View. Make your Reporter Enterprise reports more useful by basing them on VM business unit, department or purpose – instead of just cluster, host or datacenter level. Create more effective nworks MP or SPI alarms by assigning different alarms to VMs with different SLA levels or performance characteristics. Integration with more Veeam products will be added soon!

"Set & forget" automated VM categorization and workflow
No more need for repetitive manual categorization of new VMs into multiple folders. Set up rules and policies once, and new VMs will automatically be grouped appropriately.

Integration with your existing VM categorization process
Are you already using custom attributes to group your VMs by business unit, department, purpose, or SLA? Veeam Business View can automate and extend what you already have – no need to recreate everything from scratch.

Open architecture
Because Business View integrates with vCenter data, you can fully leverage the advantages of Business View with the VMware Virtual Infrastructure Client and other third-party products. To reduce complexity, Veeam Business View comes with a built-in web service that allows any application to quickly query a specific category’s content directly from the Business View server, without putting any extra load on the vCenter server.

Fast
Veeam FastSCP can copy files over 6 times faster than WinSCP and other SCP-based tools as it uses full network capacity. The Veeam FastSCP engine also features traffic compression and empty block removal for best file copy performance.

Secure
Veeam FastSCP uses SSH as a control channel to generate a one-time username and password for each file transfer session. Veeam FastSCP does not require putting ESXi into “unsupported” mode or compromise its security by enabling additional services.

Simple
Veeam FastSCP has a Windows Explorer-like user interface familiar to any Windows user. Just run it on your Windows machine and start copying – it doesn’t require any additional ESX or ESXi reconfiguration.

Single console
Multiple Windows, Linux, ESX and ESXi servers file management in a single console without re-entering logins and passwords, and automated sudo for ESX and Linux servers to save even more of your time.

Flexible file management
FastSCP allows both interactive file management via drag-and-drop or copy-and-paste using familiar Windows Explorer-like UI; and scheduled file copy jobs.

ESX(i) to ESX(i) copy
FastSCP makes it possible to perform file operations between standalone ESX and ESXi hosts (or between hosts in different vCenters) with ESX(i) to ESX(i) direct file copy. You can browse, copy, edit files and attributes within a familiar interface, whether you’re copying files to ESX or to a desktop.

Disk space preallocation
Veeam FastSCP performs automatic disk space preallocation on target ESX storage to prevent fragmentation.

Email reporting
After completing the scheduled file copy job, Veeam FastSCP can optionally send an email with the job statistics and execution results.

Easy file editing
Built-in file editor for tweaking ESX and Linux configuration files, with ability to edit Linux file permissions (chmod) in a Windows GUI.

Integration with Veeam Backup
Do more from the same console. FastSCP is integrated with Veeam Backup #1 backup and replication solution for fast recovery of your VMware Infrastructure. To download a trial license and learn more about Veeam Backup please click the link above.