For admins looking to reduce the amount of consoles that have to be managed, Veeam was, frankly, depressing. On one hand, the amazing validation and stability features to protect your virtual workloads are a must have, but on the other, its lack of physical support meant licensing and managing another backup product a steadfast requirement. Those that insisted on one backup console, thus overlooked Veeam and instead deployed a backup solution that was geared more towards physical workloads, backing up VMs using the same processes. While this provided a single console, it prevented the adoption of many backup enhancements that only exist when protecting virtual workloads.

A couple of years ago, Veeam released a new addition to their growing list of free products, initially known as Endpoint Protection. Its purpose was to provide a method to “VeeamZIP” a physical machine. Future releases of the product saw additional enhancements, including the ability to centralize the physical backup with a Veeam Repository, as well as its DR and instant recovery capability.

After much anticipation, Veeam is happy with the availability they can provide physical workloads (server and workstation) with their product, by installing the Veeam Agent for Microsoft Windows 2.0. The build as announced will include the following capabilities when backing up your physical and public cloud servers:

  • Active full backups
  • Application-aware processing
  • File indexing and search
  • Instant Recovery to Microsoft Hyper-V VM
  • Server-specific scheduling and retention
  • Synthetic-Full backups
  • Transaction log backup for databases
  • Full support for Windows Server 2016 AND Windows 10
  • Backup directly to Veeam Cloud Connect
  • Direct restore to Microsoft Azure
  • Source-side encryption
  • CryptoLocker protection for USB devices
  • Endpoint protection for Mobile users
  • Workstation-specific scheduling and retention

In an upcoming blog series, I will run through a step-by-step install of the new version, and how Veeam brings its innovation to the physical environment.

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