vSphere 6.7 and Veeam Support (BAW13)
For those of your who do not currently subscribe to the Weekly Veeam Community Forum emails provided by Anton Gostev at Veeam, here are details taken from his most recent email with regards to Veeam 9.5 support for vSphere 6.7.
| So the biggest news of the past week is VMware vSphere 6.7 becoming generally available, bringing the long-awaited HTML5 client! One interesting observation for me was noting that it took them 1.5 years to release this minor update, making it the 3rd minor update since vSphere 6 release over 3 years ago. This in turn means we’ll likely only see the major release in about 5 years from the previous one, which certainly feels like a slow down from their previous release cycle. On the other hand, at the current state of vSphere maturity, arguably this is what most of us users would prefer from a mission-critical platform – less new features, more stability. I don’t think anyone here would want to see the repeat of vSphere 6.5 story with constantly re-issued a/b/c/d release packages, things like “Patch 1” followed by “Express Patch 1a” – and all those other fun things we had to struggle through. But, I think there’s another aspect to this as well: lack of serious competition in the enterprise hypervisor market following the OpenStack failure and Microsoft switching their focus to Azure and Azure Stack puts VMware in the position where they can take time perfecting their platform, “doing it right” instead of rushing features out. Having said that, of course it has to be recognized that they do see Nutanix AHV in their rear-view mirror these days, and have to remember that objects in mirror may be closer than they appear.
As far VMware vSphere 6.7 support in Veeam products, it is important to realize that as an ISV, we get the GA code at the same time with everyone else, so it will take us some time to test all of our products against it now that it’s available. However, we already know that the most current Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 3 does NOT support vSphere 6.7 and as I mentioned here before, our release vehicle for adding this support will be Update 3a. Of course, we’ve already done a lot of work based on the pre-release code drops (for example, migrating our vSphere Web Client plug-in to HTML5 alone took us a few months). But it is only now that we can see the actual GA code (and notably, we’re already finding some differences with the RC code). Finally, since everyone will have the question about expected Update 3a timelines anyway: historically, we’ve been shipping new vSphere release support on average within 2 months from GA (with the official commitment for new platform support being 90 days from GA date). In this particular case however, there are additional unknowns in the equation: Windows Server 2016 RS4 and Windows 10 Spring Creators Update releases, support for which needs to catch the same release train. Although presumably, these should be shipped any day now – and testing the RC code has not revealed any major issues so far. For those who did jump the gun and upgraded to vSphere 6.7 despite lack of official support, but unwilling to downgrade back to a supported vSphere version – remember that you can also use our agents to backup your VMs until Update 3a is shipped. We’ve actually just launched the 3 month production license program for Veeam Agents for Microsoft Windows and Linux, as well as Veeam Backup for Microst Office 365 – available to ALL customers and prospects without any restrictions. So if you have a need to protect your Windows and Linux workstation and servers whether they are physical or virtual, on-prem or in the cloud – or want a local backup of your corporate data hosted in Microsoft Office 365, you can now give our corresponding solutions a try. The license can be obtained directly from the download pages of Veeam Agents for Windows and Linux and Veeam Backup for Office 365. |
Updated: 26th June 2018
The latest news from Anton Gostev is that, at the time of writing, the RTM code for Veeam Backup and Replication 9.5 Update 3a has been released to early adopters and will be making its way across to service providers over the next week or so. With the Veeam release schedule this should mean that approximately 2 weeks after it has been released to service providers, then it should be publicly available. If you are desperately in need of getting the latest version before it is publicly released, to help with issues, then it is advisable to open a ticket with Veeam and they may be able to provide you with the code early to help resolve those issues.
Updated: 2nd July 2017
During the latest emailing, it appears that Veeam Backup and Replication 9.5 Update 3a will be released to the public this week with Update 4 due for release later in July.
Blog-a-Week 2018 Posting (BAW):
In previous years, I have had periods throughout the year where I have been unable to post an entry to my blog. During 2018, my aim is to post a blog entry each week of the year. I’m hoping that the blog entries will all be useful bits of information or items that I’ve been working on recently but if the standard of the entries drops, I apologise now, as this could have been a busy week and I wasn’t able to put in as much time as I would have liked into the post