Second article about the new features of Veeam Backup & Replication 6, today we talk about Advanced Replication.

Replication has been always one of the strenght point of Veeam, even if sometimes underestimated. Using inexpensive standby hosts, delta syncs and usage of dissimilar storage (has also VMware did in SRM 5 with vSphere Replication), with replication we can create full Disaster Recovery plans using only Veeam.

With Version 6, even replication will benefit of the new distributed architecture (I talked about it here) for even greater performances, plus other features, some of them really interesting:

– Hot Add will be used even for writes

– re-IP ov VMs! This alone is worth the entire software. It will be possible to replicate VMs towards different subnets, and the software will change for us IP addresses to make the VMs running again

– Seed from backup: (I know the name but not what it does, so is a supposition) maybe we will be able to use backup as replication source, avoiding to copy twice the production machines

– preserve thin disks

– traffic throttling

– Full Failback with a click. This feature can really be an alternative to storage vmotion for those customers not having a high VMware license with this feature.

With all these enhancements, and a significant price difference, Veeam 6 can really become a dangerous competitor even for VMware Site Recovery Manager.