Included in the release of Data Protection Software 19.2 is, of course, Avamar 19.2. While I don’t have Avamar 19.2 rolled out in my lab yet to include any screen-captures, I still wanted to run through the key new features of this release.
The Avamar Web UI (AUI) gets a big round of enhancements with 19.2, including:
- Updates to the inclusions/exclusions for dynamic policy members
- On-demand backups in the scheduling section
- Improved options for editing datasets
- Smaller granularity on recall of cloud tier backups (recall down to the individual backup, and file-level recovery against recalled backups in the AUI)
- When selecting VMware entities you can search by name, even if it’s in a folder or subfolder
Beyond functionality enhancements in AUI, you’ll also see that Avamar 19.2 now has localization for Simplified Chinese and Japanese for:
- The Avamar Web User Interface
- File-level recovery
- Avamar Desktop/Laptop
- Avamar’s installation manager
Such is the progress on the HTML5 interface that the Avamar release notes say:
Note: Avamar Administrator is deprecated in favor of the Avamar Web User Interface (AUI) and will be removed in a future release.
Avamar 19.2 Release Notes
I really have to say that the Avamar engineering teams have done a stellar job with the transition to the HTML5 interface!
AUI also supports replacing existing self- or commercially-signed certificates for web services with your own ones, and you can include support for RSA replication servers in the two-factor authentication controls as well.
There’s a bunch of client enhancements as well – that covers everything from various upgrades to NAS platform support for NDMP to clients supporting retention times further out than 2038.
The Data Protection Extensions (DPE) gets some updates in the 19.2 release:
- DPE for VMware vCloud Director:
- File-level recoverability within the vCloud Director Tenant Portal
- Dashboard page for vApp owners in a vCloud Director Tenant Portal
- English, French, Dutch, Simplified Chinese, Korean and Japanese localization for the vCD DPE UI
- English, Simplified Chinese and Japanese localization for the vCD Tenant Portal UI
- DPE for OpenStack:
- Support for the Queens release
- DPE for OpenStack can now be installed on either a controller or a compute node.
There’s a big shift underneath the hood for Avamar – the underlying OS has been moved to SLES 12. If you’re using Avamar 18.2 or lower, that means you first have to upgrade to Avamar 19.1 to get the OS upgrade performed. (If you’re on Avamar 19.2 you can obviously upgrade straight to 19.2.) The release notes cover this in quite a bit of detail.
You can find the release notes for Avamar 19.2 here.