NetWorker 19.8 and Avamar 19.8 were released in December, and in this post I’ll run through some of the new and updated features in them both.
Avamar 19.8
As always, you’ll find all the official details for Avamar over at the core support site for the Avamar Server solution, but let’s have a quick look at some of the new features you’ll find in 19.8:
- HTML GUI (AUI):
- SSO authentication available
- Support to recover the replicated copy of a VM as a new VM when the local/original backup of the VM has been deleted or expired.
- Support filtering by ESX host name in regulator operators.
- Avamar Virtual Edition (AVE):
- AVE now supports being deployed with up to 24 TB usable capacity.
- AVE now supports VMware 7.1, 7.2 and 7.3.
- Client enhancements:
- Sharepoint backups leveraging TDE encrypted SQL servers now support granular recovery (GLR).
- Table level restore of SQL backups for TDE encrypted SQL servers are also supported.
- RedHat Enterprise Linux v9 filesystem backups no longer need the initscript package.
- PowerProtect DD support:
- DD Boost API for DDOS 7.9 and 7.10 are also supported by this release.
- Avamar now supports the Mtree it is using having a hard quota applied.
- Major new feature: Avamar now supports Retention Lock Compliance mode on PowerProtect DD systems.
- NDMP:
- Avamar can now browse an Isilon OneFS file system using session-based authentication.
- Security:
- Support for CipherTrust Manager 2.4 when using Avamar in a Cyber Recovery solution.
- Support for a custom security login banner in AUI.
- Virtualization:
- Support for backup and recovery of the VM tag information as part of VM metadata.
If I were to name the single most important reason to upgrade your Avamar environments to 19.8, it’s support for Retention Lock Compliance mode with PowerProtect DD systems. As always, enabling retention lock requires careful capacity planning — but the net benefit of giving yourself a first line of defence against ransomware attacks cannot be understated.
NetWorker 19.8
As always, you’ll find the official details for NetWorker over at the official support site, here. This includes documentation, installers, and knowledge base articles. Before you head there, let’s have a look at some of the new features in 19.8:
- vProxy:
- Support for adding 2-4 NTP servers during vProxy deployment.
- Support to configure syslog server logging for vProxy during vProxy deployment.
- Support for parallel backup and restore of multiple VMDKs in a single VM – great if you’ve got some big multi-disk VMs where you need to maximise backup and recovery operation speeds for.
- NetWorker Management UI (NWUI):
- Enhanced support for specifying cloning configuration parameters within the NWUI.
- View full details for capacity or traditional licenses within the NWUI.
- NetWorker storage nodes:
- The number of Data Domain Boost devices you can configure on any individual NetWorker storage node has increased from 31 to 127.
- NFS v4 target device support.
- Cloning:
- The NWUI and NetWorker REST APIs now support enforcing chronological ordering when cloning savesets.
- PowerProtect DD integration enhancements:
- REST API support to trigger Mtree replications from a source to target server.
- REST API support for access to PowerProtect DD Smart Scale mobile storage unit (MSU) operations.
- Index backup enhancements:
- There’s now an option to trigger client file index backups immediately after client backups have been completed. (Rather than waiting for the NetWorker server backup.)
- NetWorker virtual edition support for Alibaba Cloud Elastic Compute Service.