{"id":5195,"date":"2014-06-30T15:12:57","date_gmt":"2014-06-30T05:12:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/?p=5195"},"modified":"2014-06-30T15:12:57","modified_gmt":"2014-06-30T05:12:57","slug":"whats-new-in-8-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nsrd.info\/blog\/2014\/06\/30\/whats-new-in-8-2\/","title":{"rendered":"What’s new in 8.2?"},"content":{"rendered":"

NetWorker 8.2\u00a0entered Directed Availability (DA) status a couple of weeks ago. Between finishing up one job and looking for a new one,\u00a0I’d been a bit too busy to blog about 8.2 until now, so here goes…<\/p>\n

\"what's<\/a><\/p>\n

First and foremost, NetWorker 8.2 brings some\u00a0additional functionality to\u00a0VBA. VBA was introduced as the new backup process in NetWorker\u00a08.1. Closely integrating\u00a0Avamar backup technologies, VBA leverages a special, embedded\u00a0virtual Avamar node to achieve high performance backup and recovery. Not only can policies be\u00a0defined in NMC for VBA can be assigned by a\u00a0VMware administrator in the vSphere Web Client,\u00a0\u00a0… so too can\u00a0image level backup and recovery operations be executed there. Of course, regularly scheduled backups are still controlled by NetWorker.<\/p>\n

That was the lay of\u00a0the land in 8.1 \u2013 8.2 reintroduces some of\u00a0the much-loved VADP\u00a0functionality, allowing for a graphical visualisation map of the virtual environment from within NMC.<\/p>\n

Continuing that Avamar\/VMware integration, NetWorker 8.2 also gets something that Avamar 7 administrators have had for a while \u2013\u00a0instant-on<\/em> recoveries when backups are performed to Data Domain.\u00a0There’s also an emergency restore option to pull a VM back to an ESX host even if vCenter is unavailable, and greater granularity of virtual machine backups \u2013 individual VMDK files can be backed up and restored if necessary. For those environments where VMware administrators\u00a0aren’t meant to be starting\u00a0backups outside of\u00a0the policy schedules, there’s also the option now to turn off\u00a0VBA Adhoc Backups<\/em> in NMC.<\/p>\n

Moving on from VMware, there’s some fantastic snapshot functionality in NetWorker 8.2. This is\u00a0something I’ve not yet had a\u00a0chance to play around with, but by all accounts, it’s off to a promising start and will continue to get deeper integration with NetWorker over time. Currently, NetWorker supports integrating with snapshot technologies\u00a0from Isilon, VNX, VNX2, VNX2e and NetApp, though the level of integration depends on what is available from each array. This new functionality is called\u00a0NSM for NAS<\/em> (NetWorker Snapshot Management).<\/p>\n

The NSM integration allows NAS hosts to be integrated\u00a0as clients within NetWorker for policy management, whilst still working\u00a0from\u00a0the traditional “black box” scenario of NAS\u00a0systems not getting custom agents\u00a0installed. There’s a long list of\u00a0functionality, including:<\/p>\n