I have seperated them with dashed lines for better readability.
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More 'restore to' options
Currently, VeeAm 4 offers the ability to restore an entre VM or the VM Files (vmx, vmdk etc), or a specific Guest OS file.
Those are three great options (well, option 1 and 2 are pretty much the same, option 1 just registers the VMX for you when restoring to ESX).
I would like to suggest an expansion to option 2, with the following two extra destinations:
* FTP Server
Upload VM files directly from the backup archive to FTP. Why? Because I have a remote NAS that offers a location as an NFS share to ESX and also has FTP access. Reason two is that you can also use it to restore much faster to an ESXi server with an FTP service enabled just for the purpose of fast restore, completely unsupported and not recommended of course. It's just that I tried a normal restore to ESXi and I got 10 MByte/sec restore speed on a 1 Gbit network. I can FTP much faster than that to my ESXi. And after a reboot FTP is disabled again. But the store about the NAS/SAN with NFS and FTP access should be the official reason of course
NetDrive might be able to help me with this as well of course, but an integrated solution is usually better.
* iSCSI target mounted in Windows (vmfs formatted)
Direct restore to SAN. VeeAm can already backup from an iSCSI target mounted in Windows, even though Windows can't read the volume. A direct restore would be very useful as well.
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Forward incremental backups
...where the base file stays the same and the incremental files contain the difference. Differential might also be a great option. Main advantage is obviously that there's much less data to transfer each day to an off-site location.
The scheduler would need options to 'create a full backup every xx backup runs' and also to 'retain the last xx full backups'.
That way, I can always keep the last 2 full backups with all incrementals or differentials, and when the third full backup is created successfully, the oldest full backup and corresponding incrementals/differentials are deleted.
I can then use Syncback or another sync utility to easily keep the local backup storage synced with a remote backup storage, and I would need to transfer minimal amounts of data.
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Increased recovery speed with ESXi
Perhaps not entirely VeeAm's fault, but if there's something that can be done, that would be very welcome. Restore speeds with ESXi are 10 MByte/sec tops in my tests with 1 Gbit network and when I'm restoring, every minute counts. Backup process is usually fast enough: the first backup takes very long, but the increments are pretty fast. But some improvements here are welcome as well. I'm using the Storage API - Network backup mode, since all my ESXi boxes have local storage (I'm just experimenting with iSCSI targets at the moment).
It is possible some features may already have been suggested, in that case I'm sorry. I also believe the forward increments are already planned for some future version, but perhaps my description of the scheduler changes that would be nice might be useful.