Upgrade 5 to 6.5 or 7

[larry]

I will be upgrading my Veeam from 5 to at least 6.5. ( it works why fix it ) During the upgrade I will be installing new hardware for the Veeam servers and doing clean installs. Old data will be left on the old servers. My current setup is 4 Veeam servers with 2 at each of 2 sites. My current Wan is 150meg, 2ms. All backups are done after hours with the full WAN available of backups. I store 12tb of backup data at each site and transfer 400gig of changes on most nights, some nights it is a few tb.
My Veeam servers will be HP DL380p running Windors2008R2 16 gig of ram . E5-2620. Can add more ram and a second CPU if needed. Direct SAN access. This is more power and more memory than my current setup. I backup to a local Raid and a Netgear.
We only use VMware and have no plans of switching.
Would 10gig to the SAN make any different?
Any time frame on version 7 ?
I will also be upgrading my VMware from 4 to 5 after the Veeam update.
Before I just load up the new Veeam, I am looking for any advice on setup. We are a Veeam enterprise customer with support. My only issue would be full offsite backups taking too long, our image server is a SQL server with 2tb of data.
We want to create all new jobs and start fresh. After years of using Veeam we now know which VMs we want grouped and why. We have changed vlans and want to redo our labs as well.

[veremin]

Any time frame on version 7?

According to the plan it will be released in Q3 this year.

My only issue would be full offsite backups taking too long, our image server is a SQL server with 2tb of data.

In this case, in future you might want to backup to local repository first and then use a new type of the job called Backup Copy Job that will be introduced in the upcoming release and that will take care about copying backup off-site for you. Additionally, there will be WAN acceleration feature available, that also might be for some help.

Thanks.

[Vitaliy S.]

Would 10gig to the SAN make any different?

Is this for the iSCSI network connection? You should have pretty decent job performance with this kind of setup.

[larry]

thanks, we will start with 6.5 and move to 7 when it comes out. The links sent me to a link for the web video which supplied alot of infomation.

[veremin]

Good strategy, indeed. Should any additional help be needed, feel free to contact us. Thanks.

[foggy]

thanks, we will start with 6.5 and move to 7 when it comes out.

Then you can use backup seeding to avoid running fulls over slow link. Just make sure you perform at least one successful job run after upgrading to v6.5 to be able to map your backup jobs to v5 format backup files.

And, btw, here is a proper v5->v6x upgrade procedure in case you would want to benefit from the new centralized architecture introduced in v6.

[larry]

I am now planning of setting up 6.5, kick the tires but leave my version 5 servers running until 7 comes out. Then the update to 7 will have little risk for me. That is if my license allows me to use ver 5 and 6.5 at the same time, I have a license for all my CPUs but can I use both Veeam version ?

[Vitaliy S.]

Larry, you should be able to use two versions during your migration period, but you will still need to have two separate keys for v5 and v6.

[larry]

ok thanks

[veremin]

Should any additional help be needed, don’t hesitate to contact us. Thanks.