There’s one fundamental truth in backup and recovery that every IT professional eventually learns: you don’t know if your backup archives can actually be restored until you’ve tried to restore them.

Veeam has a remarkable feature that automatically verifies backup archive availability online, ensuring your backed-up content can be properly restored when disaster strikes.

The magic happens because SureBackup starts backup archives as normal virtual machines in an isolated environment, then runs comprehensive automated tests. It checks everything from VM heartbeats and network connectivity to application and service status within the VMs. After testing completes, it generates a detailed verification report about the archive’s recoverability.

Kicking off the New Year with some exciting news! Veeam 9.5U3 brings us centralized agent management, a game-changing feature that transforms how we handle physical and cloud infrastructure backups. The interface has evolved significantly, but don’t worry — Veeam maintains its familiar wizard-driven approach that we all know and love.

Let’s dive into what’s new and explore how this centralized management works.

Sometimes the best discoveries happen completely by accident. Last week at VeeamON Shanghai, I stumbled upon something that completely changed my perspective on home lab setups. One of my colleagues casually mentioned he was running ESXi on his laptop, and I was blown away.

Now, I’ve always assumed installing ESXi on a laptop would be a nightmare of driver hunting and compatibility issues. But here’s the game-changing insight: use Dell’s customized ESXi ISO. Everything just works out of the box—no driver hunting, no compatibility headaches. The installation process is literally one-click, and you’re up and running.

In our last post, we explored how to accelerate the backup engine — a critical optimization for maximizing backup performance and improving your RPO.

But that’s just one piece of the performance puzzle.

Today, I want to share another game-changing accelerator that Veeam introduced: the vSphere communication acceleration technology. And trust me, the results are absolutely stunning.

The Broker Service Revolution

Introduced in Veeam 9.5, the Broker Service is one of those features that seems simple on the surface but delivers incredible performance gains in practice.

I don’t often talk about speed and performance, because I’ve always considered it a fundamental requirement—like a good car’s engine. You expect it to work well, and you don’t really think about it until something goes wrong.

But here’s the thing: in the world of backup and recovery, that engine is everything. It’s where backup software truly proves its worth. Today, I want to dive deep into Veeam’s acceleration technologies.

Virtualization didn’t just change IT—it revolutionized it. But while we were busy transforming our infrastructure, something equally profound was happening in the backup world. The rise of virtualization brought us agentless backup, and suddenly the old way of doing things didn’t make so much sense anymore.

Here’s the thing about backup architecture: it’s always been a debate between agents and no agents. Both approaches have their obvious trade-offs, but what if you could have the best of both worlds? That’s exactly where Veeam’s approach to agentless backup with application awareness changes the game.