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.

I’ve been working with more VMware environments lately, and I’m noticing a clear trend: NFS datastores are becoming mainstream. It used to be that only NetApp enthusiasts would seriously consider NFS for VMware, but times have changed. With the rise of hyper-converged infrastructure, major platforms like Nutanix and Cisco HyperFlex are now delivering storage to VMware exclusively through NFS.

This shift has always been a bit problematic for backup performance. When you’re using NFS datastores, your only option for virtual machine backups has been the network transport method (NBD), which caps you at just 40% of VMKernel’s total network throughput. Even with plenty of bandwidth available, you’d hit that performance ceiling every time.

Great news from the Veeam team! Last week, we achieved another significant milestone by passing the newly available VMware Web Client Plug-in Ready certification for vSphere 6.5. This is genuinely exciting news for anyone managing VMware infrastructure with Veeam.

You can verify our certification status on VMware’s official compatibility list: https://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?deviceCategory=wcp

Why VMware Ready Certification Matters

If you’re not familiar with VMware Ready certification, here’s why it’s such a big deal. This certification ensures that plug-ins meet VMware’s highest standards, providing several key advantages:

Sometimes the most exciting announcements at conferences are the ones you never saw coming.

At last month’s VeeamON conference, Veeam unveiled something completely unexpected—a product that has nothing to do with backup. They called it Veeam PN (short for Veeam Powered Network), and it’s a lightweight SDN solution that quickly connects multiple sites for both site-to-site and endpoint-to-site communication.

Rather than attempting a comprehensive review (you can dive deeper in Veeam KB2271 and the official help manual), I want to share how I’m using it in my home lab.

It’s been a hectic 72 hours.

From Friday evening through today, my phone hasn’t stopped ringing. Friends calling in panic, canceling weekend plans, activating emergency protocols, desperately trying to recover their data. This WannaCry ransomware earned its name—it’s left countless unprepared organizations literally wanting to cry.

Whether you paid the ransom or managed to recover your data another way, now that the dust is settling a bit, it’s time to step back and think strategically. How do we prevent this from happening again? How do we build truly comprehensive protection that leaves no gaps?

One of the most common questions I get asked is: “How effective is your backup software’s deduplication, and how much storage space will my backups actually use?”

The truth is, effectiveness varies dramatically depending on your data types and storage methods. Different environments and hardware configurations can produce vastly different results, making it impossible to give a one-size-fits-all answer. But regardless of these variables, backup data needs storage space, and capacity planning becomes a critical component of any backup infrastructure design.