Technical

Veeam Backup & Replication 12.1.2: Everything You Need to Know

Jun 27th 2024 | 7 min to read

Veeam has just released Veeam Backup & Replication 12.1.2, which brings a host of new features, security updates, and performance enhancements.

Explore the significant changes and improvements to stay updated, enhance data security, and optimize your backup processes.

Third-Party Component Updates

Updating these components is essential to enhance your backup infrastructure's compatibility, security, and performance.

VMware VDDK: No longer directly integrated into the Veeam Transport component, now installed only for backup infrastructure roles involved in vSphere interaction and updated to 7.0.3.4 to address CVE-2023-38545.
Microsoft .NET: Updated to 6.0.29.
Microsoft WebView2: Updated to 123.0.2420.81.
PostgreSQL installer: Updated to 15.6.1.
PuTTY: Updated to 0.81.
Curl: Updated to 8.5.

New Features and Enhancements

Platform Support

These updates expand compatibility, ensuring smooth operation across a broader range of systems.

AlmaLinux 9.3 and Rocky 9.3: Now supported for use as Linux-based backup repositories and backup proxies.
Microsoft Azure Stack HCI 23H2: Support for the March 2024 build.
Microsoft SharePoint Subscription Edition 24 H1: Support for application-aware image processing.

General Enhancements

Enhancements improve performance, efficiency, and usability, optimizing your backup processes.

Improved VMware NBD Performance: Performance improved by up to 2x.
Backup Copy Jobs: Now support using other backup copy jobs as a source for VMware, Cloud Director, and Hyper-V workloads.
ReFS Repository Performance: Reduced the impact of disk fragmentation by removing unneeded low-level file system calls.
Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager: Improved data collection performance.
Veeam AI Assistant: Now leverages Markdown for prettier output.
Windows and Syslog Events: Now include the backup server’s build number.
ZFS Block Cloning Technology Preview: Allows enthusiasts to test new ZFS capabilities in test labs. Not supported for production use.

Malware Detection Enhancements

These improvements strengthen malware detection, reduce false positives, and provide better logging and reporting.

File Path Exclusions: Ability to exclude specific file paths from suspicious file system activity analysis.
Detailed Logs for Bulk Rename Events: Logs affected files in detail.
Enhanced Event Information: Additional details such as object names, timestamps, and backup server versions.
Reduced False Positives: Increased the threshold for the minimum number of modified or deleted files and tuned the sensitivity settings of the malware detection model.
Renamed Event: "Ransomware Note" renamed to "Onion Links" for clarity.
Detection of Onion Links: Even in files 900 bytes or smaller.
Weekly Log Archival: Malware detection logs are archived weekly.

Enterprise Applications Enhancements

These upgrades boost the security, efficiency, and accuracy of backups for critical enterprise applications.

Network Traffic Encryption

Encryption Support: Added support for network traffic encryption for all application plug-ins.

Specific Application Enhancements

Oracle RMAN: Enhancements for multiple Oracle RAC and Oracle Exadata deployment scenarios.
Db2 Plug-in: Includes a command to list available restore points with timestamps.
Microsoft SQL Server Plug-in: Intercepts errors during backup and recovery to ensure accurate reporting.
SAP on Oracle: Added support for Oracle Linux 8.

Object Storage Enhancements

Improvements below influence streamline storage management and reduce operational costs.

Veeam Data Cloud Vault: Now integrated directly into the user interface.
Scale-out Backup Repositories: Support for multiple Performance Tier and Capacity Tier extents backed by Smart Object Storage API (SOSAPI) enabled object storage.
AWS S3: Increased default generation period to minimize API calls and reduce storage costs. Added support for Canada West (Calgary) region.
CPU Consumption Reduction: Lowered CPU usage during the checkpoint removal process.

Primary and Secondary Storage Enhancements

These updates boost backup performance and optimize storage system efficiency.

IBM SVC: Improved backup performance from storage snapshots with updated parameter values.
Dell Data Domain: Increased default DDBoost connection cache value and optimized the cache, enhancing backup performance to Scale-Out Backup Repository.

Security & Compliance Analyzer Enhancements

Upgrades below enhance security measures and ensure regulatory compliance.

PostgreSQL Configuration Check: Ensures recommended settings are applied.
Service Status Validations: Now check whether services are running.
Host to Proxy Traffic Encryption: Enhanced test to cover additional deployment scenarios.

Veeam Agents Updates

These advances ensure compliance and enhance security checks.

Veeam Agent for Windows 6.1.2.134: Added Metadata Service Version 2 support for AWS machines.
Veeam Agent for Linux 6.1.2.1781: Added support for AlmaLinux 9.3 & 9.4, RHEL 9.4, Rocky 9.3 & 9.4, and Ubuntu 24.04. It also supports booting Recovery Media in a PXE environment.
Veeam Agent for Mac 2.1.2.646: Added the ability to exclude folders from backup.
Veeam Agent for Solaris 4.1.1.1423: Added Bare Metal Recovery support for the latest Solaris updates.

Resolved Issues

Fixing these issues ensures a smoother, more efficient, and reliable backup process.

General Fixes

Addressed high RAM consumption, display issues, and various backup processing problems.
Improved handling of specific error conditions and configuration scenarios.

Platform-Specific Fixes

Resolved VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Cloud Director, and Agent Management issues.

Key Security Updates

These updates are crucial for preventing unauthorized access, account takeovers, and privilege escalations and for ensuring the integrity and security of your backup environment.

Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager (VBEM) Vulnerabilities

CVE-2024-29849: Critical severity (9.8) - This vulnerability allows an unauthenticated attacker to log in to the VBEM web interface as any user.
CVE-2024-29850: High severity (8.8) - This vulnerability allows account takeover via NTLM relay.
CVE-2024-29851: High severity (7.2) - This vulnerability allows a high-privileged user to steal the NTLM hash of the VBEM service account if that service account is anything other than the default Local System account.
CVE-2024-29852: Low severity (2.7) - This vulnerability allows high-privileged users to read backup session logs.

Veeam Agent for Windows (VAW) Vulnerabilities

CVE-2024-29853: High severity (7.8) - This vulnerability allows for Local Privilege Escalation.

NEW 192TB Ootbi: Seamless Integration with Veeam 12.1.2

Ransomware-proof and immutable out-of-the-box Ootbi by Object First has increased its support for larger storage capacity, allowing up to 192TB on a single node and unlocking up to 768TB of usable immutable backup storage per cluster.

Moreover, continuous integration with Veeam's 12.1.2 release opens the door to greater backup storage capacities beyond 3PB, as Ootbi clusters can now be used as multiple extents in a Veeam Scale-Out Backup Repository (SOBR).

Request a demo to learn how the new 192TB Ootbi can elevate your data backup protection.

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