Azure Backup Server now supports SQL 2017

Azure Backup Server can now be installed on Windows Server 2019 with SQL 2017 as its database. V3 is the latest upgrade for Microsoft Azure Backup Server (MABS) and it brings key enhancements in the areas of storage and security.

Security

Preventing critical volumes’ data loss

While selecting volumes for storage that should be used for backups by MABS, user may accidently select the wrong volume. Selecting volumes containing critical data may result in unexpected data loss. With MABS V3 you can prevent this by disabling these volumes to be available for backup storage, thus keeping your critical data secure from unexpected deletion.

TLS 1.2

Transport Layer Security (TLS) is the cryptographic protocol which ensures communication security over the network. With TLS 1.2 support, MABS V3 ensures more secured communication for backups. MABS now offers TLS 1.2 communication between Azure Backup Server and the protected servers, for certificate based authentication, and for cloud backups.

Storage

Volume migration

MABS V3 provides the flexibility to move your on-premises backups data sources to other storage for efficient resource utilization. For example, during storage upgrade, you can move data sources such as frequently backed up SQL databases to higher performant storage to achieve better results. You can also migrate your backups and configure them to be stored to a different target volume when a volume is getting exhausted and cannot be extended.

Optimized CC for RCT VMs

With resilient change tracking(RCT) mechanism in Hyper-V VMs, MABS optimizes the the network and storageconsumption by transferring only the changed data during consistency checkjobs. This reduces the overall need of time consuming consistency checks, thusmaking incremental backups faster and easier.

Reference

Azure Backup Server documentation

what’s new is MABS