I believe another reason for that is so if you want to move a VM from one backup job to another or a different repo it makes that process easier as well. I think it also ties into the option to be able to run a single VM backup again in a job if it fails instead of the whole job. I believe performance was another thing.
I could also be out in left field with that so take it as it is.
It enables migration of individual VM backups between repositories and jobs, and allows for better parallelised performance are the key points
per VM backup jobs used to say up to 300 VMs in a job, now it can exceed 1k for example (not sure the exact stopping off point for that but I’ve seen 1k performing well)
Geoff - From my understanding, the new format with meta files per VM makes Veeam more flexible → ability to perform per-VM FULLs, move individual VMs, etc.
See ‘Backup Chain Formats’ here, where it discusses this.
To add, it’s also speeds up verifications of backup chains and when running health checks against the chain.
Before we implemented per VM backups, we always used to run into health checks not completing in time due to the very short backup window we had.
Is that further accelerated when using per-VM metadata vs traditional per-VM with one metadata file?