With our 24.7 release, the Cove Data Protection team has delivered several important updates and improvements to Microsoft 365 Backup and Cove Continuity, including full support for vSphere HA clustering.

Cove Continuity

As noted above, we are happy to announce that Standby Image to ESXi now supports vSphere HA (High Availability) cluster capabilities.

VMware vSphere HA clusters are groups of ESXi hosts that work together to ensure availability of virtual machines (VMs). When a host in the cluster fails, VMs on that host are automatically restarted on other hosts in the cluster in a process called failover.

With this update, Standby Images can be moved across hosts and storage in the cluster (e.g., if a host goes down or has reached its resource utilization threshold).

Additionally, we’ve retrained our AI/ML model to improve boot detection accuracy for several types of screens that previously triggered both false positive and false negative results:

• Windows auto login screens
• Windows “getting devices ready” screens
• Microsoft Hyper-V login screens
• Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) screens
• Completely black screens
• Boot manager screens

Additionally, we’ve addressed several customer issues: 

• Standby Image verification tab: Resolved an issue where Windows logs did not always display.
• Standby Image to Azure and Standby Image to ESXi: Fixed the failed boot issue with the error: “The application or operating system couldn’t be loaded because a required file is missing or contains errors (winload.efi).”
• Standby Image to Azure: Implemented full scan recovery after a failed boot to fix the standby copy.
• All plans: Fixed the error “Failed to initialize virtual disk file: Failed to get volume information: The parameter is incorrect” 

Finally, for Swiss partners, we will now perform Recovery Testing recoveries to Germany by default to ensure data sovereignty requirements are met.

Microsoft 365 Backup

With this release, we’ve also made several improvements to Microsoft 365 billing:

• Microsoft 365 dashboard was improved by displaying the number of billable users
• Non-licensed Teams Owners are now excluded from billing.
• The summary step of the Add Device Wizard has been extended to display the number of Teams billable users.

And last but not least, we’ve improved error messaging to provide clearer information when lost or “broken” items in Microsoft Teams (on the Microsoft side) trigger errors in Cove.