Veeam® is not “giving away” all the functionality in Veeam Backup & Replication, but Veeam Backup Free Edition™ has significant functionality that virtualization admins will find useful. Included in the free edition is an updated version of their file management FastSCP™ tool that VMware admins have used for many years. In this new version, the functionality has been extended to Hyper-V, but the biggest piece of new functionality is VeeamZIP™. VeeamZIP enables users to quickly and easily “zip” all the files and settings associated with a VM into a compressed, deduplicated “archive” file that will fit on most removable media such as a portable hard drive or even a USB flash drive. A key advantage of using VeeamZIP instead of a built-in export capability is that the VM does not have to be shut down or taken offline. Veeam had lots of common administrator scenarios in mind when designing VeeamZIP:
- Create an ad-hoc backup of a VM before making changes to it. Even if you have another backup solution handling scheduled backups, the ease of use of VeeamZIP to quickly create backups makes it ideal for making a copy of a VM outside of its normal backup job.
- Archive a VM before deleting it. Need to clear up space on your data stores but concerned about permanently deleting the VM? VeeamZIP it! VeeamZIP gives you the capability to keep compressed permanent archives of individual VMs that can be restored at any time.
- Take that VM with you. VeeamZIP allows you to easily transport a VM from one location to another and restore to a different host. VeeamZIP a production VM and restore it in a lab.
Veeam Backup Free Edition has most of the recovery capabilities of their paid product, so if you need to recover the VM you “zipped,” you can recover the entire VM to any host, recover VM files, or quickly and easily recover guest files and folders from the backup file.
VeeamZIP can only take full backups, and only on an ad-hoc basis, so you’d have to get the paid product to schedule backups and take advantage of incremental backups. And the extremely powerful Instant VM Recovery feature that allows you to restart a protected VM directly from the compressed, deduplicated backup file in as little as two minutes is also not part of the free version.
Even with these limitations, Veeam Backup Free Edition is a great set of utilities for virtualization admins to have at the ready. Especially since there is no expiration limit or cap on the number or size of individual VMs you can use it with.
Veeam free software can be downloaded from: www.veeam.com/free-virtualization-software-vmware-hyper-v.html
The Dot Hill AssuredSAN 3000 Series and Veeam Backup & Replication provide a powerful hardware/software combination that VMware and Microsoft customers can depend on to reliably manage their data. Designed to assist IT-constrained, midsize organizations facing the demands of data storage and data protection requirements, Dot Hill’s AssuredSAN storage solutions support businesses in meeting their IT needs by delivering breakthrough storage performance, efficiency, flexibility and scale.
The Dot Hill AssuredSAN 3000 Series is certified with vSphere, vSphere 5 Site Recovery Manager, and vStorage with full support for VAAI primitives.
Article contributed by: Jim Jonez, Sr. Director of Marketing, Dot Hill Systems
