From the site:

V-index is an online virtualization industry study performed by Vanson Bourne, an independent market research company. It is based on a survey of 500 enterprises across the US, UK, France and Germany and is designed to measure 3 parameters – virtualization rate, consolidation ratio and primary hypervisor in use.

So what do you get at V-index.com? First off, you get a quick look at virtualization adoption in a series of 3 different areas: penetration rate, consolidation ratio and Hypervisor in use:

You also get access to a series of snippets that you can put on your own blog or website. The data behind these snippets will be automatically updated each time the v-Index is updated (currently quarterly). Here’s a sample snippet:

V-index There are many different sizes and styles to choose from so feel free to pick the one that works best for your site. Also on the site is a page full of infographics on the v-Index results. These infographics show the splits by country for each of the 3 areas in the survey:

Of course, you can also download the full V-index report in PDF format and also provide feedback on other areas or data points you’d like to see in the V-index.

Again, V-index is meant to be a community resource, Veeam’s involvement is to sponsor the survey by Vanson Bourne and make the results available to everyone. You can use any of the data on the V-index site, please check the privacy policy for more information..

What has also been great is that the virtualization community has recognized us with 8 Top Virtualization Industry Awards in just 5 months since VMworld 2010 in September!!! I remember how we simply could not believe it when we learned at VMworld 2010 that we were the first company ever to win 4 “Best of VMworld” awards at a single VMworld event—including “Best of Show” for Veeam Backup & Replication v5. Then Backup & Replication v5 won a “Reader’s Choice Award” while Veeam ONE won a “Merit Award” from Virtualization Review magazine. And right after that, we received two “Product of the Year 2010” awards from SearchServerVirtualization.com (Veeam Backup & Replication won the Gold award in the Backup and Storage for Virtualization category and Veeam ONE won Gold in the Virtualization Management category).

Thank you all again for such a wonderful year! I look forward to spending an even more exciting year with you in 2011!

The Essential Guide to Legacy-Free Disaster Recovery by Sean Clark

In this whitepaper, Sean navigates through the journey we have all experienced in one way or another-from traditional server environments to the virtualized data center. What about data protection? Sean explains howdata protection needs to be changed along the way as well.

VMware and Microsoft VSS: What You Need to Know by Greg Shields

VSS has been in use for a number of years and across a number of different applications. However, not until you read Greg’s whitepaper on VSS will your understanding be complete. Greg explains why VSS is important as well as the risks of not using VSS properly as applied to virtualized environments.

The Expert Guide to VMware Data Protection by Eric Siebert

Chapters one and two of this e-book are a great resource to identify the key concepts of VMware virtual machine backups, best practices and real world examples of using VMware data protection strategies. More chapters from Eric are on their way, and this series will bring something for everyone.

We need more great content from virtualization experts like you.. If you are interested in writing a whitepaper or other product for Veeam, here are some of the things we are looking for:

• Virtualization experience: Above all else, we need community content that is based on real-world experience with virtualization.
• Focus on content: Let the Veeam Teeam make the formatting magic happen in the white paper – you just have to bring the unique content.
• Timeliness: We need to be able to set a delivery date with you and stick to it.
• Good ideas for content: Experience is a great source of content, and if you have experiences related to virtual machine data protection and management that can be presented clearly; we’d like to talk to you.

What is involved with writing a whitepaper for Veeam?

First of all, these are sponsored whitepapers in which a negotiated fee is set to create content that the contributor is interested in writing and Veeam is interested in sponsoring. A delivery date, word count and other big picture content objectives are set; and that is it!

If you are interested in contributing content to Veeam, please email Zorian Rotenberg, Veeam’s VP of Special Projects at zorian@veeam.com.

In the Reader’s Choice Awards, Veeam Backup and Replication v5 was selected as the winner of the Virtual Business Continuity category and the Veeam ONE Solution for VMware received the Merit Award in the Virtual Management & Optimization category.

This week, the Americas Veeam team is gathered in Atlanta for the annual kickoff for 2011; and this is great news for us to celebrate together. While we are logistically hampered by strong winter weather in the Southeast, this is a bright spot and a big deal for the Veeam team.

The Reader’s Choice Awards are available online at Virtualization Review (registration required) and are also figured in this month’s print issue of Virtualization Review magazine. Be sure to check out Veeam in the Reader's Choice Awards. Thank you virtualization community!

VEEAM should really give every VMware VCP a full copy of their complete catalog! If I had gotten that I would have made them some money! 2:04 PM Oct 16th via Tweetie for Mac

cape2000

This got us thinking, should we do this? I talked to a few people, including Maish Saidel-Keesing who has a popular blog called Technodrone and TechHead Simon Seagrave. They agreed that this would be a great idea for the community.

After discussing the idea internally we got the ball rolling, everyone agreed it was a great idea. Of course it’s taken us some time to get the announcement out there, one of the reasons is that we wanted to wait until we released Veeam Backup & Replication 5.0.1 since it fixed several minor issues. With 5.0.1 released and the Dutch VMUG on the horizon, we decided to go ahead and make this our 2010 Holiday gift.

From our official press release:

Veeam Software, innovative provider of VMware data protection, disaster recovery and VMware management solutions for virtual datacenter environments, today announced that Veeam Backup & Replication™ v5 with vPower™ is now available free to all VMware vExperts, VMware Certified Professionals, and VMware Certified Instructors. Any vExpert, VCP or VCI can receive a free two-socket software license (valued at approximately $1,800) for non-production use, including training, evaluation and development.

Ready for your NFR key? Simply visit this link and register and you’ll be on your way to trying out the best products for managing and protecting VMware infrastructures.

Update: Maish has blogged about the holiday give on his Technodrone blog: http://technodrone.blogspot.com/2010/12/veeam-holiday-present.html

This year we’re again preparing another holiday surprise. It’s not a new product or an existing product for free (like in 2008), instead it’s a gift to the VMware community. Doug Hazelman will be announcing the “gift” at the Dutch VMUG happening on December 10, 2010. We’ll also be issuing a press released and there will be a blog post announcing the vSpecial gift.

We have already talked to some of you in the community about this so if you "know" please don't spoil it for everyone else. If you're on Twitter, look for special hash tag clues this week.

Happy Holidays!

Since the release of Veeam Backup & Replication v5 in October, we have gotten great reviews and invaluable feedback. You can read Eric Siebert’s review of Veeam Backup & Replication v5 that was posted on Searchdatabackup.com or see the in-depth review posted on Vladan.fr.

As you probably already know, Veeam Backup & Replication has features that are not available in any other existing products on the market:

• Instant VM Recovery: Restore entire virtual machines from a backup file in minutes.
• U-AIR (Universal Application-Item Recovery): Recover individual items from any virtualized application, on any OS.
• SureBackup Recovery Verification: Automatically verify the recoverability of EVERY backup, EVERY VM, EVERY time.
• On-Demand Sandbox: Create test VMs from any point in time to troubleshoot problems or test workarounds, software patches or new application code.
• Instant File-Level Recovery: Recover an entire VM or an individual file from the same image-level backup in any OS or file system.

With this promotion you can get 25% off Veeam Backup & Replication v5 when you provide a proof of license for a competing product. This is a limited time offer that will end soon. If you are not satisfied with your existing backup solution, give Veeam Backup & Replication v5 a try.

The second promotion that will end right before Christmas is on Veeam Essentials Plus. You can save 42% by getting a free upgrade to Veeam Essentials Plus when buying Veeam Essentials.

We are very glad to be a part of the “IF ONLY virtualization was…” campaign with VMware. VMware Essentials Plus and Veeam Essentials Plus will give SMB’s the ability to manage and protect their virtual infrastructure at an affordable price.

Veeam Essentials Plus includes Veeam Backup & Replication v5 Enterprise Edition (features listed above), the industry standard for VMware monitoring in Veeam Monitor 5.0, Veeam Reporter, Veeam FastSCP and Veeam Business View.

Learn more about this VMware and Veeam promotion.

Take advantage of these two great promotions before they are gone.

One of the points I liked about the Storage Switzerland article was the entire history aspect of backup vendors…

In almost every case, when a new operating system or platform became dominant, a new data protection leader emerged. Novell NetWare begat Cheyenne Software, but as UNIX and Microsoft Windows NT emerged, this NetWare solution couldn’t make the transition to the new platforms. UNIX backup drove the establishment of Legato NetWorker (eventually EMC NetWorker) and Openvision NetBackup (eventually Symantec NetBackup). Microsoft Windows NT drove the establishment of Arcadia Backup Exec (eventually Symantec Backup Exec). Even CommVault, one of the more successful newer backup applications, was driven by the establishment of Windows as an enterprise, mission-critical operating system. In short, each new operating system or platform eventually brought a new data protection application.

This truly does show that it’s a great time to be a vendor focusing on the VMware platform (and virtualization in general). Expect more great things from Veeam as we continue to innovate on these virtualization platforms.

Veeam Reporter is like having time lapse photography of the configuration of your virtual environment. Most users schedule Veeam Reporter to collect configuration information from Virtual Center once a day.

Reporter pulls all of the configuration information available without using agents though the VIAPI and stores it into a SQL database. Once the data is collected, Veeam Reporter can produce numerous canned reports as well as exposing the data for customized reports leveraging SQL Reporting Services (SRSS). Add to this capability the integration with Veeam's no-cost value add solution Veeam Business View and you have a complete solution for reporting on your virtual infrastructure from both a technical and a business view.

So, with all this flexibility I often get asked what are clients doing with Veeam Reporter. I have compiled a top 10 list.

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All 4 blog posts make very valid points. The purpose of this post is not to call into question any of those points but to explain Veeam's position in the dedicated VMware data protection space. In fact, I wrote an article for Virtualization Review a few months back talking about physical vs. virtual and the change happening in the industry. The backup and DR space was very different in the age of the mainframe…then came Windows…now comes virtualization.
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