Our latest countdown clock hit zero this morning and we announced the availability of Veeam Backup Free Edition (or as we like to say, Something Awesome for Virtualization Lovers). Veeam Backup Free Edition is just the latest edition to our line of free tools and utilities for virtualization professionals. Combined with Veeam ONE Free Edition, you now have a complete set of tools to help you manage and protect your virtual infrastructure, no matter if it’s running VMware vSphere ESX/ESXi or Microsoft Hyper-V.
Veeam Backup Free Edition
As you may have guessed, we’re not “giving away” all the great functionality in Veeam Backup & Replication, just a subset. Included in the free edition is our familiar file management FastSCP functionality, Quick VMware migration and something new we’re calling VeeamZIP. VeeamZIP really is the awesome part, it allows you to quickly and easily “ZIP” all the files and settings associated with a VM into a compressed, deduped “archive” file. The file that VeeamZIP creates is our in our standard .VBK file format. You can now take a 500GB VM and “ZIP” it into a single file that will fit on most removable media such as a portable hard drive or even a USB “thumb” drive. There are countless uses for these compact VM archives…
- Create an ad-hoc backup of a VM before making changes to it. If you’re using the paid version of Veeam Backup & Replication you can even do this on an individual 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 permanent archives of individual VM’s 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. VeeamZIP a production VM and restore it in a lab.
A History of Free Utilities
Veeam started out back in 2006 with a free utility, FastSCP. The great thing about FastSCP (besides being free) was that it solved a common problem in a very easy to use and familiar interface. FastSCP was also a tool built out of necessity…our developers were working with ESX and found it difficult to manage large files…so they created a utility that became FastSCP. FastSCP quickly became a standard tool in every ESX administrator’s tool box. With hundreds of thousands of downloads, it’s by far the most popular tool for ESX/vSphere.
With Veeam Backup Free Edition the functionality of FastSCP is not gone, it’s still there, we’re just retiring the FastSCP name in favor of Veeam Backup Free Edition and VeeamZIP.
We have continued our commitment to the virtualization community by releasing Veeam Monitor Free Edition, Veeam Reporter Free Edition and most recently, the combination of both of those: Veeam ONE Free Edition. Veeam Backup Free Edition is just our latest free offering to the virtualization community and it won’t be our last.