Today, Veeam released a truly free version of the company’s popular backup product. Dubbed the Veeam Backup Free Edition for VMware and Hyper-V, the free product is, as one might expect, not as feature rich as the full product, but might be just what the doctor ordered for a particularly small environment or division. Note that this is not just a trial product; it’s a real product that never times out.
With Veeam Backup Free Edition, you can quickly:
Backup, archive or copy a VM—without pausing or powering it off
Restore data from inside a VM
Migrate and manage VMs and files
all in one easy-to-use tool that’s completely free.
What’s inside
Veeam Backup Free Edition contains useful utilities for day-to-day VM management, including:
- VeeamZIP: ad-hoc backup for operational, archival or portability purposes
- Instant File-Level Recovery: restore individual guest files directly from an image-level backup
- File Manager: the easy way to manage VM and host files
- Quick Migration for VMware: migrate a live VM to any host or datastore.
The free version actually includes some enterprise-grade features such as compression and deduplication!
What’s not inside
Of course, Veeam didn’t throw all of their IP into a free product, nor is the free product intended to replace the full-featured tools that the company sells. For example, the free version does not include the ability to schedule backups or perform incremental backups and does not have application-aware processing found in paid editions. Further, this is just a backup product; replication is not included. As a quick use tool, the free edition does not include scripting capabilities and cannot hook into Veeam Enterprise Manager.
If you’re interested in looking at this free tool, take a look at the Veeam product site.