That's right, for the past couple of weeks the countdown clock to 'Something Awesome for Virtualization Lovers' has been ticking away on the Veeam site and now it's finally hit zero revealing that Veeam Backup and Replication 6.1 is here in all its' glory. So, for paid customers there is a slew of new features and enhancements packed into a .1's worth of code updates which you can review all of them in the 'What's New' document, some of which I will touch on below…and for non Veeam customers, there's something in it for you as well… Veeam has announced that they will now ship a free edition of their flagship Backup and Replication starting at 6.1 moving forward. Yup, you read that right, it's free.
Wow! What's the deal? A free edition!?!?!
All other Veeam products have shipped with a free edition and now Backup and Replication does as well. In essence what it does is take the now depreciated Veeam FastSCP name, and bundle that technology in with some backup/restore/migration capabilities and slap a new user interface on top of it. Kudos to Veeam for continuing with their great community contributions…One of the biggest new features is called VeeamZip
Huh! VeeamZip?
Yup, it's like WinZip but for your VM's. The new VeeamZip function let's you quickly select a VM and perform a full backup on that VM. This leaves you with a .vbk file, fully encapsulating all of that VM's settings and configuration, fully compressed and deduplicated. It completely maintains the integrity of the VM, the disk types (thin, thick) that you have chosen and can be performed on a powered on VM. A very handy tool that will allow you to quickly take a backup of the VM for testing, development, or archiving purposes. Hey, you could even install the free edition on to your workstation to allow you to pull a backup of a VM onto an external USB drive. Very Cool! Also, what good is a backup if it can't be restored? Well, you can use the free edition to also restore the entire VM, VM files (.vmdk, .vmx), or individual guest OS files as well. Also, if you have a licensed version of Veeam, simply import this VeeamZip into your licensed environment to perform all the crazy Veeam functionality you normally would such as vPower, etc.
Speaking of vPower, it's here for Hyper-V
Hyper-V users can now take advantage of all that vPower has to offer such as Instant VM recovery. You can now run your Hyper-V VMs directly from their compressed deduplicated backup file. An awesome feature which really cuts down on the time it takes you to restore and get back up and running if a loss occurs. All changes are replicated to a separate snapshot file. thus leaving your backup file in a consistent state. Oh, once your happy with everything, you can easily migrate that VM back into your production environment.
So, what next, well, get on over to Veeam.com and get your hands on Veeam Backup and Replication 6.1 and give it a try for yourself! Again, It's free!!! Also, be sure to check out the What's New document as there are a lot more enhancements, fixes, and features that I haven't touched on here. I quickly browsed through it and seen a lot of enhancements around the intelligent load balancing, disabling inline deduplication, hot add enhancements, etc…
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