This morning at Tech-Ed North America Veeam have announced their next big thing, as reported at the beginning of May Veeam had put a ticker on their website to their next big thing. What may surprise some of you is that the announcement has come at Tech-Ed, Microsofts annual event. When you hear the announcement it all makes sense.
That’s right Veeam are extending the functionality of Veeam Backup and Recovery 6 to include Hyper-V backup. It seems a number of people including myself predicted that this maybe the case >> https://virtualisedreality.com/2011/05/03/veeams-next-big-thing/
Veeam are bringing image-based backup and replication, de-duplication and compression and changed block tracking to Hyper-V. In my view this is going to be a major win for Microsoft in the Hyper-V stakes, a number of customers I have spoken to using Hyper-V have always had problems with their backups most customers I have dealt with have used Microsoft DPM. The fact that Veeam have added changed block tracking that VMware made available to us in vSphere to Hyper-V is a big bonus for Hyper-V users, this functionality has had to be implemented by Veeam in the case of Hyper-V. Veeam Backup and Recovery will also have the replication technology that is available for VMware today. I understand that the Hyper-V integration isn’t going to feature the U-AIR recovery, SureBackup or Instant Recovery in this first release.
The real bonus to all this is that this product is available for any version of Hyper-V whether it is managed by SCVMM or not, this is going to further enhance Hyper-V as an offering for small businesses and non-profit users. By being able to have a couple of small hosts, some shared storage in the form of an Iomega PX4 or similar and Veeam, small business will be able to have enterprise class features for small business prices. Maybe it was time VMware opened the API’s in ESXi again to allow backups from it’s free version like we used to have in the past?
From my point of view there are still significant benefits and reasons why to choose VMware vSphere over Hyper-V but for the right size customers and those that have already made their choice this is going to make a big difference.
Veeam will be announcing more features later in the year and promised is more features for us in the VMware camp as well, we should start hearing more at VMworld with the product expecting to be released in Q4.
Virtualised Reality 
That’s disappointing. I was hoping for some actual added functionality.
There is more goodness coming for VMware users as well keep an ear out around vmworld