Veeam Backup and Replication Support for Hyper-V is Finally Here

Just last week, Veeam announced the release of version 6 of their popular Backup & Replication solution. Among the many enhancements for VMware vSphere, including enterprise scalability, enhanced performance, accelerated replication and the 1-click file restore feature, the most notable addition to the new version is support for Hyper-V. Download Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 Hyper-V

Recognizing the huge demand, Veeam has been working on this functionality for quite some time, making the big announcement earlier this year at TechEd. When I met with Doug Hazelman, Veeam’s VP of Product Strategy (@VMDoug), at the conference he explained how the added support for Hyper-V will benefit virtualization administrators who manage multi-hypervisor environments that include Hyper-V and vSphere.

Veeam Backup & Replication v6 offers speed and efficiency that is unmatched by other solutions and now has the capability of protecting data on both vSphere and Hyper-V. Learn more about the newest version of the tool and about Veeam from Doug Hazelman himself in this video from TechEd 2011.

Following is a full transcript of the interview.
Doug Hazelman: So the big announcement was that we’re bringing support for Hyper-V to Veeam Backup & Replication in version 6. It’s going to be out in Q4 of this year. The big announcement was obviously here at TechEd, a big Microsoft event, so very excited. We’ve got a lot of very positive feedback on our announcement via Twitter and blogs. And VMwareVideos.com has got a good blog on it. It’s been very well received.

Read David Davis’ post: Can Veeam do for Hyper-V what Microsoft Can’t?

We haven’t really made any other big announcements here. It’s all about backup and replication supporting Hyper-V. Part of the other reason that TechEd is an extremely important show for us is because of our management pack for our System Center Operations Manager.

So what that allows us to do is take all of the VMware performance and event data from the host to the storage and everything and put that into System Center Operations Manager. Then it’s also PRO-enabled, which stands for Performance and Resource Optimization, so we can actually then do corrective actions on the VMware environment through SCVMM.

When you look at Microsoft’s private cloud strategy, it fits in very well there. With Microsoft doing, obviously, the similar things on the Hyper-V side, Veeam doing it for VMware, that allows you to have cross-platform management from a single interface, which is System Center. Download Microsoft System Center 2012

Then of course you still get to take advantage of all the great System Center functionality, with Configuration Manager, with Operations Manager, and all the different management packs that are available for that, for the applications. So it truly gives you top-to-bottom view from your application all the way down to the virtual infrastructure that it’s running on.

Question: What funcionality is Veeam brining to Hyper-V?

Doug Hazelman: So when we release our version 6 with the Hyper-V support, three of the key things that we’re bringing to the market for Hyper-V backup is image-level backup and replication. So it will have both backup and host-based replication. We’ll still have our deduplication and compression technology, but most important, the one feature I think that I’m most excited about is we’re actually using our own implementation of what we call Change Block Tracking for Hyper-V virtual machines. What that will allow us to do from a Backup and Replication standpoint is make the incremental backups and replicas much, much faster than if we didn’t have that functionality.

So it’s something that VMware crowd is used to because it’s built into vSphere and available through APIs, the vStorage API for Data Protection and the VDDK. But on Hyper-V we essentially had to write our own file sync driver. But we’re bringing that functionality for standalone Hyper-V hosts, free Hyper-V so all versions of Hyper-V are supported. What it will also support, the Cluster Shared Volumes, or CSV, shared storage within Hyper-V as well.

Question: Why should someone choose Veeam?

Doug Hazelman: So if someone should choose Veeam, take a look at our track record. We have over 25,000 customers globally. We’re growing fast, and we really do listen to our customers and listen to their needs and try to deliver based on that. We also deliver a lot of unique functionality to the market. That’s one of the things that we’re known for, is doing things in a different way. Part of that is because we focus on virtualization. Virtualization as a platform allows us to do a lot of things differently than what people are used to having to be able to do in the physical world. We think outside of the box, so to speak, and deliver on those products.

So 2010 was a big year for Veeam in regards to awards. We won, across our entire product set, nine major awards in the industry. Five of those alone were for our Backup and Replication product. When we last talked at VMworld, I was all excited because we had just won Best of Show for Veeam Backup and Replication version five with vPower. So again, we were very excited about that, then all the other awards that just kind of kept coming in throughout the year.

It really validated it. In an analyst report that was released last week, one of the things they said was that 2010, Veeam really became the thought leader in regards to VM backup.

Question: What’s the best way to get started with Veeam?

Doug Hazelman: To get started with Veeam products it’s as simple as going to Veeam.com and downloading any one of the products you want.

So we talk about our free tools, FastSCP, it’s been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. But we also, very quick and easy, you can download any of our software and get a 30-day fully functional key so you can actually try it out in your environment.

The other thing about our free tools is, like Free Monitor and Free Reporter, all you have to do is get a license key to unlock all the full functionality of those products. So even if you start off on the free version, you get to like it but there’s some more things you want to do, all you have to do is contact your Veeam ProPartner. They’d be happy to set you up with a permanent license key so that way you can unlock all the functionality.

Question: What’s new with Veeam free tools?

Doug Hazelman: So in regards to the free stuff, we still have FastSCP, Free Reporter, Free Monitor. We will be probably introducing a little bit of change in regards to Monitor and Reporter this summer. We’ll still have free versions, but it will be changed a little bit when we go to version six on those. Also, I can’t give any details, but hopefully we’re going to be able to get some cool functionality into FastSCP when we go out with Backup and Replication version 6. So there might be some exciting news there to look forward to. But no details yet.

Question: What are you most excited about this year?

Doug Hazelman: So one of the things I’m most excited about is, I was at MMS a couple of months ago, System Center 2012. I don’t know when it’s going to be released, if it will be released in 2011. If it is, I think that’s going to be great. There’s a lot of great things around System Center 2012 and also integrating the entire System Center line around that single release. So I’m really looking forward to that.

Then also, of course, vSphere 5. I think there’s a good chance that we might see vSphere 5 in 2011. Some of the details have already leaked on some sites. But I think, obviously with our partnership with VMware, there are some features in vSphere 5 that I’m very, very excited about.