New Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition for home labs is free!
Dear Home Lab Enthusiast with data to protect:
Today's Veeam announcement was big. A way to run enterprise level software with all the features you need for a lab environment, with none of the guilt. That's right, up to 10 VMs, and physical systems too! Got your attention? Read on!
I started using Veeam back in the FastSCP days in the mid 2000s, saving the enterprise customers I was paid to train huge chunks of consulting time. This simple product moved ISOs into new VMware vSphere VMFS datastores that we had just created. It was also about 5x faster than VMware's native speeds at the time, which earned Veeam a lot of fans, quickly.
lash forward to today's world, where you can consume an entire Smörgåsbord of VMware products for about $200 per year ($180 with TINKERTRY discount code) using the VMUG Advantage EVALExperience, and you tend to have a bunch of stuff to back up as the years go by.
Host-based virtual, agent-based physical, and public cloud too!
My cluster has really become more of a compact, efficient, and quiet home datacenter really, and I know many hundreds of you have identical Bundles now too, likely running vSphere, and maybe a bit of Window Server and/or Hyper-V.
Such home datacenters also tend to have multiple flavors of Linux and Windows VMs and appliances that need efficient daily deduplicated and compressed host-based backups. That's right, select the VMs you want to protect, no agent required. You may also have some physical machines to backup too, like laptops, that benefit from a small agent to install, allowing for bare-metal restores. Perhaps you have some public cloud content too.
Wouldn't it be nice to handle all three of those backup types? How about if some of those systems and VMs are "production" workloads like I have in my home lab? Veeam now has this all covered, for up to 10 VMs, which is likely enough for most home labs.
The appeal of being able to back it all up is considerable. Oh, and by the way, Veeam works fine with vSAN too! Of just good old fashioned 10TB or 12TB drives, or a nice reslient NAS such as this 10GbE network beast of a NAS that I'm currently testing.
You'll really want to read the short article Kirsten below, but if you really don't even have the time to read it all, here's my TLDR of her TLDR, just the highlights:
Announcement
- Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition:
Our latest gift to the community
Mar 26 2019 by Kirsten Stoner at Veeam...
TL;DR
The NEW Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition is the must-have, FREE solution that provides host-based backup and replication for VMware, Hyper-V and AHV; as well as an agent-based backup solution for Windows and Linux workstations and servers – whether they are physical computers or running in the public cloud. It offers a tremendous set of capabilities and is significantly more powerful than its predecessor (Veeam Backup Free Edition) or any other free backup product on the market. In fact, it is even more powerful than several paid backup solutions offered by other vendors. This is our gift to you and there are no strings attached — you are free to utilize the Community Edition any way you want — be it for your home lab, or for your critical line of business applications in case of IT budget constraints. Download your FREE copy and get started today!
...
The good news is, these days are over! Community Edition now provides ALL the features offered in our paid Standard edition (see feature list here) at no cost, with the most significant added capability being able to perform incremental backups and scheduling backup jobs without needing to use PowerShell, which historically has been seen as the biggest drawback for our Free Edition users. Next, as the difference in the name implies, Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition provides VM replication functionality for those few, most important VMs that require the fastest restore in case of a disaster. Finally, the biggest game changer is protection for physical servers and workstations, enabling you to protect all your workloads from a single console. And best of all — it’s completely free, including for production use!
...
Download
You'll want to use the Get Community Edition DOWNLOAD FREE button on the NEW Veeam Availability Suite 9.5 page, which takes you to the download page with the latest release notes.
- Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition
Contains Update 4aNote: Free vSphere Hypervisor (free ESXi) is not supported. vSphere Essentials or higher license level required.
Email blast
I'm not sure if this email from earlier today was sent to everybody on the Veeam forums today or just to Veeam Vanguards like myself:
See also at TinkerTry
- Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 3a RTM is now available featuring VMware vSphere 6.7 support
Jun 26 2018
Disclosure
TinkerTry takes extreme care to protect visitors by using only one ad network, BuySellAds, which has never had a security issue to date, and is very commonly used in the virtualization community. I regularly receive lucrative offers from various companies looking to have me inject javascript trackers into TinkerTry, which I turn down, of course.
Veeam has been an advertiser on many virtualization sites for years now, and at times on TinkerTry too. All TinkerTry advertisement goes through third party BuySellAds. None of my articles are sponsored posts, and note that there are currently no affiliate links for Veeam products. TinkerTry.com, LLC is not a Veeam Pro Partner, but I am a Veeam Vanguard Program member. There are no commissions for any Veeam products folks buy after reading one of my articles.
I reserve and exercise the right to freely write about topics that I choose, whenever I choose to, an essential part of what makes blogging about home virtualization labs, storage, and backup so much fun for me. I tend to feature products that I actually use for a while, and have proven value for my home lab and home.
