Veeam Adds Hyper-V Support To Its Backup And Replication Software

Following industry expectations, Veeam Software is announcing its intention to have its family of virtualization backup and replication software support Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor by the fourth quarter of this year. Up until now, the company's product line has supported only the VMware virtualization system. The company expects that both hypervisors will be supported in a single download and installation.

"The ability to support multiple hypervisors is a key feature, especially as we see the adoption of Hyper-V rise," says Rachel Dines, analyst in infrastructure and operations for Forrester Research, a Cambridge, Mass., consultancy. "We are seeing an increasing number of companies using Hyper-V alongside VMware, especially in the SMB space. While the average enterprise is using Hyper-V for approximately 6.5% of their virtualized environment, the average SMB uses it for 13% of their virtualized environment. This announcement is going to help Veeam gain traction in the SMB and SME space, which is where they are focused."

Veeam is making this move because its focus is on virtualization, and indications are that Microsoft is taking a share in the hypervisor race, says Doug Hazelman, senior director of product strategy for the Columbus, Ohio, company. For example, Gartner is predicting that, by the end of 2012, Microsoft will have 27% of the market, at VMware's expense--meaning it makes sense for Veeam to jump on the Microsoft bandwagon, he says.

The company is particularly interested in organizations that are looking to implement multihypervisor environments, and cross-platform management around Microsoft's Systems Center, where Veeam will handle the VMware part and Microsoft will handle the Hyper-V part, he says.

There are likely to be some differences in feature sets between the Microsoft and VMware implementations of the products, particularly at initial release, due to platform differences between the hypervisors, Hazelman says. For example, features such as vPower functionality, recovery verification and features that have been added to VMware in Version 5 are likely to be coming to Hyper-V at a later time, he says.Other features that are not currently supported in Hyper-V are host-based replication, or replicating a virtual machine from one host to another, and change block tracking, which helps make VMware incremental backups faster by using a VMware API set to determine which data blocks have changed between backup cycles. Veeam wants product sets to be comparable, he says.

The company plans to ship version 6 of its product sometime during the fourth quarter of the year. Pricing is not yet determined, partly because Veeam wants to ensure that the licensing scheme is consistent with its current products and yet also fit in with the licensing strategy to which Microsoft customers are accustomed, Hazelman says. For example, the company's VMware product is priced at $550 per socket, while comparable products from VMware itself are priced at $500 per virtual machine, he says.

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