Veeam Provides a Whole Lot of Free (And Useful!) Goodies

Scott D. Lowe, vExpert, MVP Virtual Machine, MCSE
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On September 6, 2014

You probably know that Veeam has provided some tools for free, but you may not know that full breadth of what you can get from the company without paying a dime. Obviously, Veeam hopes that you fall in love with the tool and then consider paying a few bucks for their for-pay products, but that doesn’t take away from the usefulness of what the company provides at no cost. Here’s a quick look at each of Veeam’s free resources and what they can do.

Veeam Backup Free Edition for VMware and Hyper-V

With Veeam Backup Free Edition for VMware and Hyper-V, you’re able to get a feel for what Veam’s full backup and replication tool can do, but you don’t have to stop using the product since it never expires. As you might expect, though, the free version isn’t nearly as full-featured as the for-pay product and has the following limitations:

Full backups of individual VMs only—no scheduled, incremental or multi-VM backups
No vPower® capabilities (however, you can import VeeamZIP backups into the paid editions and use vPower capabilities there)
No VM replication
No scripting

There are some other limitations in the product that you can learn about in this free vs. full comparison document. That said, there are no limitations on the free product with regard to the number of hosts, sockets, or virtual machines.

Veeam Task Manager for Hyper-V

Hyper-V is a hypervisor enjoying a rapidly expanding share of the hypervisor market. Veeam has responded to this growth by providing the free Veeam Task Manager for Hyper-V. Task Manager is just one component of Veeam’s larger Veeam Management Pack for System Center, but the free tool does not require System Center to operate, making it a good fit for smaller Hyper-V organizations needing a way to monitor their servers.

When you download Task Manager, you don’t have to install it. The tool can be run from a USB device if you need to use it against multiple environments.

By the way, until the end of 2014, Veeam is providing Hyper-V customers with free Veeam Management Pack v7 Enterprise Edition. If you request your product by December 31, 2014, Veeam will provide you with up to 100 sockets of the product, including standard maintenance for one year.

Veeam ONE Free Edition for VMware and Hyper-V

Hyper-V only monitoring is great for Hyper-V environments, but the fact remains that vSphere remains far ahead of Hyper-V in terms of pure market share. With that in mind, Veeam makes sure to support both, with their free offering in this space entitled Veeam ONE Free Edition for VMware and Hyper-V. As is the case with the backup product, the free monitoring tool does not restrict you based on the number of hosts, management servers and Failover Clusters you can monitor and on which you can report. Again, the free product is simply a subset of the paid product.

The paid product adds major features, including:

Advanced monitoring, reporting and capacity planning for Veeam Backup & Replication
Guest process monitoring and management
All predefined reporting dashboards
Automated report generation and distribution

This document explains all of the differences in features between paid and free and outlines the various restrictions that are in place in the free edition.

Veeam Report Library for System Center

Microsoft System Center Operations Manager is a decent monitoring tool, but the reporting component isn’t always as robust as it should be. To that end, Veeam makes available a free Veeam Report Library for System Center that aims to correct this deficiency and extend the functionality of the base Operations Manager product. This free product is free forever and isn’t limited in functionality in any way.

Here are some of the reports includes in this free tool:

Veeam Alert Statistics Report- shows alert statistics for selected filter parameters.
Veeam Alert History Report – shows information on alerts raised for infrastructure objects across a time range.
Veeam Performance Report – aggregates historical data to show performance counter values on one or more charts and tables.
Veeam Performance Details Report – aggregates historical data to show performance counter values with drill down for data.
Veeam Generic Performance Top (Bottom) N Report – aggregates historical performance data to show top or bottom N infrastructure objects, performance counters, or both, for a specific rule.
Veeam Relationship History Report – allows you to choose a specific type of relationship between infrastructure objects and track changes for this relationship over a time interval.
Veeam State Summary Report – shows the time in healthy/unhealthy state for selected infrastructure objects’ monitor across a time range.

Veeam Stencils for Microsoft Visio

We all like pretty pictures. And pretty pictures in IT land are often the only thing that passes for documentation in many places. So, we want those pictures to look kind of cool. To that end, Veeam makes available their Veeam Stencils for Microsoft Visio. As you probably know, Visio is all but a standard when it comes to network and systems documentation. I use it pretty much all the time for that kind of stuff for clients.