Veeam Ships Veeam Backup Free Edition with VeeamZIP

Veeam Software has announced that the latest version of its Veeam Backup Free Edition is now available for download. The new product now includes the popular Veeam FastSCP utility and a new feature the company calls VeeamZIP. According to ablog post on the official Veeam Blog by Veeam VP of Product Strategy Doug Hazelman, VeeamZIP allows admins to quickly consolidate VM files and setting related to a VM into something akin to an archive file.

"VeeamZIP really is the awesome part...it allows you to quickly and easily 'ZIP' all the files and settings associated with a VM into a compressed, deduped 'archive' file," Hazelman writes. "The file that VeeamZIP creates is our in our standard .VBK file format. You can now take a 500GB VM and 'ZIP' it into a single file that will fit on most removable media such as a portable hard drive or even a USB 'thumb' drive."

 
Veeam Backup Free Edition

In addition to VeeamZIP, Veeam Backup Free Edition also provides a VM file manager, the ability to migrate running VMs into storage, support for System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager, quick file recovery, an updated (but not wholly revamped) user interface, and a host of other features and improvements.

In a statement announcing the availability of the product, Veeam President and CEO Ratmir Timashev stressed that FastSCP will live on in the new combined product. "Veeam FastSCP has been hugely popular since we introduced it in 2006," Timashev said. "More than 150,000 Virtualization Lovers use it, and with these new capabilities, Veeam Backup Free Edition offers even more value. We are excited to offer this latest gift to the virtualization community."

Veeam Backup Free Edition joins a market filled with free virtualization utilities, with just about every virtualization vendor offering some sort of no-cost virtualization tools. Although a bit dated, I blogged about four free virtualization utilities in 2008, and posted another article about 14 free virtualization tools and platforms in late 2009.

Have any favorite free virtualization tools you'd like to tell us about? Drop me an email or send me a note on Twitter and add them to the list. Share your thoughts by adding a comment to this blog post or contributing to the discussion on Twitter.