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Keeping Sales a Priority -- at The Expense of Free Tools

One of the best things about virtualization is that it lends itself to so many other great things, including partner products that supplement the larger landscape. Virtualization Review Editor Keith Ward hinted at this with a recent post. Today, Veeam Software has announced that the Veeam Backup product's offering to perform backups of the free edition of ESXi will be discontinued. The recommended path will be to use vSphere Essentials and enhanced Veeam offerings.

The bad news is that this is at VMware's request, clearly protecting revenue. Sure, terms and conditions exist for these scenarios, but a backup tool? I'm a little disappointed, as free tools round out any solution nicely, especially the small and medium business. This is where Veeam Backup has been targeted.

Your thoughts on the matter?. Share your comment below or drop me an e-mail.

Posted by Rick Vanover on 06/03/2009 at 2:57 PM


Reader Comments:

Thu, Sep 17, 2009

VMware is way too costly - Hyper-V or Xen are excellent products. Don't get caught up in the hype - compare feature-by-feature and you'd be surprised that Hyper-V or Xen provide what you need at fraction of the cost and easier support model for Windows shops (Hyper-V).

Fri, Jul 24, 2009 Mike

Just like those above, we implemented one server as a trial with Veeam running this last year or so. This move by VMWare has only confirmed what we thought of their intentions with licensing. We'll be moving on to either Hyper-V or Xen instead.

Thu, Jun 4, 2009 CraigS Louisville

Veeam Backup was the deciding factor for us recommending VMware ESX to our customers just getting into virtualization. We will now use Hyper-V which has a built in backup program.

Wed, Jun 3, 2009

In a way, this has been good news for us. We've been considering a move to XenServer, and this has been another reminder of how VMWare really expects things to progress. This might be just what we need to begin moving toward Xen.

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