Free Backup for VMware and Hyper-V with Veeam Community Edition VeeamZIP
Today, I want to introduce Veeam Software's excellent free tools, recommended for every IT administrator. As a leader in the backup solutions field, Veeam not only offers its powerful flagship product, Veeam Availability Suite, but also provides a full suite of free tools for every IT administrator. These tools are completely ad-free, have no restrictions, and can be used freely. However, they differ from open-source software; Veeam refers to them as Community Edition software.
Veeam's Community Edition software is slightly different from its full-featured commercial versions. Some advanced product features are limited, and there are restrictions on the number of licenses. For detailed limitations, see the Veeam official website:
Nevertheless, despite these restrictions, countless administrators have come to love this powerful Community Edition software. Below, I'll discuss what the Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition can do in an administrator's daily operations. Using these features doesn't consume any Veeam licenses, including the built-in 10 free gift licenses, yet they bring tremendous convenience to our operational management.
VeeamZIP, Free Compression Software from Veeam
This is one of Veeam's classic features, hidden within Veeam products since the first generation, and included as a standard function. As the name suggests, it essentially allows you to package a VMware or Hyper-V virtual machine into a compressed file, turning it into a ZIP archive—similar to how we compress files normally. During restoration, you can extract the original data you need from this compressed archive.
However, VeeamZIP is more than just that; its powerful functionality doesn't stop at ZIP files. VeeamZIP uses Veeam's standard backup engine, but it's not an ordinary backup scheduled task. It's a full backup of the entire virtual machine. Each VeeamZIP operation triggers the backup engine to perform a full backup of the virtual machine, resulting in a .vbk full backup archive.
During restoration, VeeamZIP is treated as a first-class citizen in Veeam, with access to the full suite of recovery features, including:
- Instant Recovery, including cross-platform recovery to VMware or Hyper-V in v11
- Instant Disk Recovery
- Full VM Restore
- Virtual Machine Disk Restore
- Virtual Machine File Restore
- Guest OS Granular File/Object Restore
- Restore to Amazon EC2
- Restore to Microsoft Azure
VeeamZIP doesn't consume any of the 10 built-in instance licenses
More importantly, VeeamZIP is truly free and doesn't consume any of the 10 built-in instance licenses in the Community Edition. Whether your environment has 100 ESXi hosts, 1000 VMs, or 1PB of data capacity, you can use the Community Edition's VeeamZIP to create compressed archives for these virtual machines without any restrictions.
Additionally, there are automated scripts to back up your VMware or Hyper-V environment.
2. PowerShell Script for Automatic Backup with Veeam Backup Free Edition
3. Office Guide for Veeam Backup Free Edition with PowerShell
Next Blog, I will introduce another free tool of Veeam Community Edition: storage snapshot
👉 Related reading: VMware Backup Best Practices
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