There are lots of resources available which help technical practitioners and decision makers evaluate options. One of the most valuable things that I’m enjoying with partner solutions that I work with is the community and free editions that are available. I run a reasonable sized lab environment which is ideal for using these platforms.
Vembu has been doing a lot around opening up more freely available tools to the market which helps get more environments protected and more of us involved in active testing of their products. I’m very pleased with the product experience and will be sharing those experiences in my upcoming data protection series.
Before you read those posts, I highly recommend taking some time and seeing what solutions may map out for you. With the timing of VMworld 2019 very near, it’s also super important for you to know what works and what may have any limitations based on your requirements. This means that you can have a more data-backed conversation around data protection as you evaluate potential solutions.
Free VMware backup software
VMware is the clear leader in virtualization but lacks an out-of-the-box data protection capability. Despite years of taking a run at an internal offering, the rise in the data protection market shows that incumbent vendors generally can not get the same results on management features within their own products. It’s ideal to look at the best-of-breed options by dedicated platform specialists. VMware backup for free is part my own lab environment and I even use it on some cloud-hosted vSphere resources and store both on-premises and out in AWS using S3.
Product Page: https://www.vembu.com/free-vmware-backup/
Data Sheet Page: Product Datasheet
Free Backup for Hyper-V
I am seeing more and more Hyper-V implementations and the ease of building out a Hyper-V (also free with the Windows license) environment for labs is a great exercise to make sure to keep in tune with the latest happenings from the Microsoft virtualization camp. This is also where having a free backup alternative is super helpful and I’ve been using Vembu as part of my lab infrastructure for Hyper-V as well.
Product Page: https://www.vembu.com/free-hyper-v-backup/
Data Sheet page: Product Datasheet
Free Backup for Windows Server
Hey, don’t forget that you may have some standalone servers which need protection as well! Despite everything being virtualized (which is not 100% true) and everything going to the cloud (also, not 100% true), the rest of us have a bunch of servers which need a little care and feeding, including data protection.
Product Page: https://www.vembu.com/free-hyper-v-backup/
Data Sheet Page: Product Datasheet
The differences you will find in the free versus the paid versions of any of the suite of tools is available in the online feature chart here: https://www.vembu.com/vembu-bdr-suite-free-vs-paid-edition/
Most notably different is the full support for CBT (Change Block Tracking) and CDP (Continuous Data Protection) which will be limited to a small number of virtual machines in the free editions. Despite the limited count, you can run some full-featured testing using a subset of the environment which will give you an idea on the performance and capabilities.
Please let me know if there are any specific features you want to have explored and shared in the series. Big thanks go out to Vembu for their support of the community as well which includes things like blog sponsorship and tons of information sharing with the blogging community.