It’s official – Veeam is announcing this morning that version 6 of their award-winning backup/replication software will support Microsoft’s Hyper-V virtualization hypervisor. The new version is due out later this year.

What’s Cool about Veeam and Hyper-V

Veeam is once again delivering IT magic by building their own Changed Block Tracking functionality into Hyper-V for some of the highly efficient backup and replication that Veeam is known for. This is going to go a long way toward bringing Microsoft virtualization up to par with VMware. Also included are file-level restore and virtual lab provisioning, as well as SCOM integration.

For non-profits, this is potentially huge, since it brings advanced backup capabilities to the hypervisor that’s included with Windows Server. VMWare is great technology, but for SMB and non-profits, VMWare’s pricing point is painful. When non-profit/education customers can get Windows Datacenter licenses for around $300 a socket (which includes Hyper-V!), suddenly VMWare looks really painful, even after educational discount.

What’s still missing

The initial release will not include Veeam’s U-AIR capability, but they’re hard at work to bring that capability online.

It also lacks the ability to back up/replicate across virtualization platforms, but that’s to be expected.

Veeam hasn’t yet announced pricing/licensing details. What I’d really like to see from Veeam is a per-socket license that is platform-independent.

If you haven’t yet experienced the awesomeness that is Veeam, give the folks at Mirazon a call. Those guys know Veeam up and down and backwards.

Veeam’s Rick Vanover has more at his blog.