Everyone loves to get an early Christmas present well this year, Veeam has a great gift you can unwrap today.   Today they announced a holiday gift for VMware vExperts, VMware Certified Professionals, VMware Certified Instructors, VMUG members, Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals, and Microsoft Certified Professionals. Last year they delivered a free gift and this year they are doing the same!  You can go unwrap your free two-CPU socket Not for Resale (NFR) license for Veeam Backup & Replication™ v6 for evaluation and demonstration use, this free software for your home labs.

So if you are a VMware vExpert, VCP, VCI, VMUG member, Microsoft MVP or MCP go here to get your gift:

       Free NFR license for Veeam Backup & Replication™ v6

This software was released a couple of weeks ago, and is version 6 of their Backup & Replication product. The best part is the tool now supports Windows Server Hyper-v!!!!!!!!!   You can learn more here: Veeam Brings its Data Protection to Windows Server Hyper-V.  Here is what Edwin Yuen, Director from Microsoft had to say about the new solution:

“Many organizations that rely on Windows Server Hyper-V also support other hypervisors. Veeam ‘s backup and replication solution for Windows Server Hyper-V, which includes innovations such as changed block tracking, gives customers a new option for managing their virtualized environments.”

If you are not familiar with Veeam’s Backup solution, it s a great tool that can help compliment your System Center DPM environment.  Here are some of the highlights:

• Veeam Backup & Replication support for Windows Server Hyper-V brings unprecedented speed and efficiency to Windows Server Hyper-V data protection. Major first-to-market capabilities include:
  • 2-in-1: backup and replication: Provides image-based backup and near-continuous data protection (near-CDP) in a single solution.
  • Built-in deduplication and compression: Included at no extra charge, these capabilities minimize consumption of network bandwidth and backup storage.
  • Changed block tracking for Windows Server Hyper-V: Exclusive Veeam technology enables fast, frequent and efficient backup and replication of all VMs, including those running on Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV).
• Additional differentiators for Windows Server Hyper-V include:
  • Agentless: There are no agents to license, deploy, maintain, or monitor.
  • Forever incremental: Eliminates the need for full periodic backups by creating new full backups from incremental backups. This is essential when backing up large VMs or over a WAN.
  • Instant file-level recovery: Restore Windows guest files directly from an image-level backup.

If Veeam seems familiar to you, they participated in the recent blog series The Cloud on Your Terms- 30 Days about the Cloud  and they wrote The Cloud on Your Terms Part 12 of 30- One Big Happy Private Cloud.  Veeam Software, innovative provider of data protection, disaster recovery and management solutions for virtual datacenter environments,