ESXi Free Backup - Price???

[gozzgug]

It's great that Veeam backup supports ESXi (free). However I don't understand the pricing. If a customer is using ESXi (free) they are probably doing so because they don't have the financial resources to pay for a ESX license. Following this train of thought why/how could a company pay for a Veeam backup license at the current price. This seems to be problem and I'm wondering if Veeam is looking into providing a version of their backup product for ESXi (free) for a much lower price. (My suggestion would be less than $100 per server and not socket.) The reason I say not socket is because you if you go per/socket again you are going over $200 for a dual core server and then you get into the whole cost thing.

This would be a great way for me to get Veeam into my company and justify a reason we should go to the full version. We are not for profit company and if I can't justify buying an ESX license how can I justify a Veeam license. I think a lot of customers would be interested in this.

Thanks.

[vbussiro]

There is now a promotional offer. Not yet 100$ per socket, but quite affordable...
But I agree that a reduced fonctionality version for free esxi would be great :
- without replication (which need a esx anyway)
- without vcb (not available with esxi though)

Anyway, fantastic work done with this program need appropriate price. And price seems competitive against other backup solution.

[Gostev]

Official response: I will take these suggestions to our VPs for discussion, but I will most likely not be able to post results of the discussion here whether they are positive or negative.

Unofficial response: in my opinion and experience, biggest thing that needs to be considered when selling software product at low prices is support volumes and cost. Surprisingly, some smaller customers generate much more support activity than larger ones because of less experienced IT staff (this is by no means rule of thumb, but you get the idea). In my last company, we even had to set a minimal purchase amount for some products to account for those support costs. Hmm... actually I've just gotten one idea. Would you be willing to by this product much cheaper, but without any support at all, or with limited support (say, 3 support calls included, additional calls are available at extra fee)? I am just thinking out loud here.

[Gostev]

without replication (which need a esx anyway)

Currently - yes, but it will not be this way forever
But I understand your idea about stripped down version, and it is quite logical.

[vbussiro]

Currently - yes, but it will not be this way forever

Great new. It'll be easier to sell complete solution with a free ESXi for disaster recovery purpose. Hope "fail-back" will be implemented.

Hmm... actually I've just gotten one idea. Would you be willing to by this product much cheaper, but without any support at all, or with limited support (say, 3 support calls included, additional calls are available at extra fee)? I am just thinking out loud here.

Quite a good idea, it's the way free ESXi works... But this forum will suffer numerous support questions.

[gozzgug]

I would not expect support at all. As with ESXi (free) you don't get support yet you get the benefits of virtualization with limits. It allows you to use and try the product without cost. Ideally I would suggest a Veeam backup (free version) that would only work with ESXi (free). Then you've got a two fold implementation of ESXi (free)and Veeam Backup in companies without cost. As everyone knows getting your foot in the door is the first step to selling a product. Once a company begins relying on a product they typically stick with it as they move forward and purchase full versions. This might even spur Veeam Backup adoption for ESX licensed customers because most licensed ESX customers have a server here or there running ESXi (free) but they have to deal with backups differently. If they could use Veeam Backup (free edition) these customers can see real world comparisons of Veeam Backup and what they're currently using for their licensed ESX backups. Once again getting your foot in the door. I bet your adoption rate would skyrocket if you had a free Veeam backup solution for ESXi (free). You could offer support on a per-incident basis with the product or any version you currently have.

I hope you decide to to do this. If you do could I get a free full version for coming up with the idea? Haha!

Rick

[rickbrewer]

Great product! However, the price is steep for ESXi. I hope some options for a lower cost ESXi version become available soon.

[steve.lavoie]

I really like the idea of a stripped down version with no support.

We currently deploy many ESXi free edition and backup is always a problem for us, specially since Vmware RCLI is now read-only and vifs.pl does not permit to copy from one Datastore to another Datastore.

Sure as a reseller in the SMB market, I prefer to sell a product and make some $ from it, but here I am still struggling to get virtualization in and sell new hardware to support ESXi.

[rickbrewer]

Bump

[Gostev]

Official response: I will take these suggestions to our VPs for discussion, but I will most likely not be able to post results of the discussion here whether they are positive or negative.

Nothing new at the moment...

[Tobias]

Im representing a small it dev firm and we are currently considering moving our current infrastructure into a vm ware ESXi solution.
We currently have a test soultion with a dual socket server and are considering running two of theese for manual failover.
That would mean 4 sockets. What is the current /socket cost? im guessing ~200usd? that would mean ~800usd which is a bit steep for us to put into a infrastructure backup application atm.

One of the greatest selling points for us atm is that ESXi is free (and we can reuse old hardware) so we do not have to invest alot into a totaly new server and at the same time beeing able to easily expand to a full blown license with VC, HA, ... (when the company grows.)
One of the biggest problems we see with running ESXi is to have a working backup solution as this either require a probably large investment or, alot of work constructing a scripted solution that wont be as maintainable as a pre packaged solution.

What i want to say is that if there would be a free (reduced price?) version of veeam for ESXi we have a deal
And we would probably stick with veeam as we grow...

Thank you.

[Gostev]

Tobias, this is a bit out off topic for this thread, but I am curious why have you chosen to use ESXi free and whether you have also considered Hyper-V R2 or XEN Server which are both completely free and beat ESXi free feature-wise hands down (they even include HA and Live Migration for free).

Since I expect that this thread will keep attracting other small business customers who wants to save some $$$ on their virtual infrastructures, I would be interested to hear opinions on this from everyone.

[elwappo]

I would say a version for 3i with no support out of the box, and at a cheaper price, would fly "off the shelves." I would say adopt a pay as you go support. Charge someone $100 per incident if they call in with a problem.

But don't sell yourself short either. You have a great product here.

[Tobias]

Tobias, this is a bit out off topic for this thread, but I am curious why have you chosen to use ESXi free and whether you have also considered Hyper-V R2 or XEN Server which are both completely free and beat ESXi free feature-wise hands down (they even include HA and Live Migration for free).

If they would provide free HA and a working "hot backup" solution we would probably go for Xen. Xen is cheaper than vmware, ~2500usd per server for essentials (this includes HA, ...) so thats probably another longterm argument why we should go Xen.
Im not sure i like the "primary pool server" solution they have, if the primary server goes down you will have to "manually" tell one of the slave servers to take over the primary responsibility. This makes Xen Center unable to connect. I dont know how this compares to vmware's server center?
Live migration is included and works well.
Xen version 5.5 seems promising, adding support for snapshots in Xen Center, enabeling hot backups. But the release data is 17june i think.
Is veeam considering supporting Xen Server?

Anyhow, what we currently need is a working, free->cheap Hypervisor solution with working backups. And as already pointed out, veeam seems like a good solution, and it would be perfect if the price would be adjusted to fit the ESXi price tag.

Cheers,
Tobias

[Tobias]

Abit off topic, but i guess this thread is about finding cheap-free backup solutions for a virtual infrastructure:

The C# API of Citrix Xen Server seems promising, has anyone tried that out for basic free scripted backup solution?
Available for free here:
http://community.citrix.com/display/xs/XenServer+SDK
there is also binding for python java and c ithink...
You could possibly get it to work with hot backups using an EXT3 formatted storage. (snapshot, backup, delete snapshot)

Still i would like if there was some third party "smart" solution that would backup only the part of the hdd used, compressing the data, easy to setup and taking care of host data integrity issues...
Also just copying changes, especially for offsite backups where you do not really want to backup a full 100gb vhd every night...

[rickbrewer]

Any updates on this issue? Having to apply a trial license every 30 days is getting old....

[Gostev]

Rick, unfortunately we had to discontinue support for ESXi free completely a few months ago.
http://www.veeam.com/news/veeam-softwar ... here4.html