Free ESXi and Veeam Backup 3.1

[Gostev]

And so it begins - heterogeneous v-management from hypervisor-agnostic vendor
http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization ... m-too.aspx

[AlaskanBrewing]

Good show. I'll wager quite a bit given another two years with enough effort thrown towards MS Hyper-V your company will see a much better return vs trying to sell to the VMWare customer base. Most of that time will just be waiting on Microsoft's product to mature and build its customer base.

[Gostev]

Couple of interesting opinions on free ESXi situation and our Hyper-V support announcement
http://vmetc.com/2009/07/24/veeam-now-s ... r-2008-r2/
http://blogs.technet.com/virtualization ... -more.aspx

[H in OH]

Great news with the Hyper-V support. The new Hyper-V R2 looks like a great package, and they are giving it away for free. They are even throwing in HA for free. I guess Microsoft can afford to give it away so that companies will be willing to spend money on more Windows licenses for all the VMs. You are a lot more willing to fire up another server and throw in another license if you don't have to think about the hardware.

You have to wonder if VMWare will be less restrictive with Free ESXi in response. VMWare simply can't compete by giving it all away free as they have nothing else to make money on.

Now if we could just have XenServer support as well. I am experimenting with XenServer right now, and it seems to work perfectly well for our small deployment. The only pain so far is backup and file level restore.

The major roadblock in checking out Hyper-V is that it requires a separate box with either Windows Sever 2008 or Vista SP1 to use the management tool. Sorry, but I do not have either lying around here.

[Gostev]

We are ready to add XenServer support as soon as it starts grabbing measurable market share. Because XenServer has similar architecture with "fat" ESX, technical barrier for adding XenServer support is much lower for us, than in case with Hyper-V. We already have many solution pieces needed for XenServer backup and replication.

My personal opinion: future of XenServer will become pretty clear in about half-year. Right now it is very, very foggy. Citrix does not even talk about it on quarterly earning calls. How 3rd party vendors like us are supposed to build strategy around supporting some platform without any information about its adoption trends, vendor directions etc? Just like any other company, we must be able to justify our investments before we move forward.

[H in OH]

We are ready to add XenServer support as soon as it starts grabbing measurable market share.

You may have a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem here. The big holdup for us from using XenServer in production at the moment is getting some type of reliable backup working. If such a backup tool was available, then the market share may jump up, especially among small installations.

[Gostev]

I have to agree with that too...

[Gostev]

Please vote here
http://surveys.verticalresponse.com/a/s ... 8387378b/0