I wanna tell you about my experience with using the “Green Power” of Veeam, in particular about their freeware product called Veeam Backup Free Edition. Those of you who have once dealt with virtualized servers should know the importance of proper data protection solutions. There’re tons of them on the market, all are good for certain purposes, the only common flaw of all of them is that they cost a fortune. As the company I’m working for has got a very tight IT-budget, I didn’t really consider any other option but free data protection solutions. As for Veeam Backup Free Edition it was a perfect fit for my purposes – it is not a free trial, but a limited (but just a bit) version of their famous backup solution Veeam Backup & Replication. It is easy to install and to get running – all within half an hour or so. As for the limitations of the free version, I’d say, they are incomparable to the capabilities provided by the tool. The set of functions incorporated into the Free Edition is powerful and for sure can serve a good data protection solution to many virtualization administrators who want to save their money. The limitations include some of the advanced features such as incremental backup, application-aware processing and VM replication. However what Veeam Backup Free Edition can do perfectly is actually what it was built for – it can perform full VM backups, even if a VM is running you can back it up without necessarily shutting it down (which was an amazing option for me). Another great capability of Veeam Backup Free Edition is the VeezmZIP feature incorporated into the solution. Pretty much like the regular ZIP utility it allows you to archive and then copy a VM in few seconds. It is very handy if you want to back up a VM before running an upgrade or for archiving purposes. Also Veeam Backup Free Edition includes several Explorer-like tools for MS Exchange and for HP-based SAN snapshots. Explorer for Exchange allows you to browse your Exchange VM’s in familiar interface and recover exactly the items you need. In my company this capability appeared to be among the top options as users frequently deleted important e-mails or contacts and came to me crying. Now they don’t have to cry anymore, LOL. All that being said, I can totally recommend Veeam Backup Free Edition as one of the best (if not the best) free of charge tool for VMware\Hyper-V data protection!