Well it’s been quite a day today for VMware ESX utility releases firstly vWire’s OpCheck and now Veeam’s latest release of the popular ESX backup utility Veeam Back 3.0.

Undoubtedly, at least for me, the biggest thing that stands out with this release of Veeam Backup is it’s ability to fully support ESXi and backup VMware ESXi VMs without the use of VCB (which can, technically, speed up your backup times).

Another nice feature of Veeam’s Backup product is the data de-duplication which can considerably reduce the size of your storage required for backups:

“When performing backups of multiple virtual machines, Veeam Backup de-duplicates similar blocks inside the backup file.”

Version 3.0 of Veeam Backup it “also offers a compatibility mode for storage devices using hardware de-duplication.”

Sven over at VirtualFuture.info has done some basic initial testing around the speeds of backing up VMs running under ESXi both using agentless and VCB methods with Veeam Backup 3.0. Well worth a read and can be found here.

For more information on Veeam Backup 3.0 head on over to Veeam’s site here.  It’s well worth a look and if you’re interested you can either download a trial version or arrange a demonstration with one of their engineers.