“We’ve received numerous questions from our partners and customers on why a competing product won the Gold award in the Business Continuity & Data Protection category. We know that judges are put in a difficult position when they have to choose from almost 200 products in a short period of time. For this award, the judges cannot, and do not, install, test or evaluate the products in a lab. Instead, they mostly rely on vendor statements in their judging process. We encourage all customers to “Put Veeam in the Lab” for a head-to-head comparison with competitive products, and make the right decision for your environment. We are confident you will find out why Veeam Backup & Replication is #1 for VMware backup.”

So, if you’re interested in seeing why Veeam is #1, fill out the form here and we’ll send you some information as well as help you get started on evaluating Veeam Backup & Replication in YOUR environment so you can makeup your own mind on who the winner really is.

vCalendar

Virtualization virtuoso and Senior Systems Engineer Jason Boche has announced his latest project, vCalendar. Veeam is a proud sponsor of a limited edition of the vCalendar that will be available at the Veeam booth at VMworld. Quantities will be limited and available on a first-come-first-serve basis so if you’re looking forward to having a vCalendar on your desk, please stop by our booth.

Veeam would like to thank Jason for reaching out to us and asking us to sponsor this project. Jason wanted to make as many vCalendars available at VMworld as possible but didn’t have the means to do it all himself. The version of the vCalendar that Veeam will have at the booth is slightly different than the one available for online ordering but rest assured, Jason’s excelent tips are the same.

Visit Veeam at VMworld

As we all know, this event has changed quite a bit since its inception on Twitter among a group of friends.  It’s yet another illustration of the power of Twitter to unite the virtualization community – which is great.

I believe it started as a casual discussion that since so many virtual Twitter friends are runners, it would be fun to get together for an early-morning run one morning before VMworld.

That sounded like fun to us, too.  The runners among the Veeam team were looking forward to it.  Since sponsors were being sought, we were very happy to chip in with some fun commemorative t-shirts.  We did a quick design, and were just about ready to send in the order when we learned the event had morphed into something much larger and more formal, a part of the actual conference.  Not blaming anyone for this, and we can certainly understand how it happened.

The new organizers did approach us about a sponsorship, but they already had a t-shirt design, and were looking for $2,500 to sponsor shuttle busses to/from the location.  Worst of all, the time had changed to Monday evening, directly conflicting with the exhibit hall opening reception.  So we can’t even participate — we’ll be working the booth then.

We’re already a Gold sponsor of VMworld, hosting a partner/customer party (let us know if you haven’t received your invitation!), as well as lots of other side activities and meetings.  We’re very happy to help out with the VM Underground Warm-up party on Sunday night.  But this run has, unfortunately, turned into something we’re just not able to do.  Our budget and resources aren’t infinite.

Please do join Duncan Epping and the others on the run.  Hope those of you who run have a great time.  Sorry we can’t join you.

We’ve heard that some people are having issues registering on our forums. We do apologize for that but in an effort to keep out spam we have to dis-allow certain email domains (gmail, hotmail) and we also have a CAPTCHA that has been made a bit more user friendly (black and white instead of color). I didn’t realize until just the other day that some color CAPTCHA’s are very difficult for people who are color blind.

Anyway, vote for your favorite and be sure to leave a comment. There’s a bonus prize of a Flip going to the person with the best comment.

So, for just shy of 1K you get fully licensed vSphere. This is great but it still leaves you without an efficient backup and recovery tool, single pane of glass monitoring or detailed reporting…enter Veeam Essentials bundle…offering Veeam Backup & Replication, Veeam Monitor and Veeam Reporter for around US $2,000 (Americas pricing). The Veeam Essentials bundle is fully functional licensed versions of those 3 products for 6 sockets (3 hosts).

Of course Veeam is placing some limits on this bundle…

• Must be purchased with VMware vSphere Essentials (or proof of VMware vSphere Essentials must be given)
• Each bundle will only support 6 sockets. This means that even if you purchase multiple bundles, each Veeam product will only work on 6 sockets, you’ll need to install other instances with the other license(s) to manage the other VMware vSphere Essentials vCenters.
• Each bundle is 6 sockets, no less (sorry folks, you can’t get it cheaper for only 4 sockets)

What does all this mean? For just under US $3,000 (hardware not included) you get 6 sockets of VMware vSphere, 6 sockets of Veeam Backup & Replication, 6 sockets of Veeam Monitor and 6 sockets of Veeam Reporter. That’s 3 servers with up to 8 cores (2×4) and 256GB RAM each running VMware ESX(i). Couple that with a free iSCSI solution such as Starwind and now you’re talking 2 TB of shared data for free (hardware and Windows licensing not included).

I did not include Support and Subscription (SnS) above because for VMware vSphere Essentials it’s optional (it’s not optional on VMware vSphere Essentials Plus). Veeam’s Essentials bundle includes 1 year of support and upgrades in the list price.

Now, let’s discuss a few things about the Free Version of ESXi. We’ve gotten a number of questions on this since we released the “news” and the Essentials bundle on the same day. Below is a simple table explaining what is and isn’t supported:

Table of compatibility:

+ = supported/usable
-  = not supported

Now please note that Veeam will not be supporting ESXi Free 4.0 at all. If you’re a current customer using Veeam Backup & Replication for ESXi Free 3.x, please contact your Veeam ProPartner or sales person for vSphere options.

While I don’t endorse or condone any of the following, I thought I would be doing an injustice if I did not include links to the community’s reaction to our announcement regarding dropping ESXi Free support. The list below is just some of the reaction, be sure to read the comments in each as well.

Rick Vanover at Virtualization Review

Rich Brambley at VMETC

Eric Scholten at VMGURU.NL

Gabes Virtual World

Search Server Virtualization’s Alex Barrett

Rich Brambley at VMETC again after Alex Barrett’s post

Search Server Virtualization’s Eric Siebert

Edward L Haletky’s The “soon to be launched” Virtualization Practice

The comments to my post on the original announcement

Update: June 12, 2009 – New Links

Bridget Bothelo over at Virtualization Pro

Discussion over at ars technica (I noticed this in my referral stats)

Update: June 15, 2009 – New Links

Search Server Virtualization’s weekly Podcast: VMware cuts free ESXi hypervisor support, fuels battle vs. Hyper-V

Update: June 26, 2009 – New Link

Mike Stokes over at eGroup

Update: July 3, 2009 – New Link

Tom Howarth over at PlanetVM

Mike Laverick from RTFM

Of course if you follow me on Twitter then you know I had some problems with my luggage. I was prepared for 1 day, but not 2. Luckily @Svenh from VirtualFuture.info gave me a cool shirt in exchange for a sneak peek at the Veeam booth and the Solutions Exchange. My luggage finally arrived around 10:30 PM on Monday night, much to the delight of my co-workers.

The week started off with a bang onboard the Veeam party boat. There was a bit of an issue with the beer keg at first but once that was sorted out we quickly killed the keg and had to bring in more beer. While we did run out of beer/liquor more than once, we tried to quickly replenish. There was a good flow of people on and off the boat all night. Thanks everyone for stopping by and meeting the Veeam Teeam.

Some boat pics and videos:

@Depping, @JasonBoche and @GabVirtualWorld on the boat

@Marnix posted some Flickr photos on the boat.

@esloof posted a video of the party as well as many other VMworld Videos

After the boat party it was time to get ready for the actual VMworld conference. Unfortuneately I was too busy to attend any sessions but I did have the opportunity to talk to a lot of people. I was also granted a speaking slot because of Veeam’s Gold sponsorship. I presented with Dan Pianfetti from Dell on how Dell uses Veeam solutions for their engagements. Thanks to everyone who attended and I’m sorry to all of you that weren’t able to get in…it was a full house!

After my session I was interviewed by Virtualization.com, the video should be up in a few days/weeks.

I talked with many more analysts, press and partners. It was a great opportunity to get the Veeam story out there.

I was able to download so pictures off of @VMcarrie‘s camera and posted them to flickr.

Once again Robert Strong (@robertstrong) did a great job of magic and comedy at the Veeam booth. Here’s a video of a trick he did for @Tom_Howarth. Below are some other videos posted during VMworld Europe:
@PaulShadwell posted this video
VMGuru.NL posted this video
@esloof rode with Robert on the way to the airport

Of course there was a lot of interest at VMworld around the entire Snuggie thing. I’m going to save Snuggie Gate for another post but here’s a pic of @B_renda enjoying the Snuggie in her room.