Ten must-have tools for every virtualization admin

The commercial edition no doubt offers powerful backup and recovery, but, surprisingly, Veeam Backup free edition does as well. It performs backups on both vSphere and Hyper-V and creates portable backup files of VMs in a Veeam ZIP format. Veeam ZIP fully encapsulates the VM and compresses it into a compact, portable backup file. The free edition replaces the very popular Veeam FastSCP and provides the same functionality. It also includes Veeam Explorer for Exchange and Veeam Explorer for SAN Snapshots. Though it does lack replication, scheduled backup, incremental backup and simultaneous VM backup, it offers instant image-level recovery, file-level recovery and a file manager to stay on top of VM and host files. Veeam also offers the free Veeam One for virtualization management and monitoring.