As many other backup vendors, HPE who has acquired Trilead's VM Explorer last year provides now a free version as well. This gives us a large choice of backup products which, in their limited free versions, exists on the very crowdy backup and replication market. Today we'll cover HPE VM Explorer Free version for VMware and Hyper-V.
We have talked about VM Explorer in the past quite a few times. We were actually the first ones to cover VM Explorer software and we liked its simplicity of utilization and also the small and lightweight installer. Over the time the product has evolved and since the acquisition, the product keeps being developed on regular basis with new features and enhancements added.
The product is switching to full web UI which is fast, responsive and mostly, does not need any plugin to function. We all struggle this year with vSphere web client. The Flash-based, buggy, unreliable piece of software. We have no choice like many other virtualization admins. It's good to know that elsewhere, with fast speed, it's possible to handle HTML 5 web-based UI with ease…
HPE VM Explorer Free version for VMware and Hyper-V
The product is currently as 6.4 version and the installer has less than 40 Mb of size. Still tiny if you ask me. In fact, a trial version is installed and so during 14 days you have the possibility to test the full product.
After installation, you have a 15 days trial period of the Enterprise version with 1000 sockets. If you do not install a license within this time, the product will fall back to the free (limited) version.
Here is a Screenshot of the configuration screen where you're asked to change the password for the admin user, and also another screen which shows a very large choice of display languages. Pretty amazing.
Another feature(s) to point our is the fact of a large choice of backup storage targets. (where you storing your backups). Many clients have already some hardware at home so why not re-use it? If you're running Windows, Linux repository or have some just NAS (don't expect fast backup speed with cheap NAS boxes), you can use those to store your VM backups.
Different backup target option within HPE VM Explorer:
- Cloud Backup targets – Amazon S3, Rackspace, Microsoft Azure and OpenStack. The integration is direct, native, without an intermediary gateway. Support of single item recovery.
- A large number of different backup disk based targets – directly attached storage, network attached storage (NAS), Storage Area Network (SAN), ESX/vSphere, Windows, Linux and FreeBSD based storage platforms, and HPE StoreOnce backup appliances (NAS and VTL interfaces).
- Tape support – includes both locally or iSCSI attached to the VM Explorer server. Split-tape backup enables efficient use of tape media and saves cost of storage.
- Automated storage tiering – allows movement of backup sets between disk, tape, and cloud allowing you to efficiently and cost-effectively utilize different available
storage tiers and meet varying RTO (Recovery Time Objective) needs.
What's the free edition limitations?
The Free Edition provides basic VM backup and restores and a direct copy of files between ESX/Windows/Linux/FreeBSD servers. Here is a screenshot from the product's PDF. As you can see, you have an only full backup, no scheduler, no backup test etc.
When your On-premises data center has Microsoft Exchange or SQL servers running, you'll need at least Professional edition which allows not only application-consistent backup of those systems, but also a granular recovery of individual items such as e-mails, or other objects.
But as being said, the product has 14 days trial before it turns itself into a free product, so why not give it a try. The installation takes less than 5 min and all you need is a Windows box with some .NET pre-installed.
Download your Free Trial of HPE VM Explorer here.
The enterprise edition, on the other hand, can also have some nice bells and whistles, such as Instant Virtual Machine Recovery allowing the VM to be recovered in seconds directly from backups without copying them to the production storage first.
Also, the file-level restore from the cloud and automated test on cloud backups are only possible in the Enterprise edition.
More posts from ESX Virtualization:
- HPE VM Explorer 6.3 now compatible with vSphere 6.5
- HPE VM Explorer Product Settings
- HPE VM Explorer with StoreOnce – Get 1TB of Deduplicated Storage for Free
- HPE VM Explorer Free version for VMware and Hyper-V – (This Post)
- HPE VM Explorer
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