Veeam hypervisor support expands as VMware customers reassess vSphere

Veeam hypervisor support now covers six additional virtualization platforms in version 13.1 of its Data Platform, a move aimed at customers weighing a shift away from VMware vSphere. The data protection vendor is trying to keep backup and recovery tooling from becoming another reason for infrastructure teams to delay a hypervisor migration.

The added platforms are Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, Sangfor aSV, XCP-ng, Citrix XenServer, VergeIO and Platform9. Veeam said the updated Data Platform release is now available. The company did not disclose pricing changes tied to the new integrations.

The timing tracks a broader rethink among VMware customers after Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware. Broadcom has emphasized VMware Cloud Foundation, its private cloud suite, and requires buyers to license at least 72 cores. That threshold can exceed the needs of smaller organizations that used vSphere mainly for server virtualization. Before the acquisition, VMware had tens of thousands of small customers, according to The Register.

Which hypervisors does Veeam now support?

Veeam’s new supported list in Data Platform 13.1 adds Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, Sangfor aSV, XCP-ng, Citrix XenServer, VergeIO and Platform9. Citrix XenServer and XCP-ng are based on the open-source Xen hypervisor, while the other four use Linux KVM.

That distinction makes the release less technically broad than the headline count suggests, because Veeam already had experience with KVM platforms from Proxmox and Nutanix. The company also had prior ways to back up Xen virtual machines, but without the same hypervisor-level integration that comes with inclusion in its main Data Platform.

A hypervisor is the layer that runs and manages virtual machines. Moving a VM from one platform to another can be relatively straightforward because VMs are disk images with metadata, but the tools around virtualization, including backup, recovery, monitoring and operations workflows, tend to make migrations slower and riskier.

Veeam president of products and technology Rehan Jalil told The Register that the company expects customers to value protecting VMs running on different hypervisors through one console. That positioning is practical: a VMware reassessment gives buyers a reason to review adjacent infrastructure software, and Veeam wants to avoid being swapped out during that review.

Veeam also introduced Cloud Archive, a product that moves data into a third-party cloud service. The company did not name the cloud provider. Asked by The Register to identify it, Jalil referred to AWS Glacier as the service that pioneered cloud archive storage and also pointed to Veeam’s close relationship with Microsoft, which offers Azure Archive Storage.

Archive storage services are built for low-cost retention rather than fast restores, with recovery time objectives measured in multiple hours. Veeam said Cloud Archive is intended for backups it described as “redundant, obsolete and trivial,” and positioned the product as offering better performance than tape. The company did not provide performance figures in the details reported.

This story draws on original reporting from The Register.