This post is also available in: Italian

A huge news of Veeam Backup & Replication 9.5 Update 4 was that the Veeam Backup Free Edition has been discontinued.

What does it means? No more free “version” for backup VMs?

No… simple it means a new (and better) for to backup your VMs for free (but only for small enviroments).

Veeam is offering a new Community Edition for several products for the tech Community. Community Editions will offer more functionality and capabilities compared to previous free editions.

For Veeam Backup & Replication, the Community Edition will replace the Free Edition starting with Update 4 and basically the Community Edition is the product without any license (like was the Free edition).

Here’s a glimpse of what Veeam is giving away for free:

• Image-based VM replication
• Synthetic full backup — create forever-incremental backups that save time and storage
• Regular backup scheduling right from the UI — setup a backup window easily
• Ability to restore or migrate directly to AWS, Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Azure Stack
• Backup verification from malware before restoring to production

But now the Community Edition functionalities can be comparable with the Veeam Backup & Replication Standard Edition, with the main limit to max 10 protected instances (instances can be virtual machines or physical).

This is a huge change and brings more features in the “free” edition like the possibility to schedule your backup (but was also possible with VeeamZIP by using PowerShell) using native backup jobs, use incremental backups, and more and more.

On the other side, you can notice that the Community edition is basically a Standard edition with the limit of the 10 protected instances… A clear sign to other competitors that are giving a “almost” features product with a limit of 3 or little more VMs.

And note that you can use the Veeam Explorer for:

• Active Directory
• SharePoint Server
• Exchange Server
• Storage Snapshot
• SQL Server

Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition is:

• Powerful: Experience the full backup, recovery and replication capabilities provided in Veeam Backup & Replication Standard edition
  
• Simple: Download and begin protecting in minutes with any server hardware and backup storage you already have
  
• Reliable: Set it and forget it, ensuring your data is protected and available whenever and wherever you need it— It Just Works!
  

And, most importantly, Veeam Community Edition is FREE FOREVER!

With the new Veeam licensing, you may use 10 instances of this free edition for any workloads: virtual, physical or cloud! Very interesting and affortable for SMB use cases.

For more information see the product page or this page.

Note that Community Editions will be available also for other product, like for example for Veeam Backup for Microsoft Office 365 and Veeam ONE. 

Andrea Mauro

Virtualization, Cloud and Storage Architect. Tech Field delegate. VMUG IT Co-Founder and board member. VMware VMTN Moderator and vExpert 2010-24. Dell TechCenter Rockstar 2014-15. Microsoft MVP 2014-16. Veeam Vanguard 2015-23. Nutanix NTC 2014-20. Several certifications including: VCDX-DCV, VCP-DCV/DT/Cloud, VCAP-DCA/DCD/CIA/CID/DTA/DTD, MCSA, MCSE, MCITP, CCA, NPP.