Security Analyst – Jeff Soehner CISSP, GXPN,GPYC,GMOB,GCIH

It’s been a while since I wrote about any VM backup software (or for that matter ANYTHING) but I wanted to take some time to update my readers on a great little software from the folks at Trilead. I have been using this software since the early version 3 releases and they lost my attention when they began to require the VMware guests be shutdown before they were backed up. Now in version 4.0.37 I noticed that they have added that functionality back along with Hyper-V support! (actually Hyper-v had been added earlier than 4.0.37 but now that I have a Windows 2012 test machine I noticed that it was supported).

They have added a two server restriction so you will only be able to connect to a maximum of two servers but as long as you don’t have more than two nodes in your cluster you can use the Free version.

You can backup all of your virtual machines running on your Hyper-V cluster and you can even move them by backing it up and then restoring it to another host (unfortunately you cannot use the replication feature in the free version although who would want to – migrating from one hyper-v to another in a cluster is easy).

You can only perform a full backup on any of these vms but since this is a free product and you can do it while the guest is running I think this software is a great plus you can check them out at http://www.trilead.com/Editions.   Where else can you find a software that will allow you to backup a vm – convert it and then import it to a hyper-v cluster that is free?