Unitrends Free – Now Backs Up Free ESXi Servers

by | Sep 15, 2015 | Latest News

Unitrends Free is a virtual-only backup appliance that provides comprehensive data protection delivered through an intuitive user experience at no cost. An installer automates the deployment process, setup involves three simple steps, running backups require only a few clicks, and files and virtual machines (VMs) can be recovered in minutes. A dashboard with interactive tiles makes it easy for you to monitor backup and recovery operations and receive warning and failure alerts.

 

With this free data-protection solution, you can protect up to 1 TB of unique VM data. There are no limits on the number of VMs you can protect and no constraints on the number of sockets. Unitrends Free deploys as a Linux – based VMware or Hyper-V virtual machine. The appliance performs hypervisor-level backups for your virtual machines. You can protect VMs with on-demand or scheduled jobs that run daily. Full backups capture everything on the VM. Incremental backups capture any changes in the VM data since the last backup was performed.

 

After backing up a VM, you can recover individual files, recover the entire VM, or perform an instant recovery, which enables you to begin using a recovered VM immediately while its data is migrated from the appliance to your hypervisor.

 

Protect & Recover For Free

 

You will never have to pay for Unitrends Free. If you decide to purchase a full version of our Unitrends Enterprise Backup virtual appliance, which offers a wide range of advanced data protection features for physical and virtual machines, you will be able to migrate your backups from the Unitrends Free appliance.

 

Quick & Easy Deployment

 

At less than 1GB, downloading Unitrends Free is fast. Once downloaded, the Unitrends Free installer eliminates the guesswork by automating deployment.

 

Appliance Setup in Seconds

 

Getting started is easy with the 3-step setup wizard.

 

Intuitive Interface

 

Unitrends Free introduces an intuitive interface that greatly simplifies the process of protecting and recovering your data. The new UI is a work in progress and Unitrends value your feedback. Please use the Unitrends Community button in the UI to let them know what you like and dislike, request features, and provide any feedback to help them improve your experience. They also encourage you to participate in the discussions in the Unitrends Free forums.

 

Protection & Recovery Made Simple

 

  • Protect up to 1 TB of unique VM data, with no limits on the number of VMs you can protect and no constraints on the number of sockets.
  • Schedule fast, incremental forever backups for daily recovery points.
  • Changed-block tracking and incremental forever backups ensure your backups complete quickly and consume minimal storage space, since only changed data is processed after the first backup completes.
  • Recover files and VMs in just a few clicks.
  • Use instant VM recovery to quickly run a virtual machine from a backup and minimize downtime.
  • Easily monitor backup, backup copy, and recovery jobs using a dashboard of interactive tiles.

 

Cloud Integration

 

Copy backups to Google Cloud, Google Nearline, or Amazon for longer – term data protection.

 

Unitrends Community Integration

 

Get Unitrending to stay in sync with the Unitrends Free community forums and Knowledge Base. The community forums are directly integrated into the user interface, allowing you to search the forum and work with our community easily.

 

Deployment of Unitrends Free

 

You can deploy Unitrends Free on a VMware vSphere or Microsoft Hyper-V host. It is recommended that you run your appliance and the VMs it is protecting on different hosts to avoid losing your VMs and their backups if one of the hosts fails.

 

  • Considerations for deploying on a Hyper-V host – You can deploy Unitrends Free on Windows Server Hyper-V 2012 or 2012 R2.
  • Considerations for deploying on an ESX host – You can deploy Unitrends Free on a server running paid versions of ESXi 5.0, 5.1, 5.5, or 6.0
  • Considerations for deploying on a Free ESXi host – For the free version of ESXi you will need to install Server agents into each VM. This is a new capability for Unitrends Free that has only just been announced; as such the Admin Guide still needs to be updated for this capability. Please contact me if you are interested in running Unitrends Free for the free version of ESXi.
  • Considerations for deploying on a physical Windows system – as for the free version of ESXi, you will need to install agents into each Windows system to be backed up. This capability was also added with the recent release of support for free ESXi. As such the Admin Guide hasn’t been updated for this either. Please contact me if you would like to use Unitrends Free to back up physical Windows machines.

 

P.S. – Also check out Unitrends Free for Google Cloud Platform – a special version developed in conjunction with Google which backups up your data locally and seamlessly integrates with Google Cloud Storage to create copies of your backups in the cloud.

 

Paul Leslie – Business Development Manager

Unitrends Free