Veeam Launches First Software Appliance

‘It starts with Veeam Backup and Replication, and it’s built as a software appliance with a just enough operating system, or a JeOS as it’s sometimes called. The Veeam Backup and Replication product is installed and pre-configured on Linux. Now, it’s not Linux that you can install and configure on your own. It’s just, you literally run this and then, boom, you have a Veeam,’ says Rick Vanover, Veeam’s vice president of product strategy.

Data resilience and protection technology developer Veeam Software Tuesday introduced its first software appliance, targeting the data protection and replication market with an offering that’s easy to deploy and manage.

The Veeam Software Appliance is an additional way to consume the Veeam Data Platform end-to-end data recovery platform, said Rick Vanover, vice president of product strategy at Kirkland, Wash.-based Veeam.

“It starts with Veeam Backup and Replication, and it’s built as a software appliance with a just enough operating system, or a JeOS as it’s sometimes called,” Vanover told CRN. “The Veeam Backup and Replication product is installed and pre-configured on Linux. Now, it’s not Linux that you can install and configure on your own. It’s just, you literally run this and then, boom, you have a Veeam.”

The opportunity for partners is immense, Vanover said.

“Customers want a more secure and resilient experience,” he said. “Getting this Veeam Software Appliance in place will be a good opportunity for partners. But we also have to think about where the backups go and how they’re configured. Those types of things are actually the opportunity that has always been out there for partners. It’s a great conversation starter. And I think the next-level opportunity for partners is to help their customers, and I love to use this phrase: leave bad design decisions of the past behind them. Sometimes it’s not a good practice to just upgrade, which can propagate some of the design decisions that may not be the right decision.”

When the new Veeam Software Appliance is initially released, it will not have an upgrade migration path to keep it simple and to provide partners with services opportunities, Vanover said. However, he said, Veeam will offer patches and new features as available, he said.

“We’ll have what we’re calling an updater, and the updater will take care of Veeam vulnerabilities,” he said. “All software has bugs. We patch them historically very quickly. But wouldn’t it be awesome if the patching was automatic? That’s the thought here, to patch the just enough OS that goes with the Veeam Software Appliance.”

Veeam years ago introduced Veeam Universal License that can be used across virtual machines, physical systems, enterprise databases, and now the Veeam Software Appliance, Vanover said.

When upgrading, customers shouldn’t have to worry about the licenses, he said.

“Wouldn’t it be great if the license just goes through all those versions?” he said. “Wouldn’t it be great if the updater does it for me? I think we’re going to go into a mode where the version number is going to be much less relevant. It’s not quite going to be like an app on your phone, but it’s going to be about as ubiquitous as it can be.”

As customers start taking advantage of auto updating, it’s up to Veeam to ensure that security risks don’t get introduced, Vanover said. Veeam already offers an update service for its Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud appliance, although instead of being fully automatic, it rings a little “bell” to tell users to upgrade, he said.

“The auto updates would come from the same online repository, and we have had that security burden for a while, so security will continue to be on us,” he said.

The Veeam Software Appliance will be available for channel partners to deploy in the cloud or on their customers’ own hardware, Vanover said. Veeam has what it calls the Veeam Ready Appliance Qualification to ensure the hardware has the right memory, storage, networking, and processor power to work. Vanover said some servers from Dell Technologies and Hewlett Packard Enterprise are already qualified.

The Veeam Software Appliance will also be available from alliance partners who will bundle it with their own hardware and sell it through their channel partners, he said.

The Veeam Software Appliance is currently in beta, and is slated to be released to general availability during the second half of 2025.

Greg Tellone, CEO of Continuity Centers, a Woodbury, N.Y.-based solution provider and Veeam channel partner, told CRN that, while he has yet to see the details, he expects the Veeam Software Appliance to be a valuable part of his company’s software-as-a-service offering.

“I expect to see a big uptake among customers,” he said. “The less you have to physically manage, the more you can put it in the cloud, the easier it is to run.”