Tag:

unitrends

Unitrends is offering free backup virtual appliance for up to 1TB

by Philip Sellers August 6, 2015

written by Philip Sellers

So, I am a little late to the party, but I just found Unitrends new Free Backup offering. Launched in May, the new backup offering is distributed as a virtual appliance and has a 1TB protected limit, but is otherwise free and clear for you to use. This is a perfect backup for your home lab or even many small customers virtualization deployments.

Since the backup is metered by protected space, there are no limits the number of VM or CPU’s that can be protected. Backups are incremental forever, there is cloud integration with Amazon and Google, automated scheduling and instant VM recovery. As I’ve written before, the restore is what is most important in a backup strategy. The free backup is virtualization focused with support for VMware and Hyper-V.

As for system requirements, the backup appliance needs:

A minimum of 2 virtual processors (CPUs)
A minimum of 4 GB of RAM
90 GB of space for the VM’s initial disk

At least 128 GB of attached virtual disk backup storage

To find out more, head over to http://www.unitrends.com/products/unitrends-free-backup-software.

Unitrends is known for its appliance based backup technology, but with the merger with PHDVirtual a couple years ago, Unitrends has a complete lineup for virtualization to physical backup. They’ve grown a lot since being founded here in Myrtle Beach. Currently headquartered in Burlington, MA, the company has been a pioneer in disk to disk backup.

August 6, 2015 1 comment

News

Unitrends Free Edition. Protecting your assets with Asset Protection and Job Creation.

by Roger Lund June 2, 2015

written by Roger Lund

Yesterday I write on Installing and Configuring Unitrends free edition. Today I will cover protecting your assets with Asset Protection. Then we will go over Job Creation. This allows you to have a backup of your VM’s for free!

Requirements:

For this scenario we will be using vCenter 5.5.

And we are off!

1. Browse to the UI.

2. Close the welcome to Unitrends free.

3. Navigate to Configure.

4. Click on the Protected Assets Tab.

5. Click Add, and select Virtual Host.

6. Put in your vCenter information and click save.

7. Now navigate to Protect.

8. Highlight your vCenter

9. Check the box next to the VM you would like to Backup.

10. Click Backup

11. A new window will popup, titled Create Backup Job.

12. Click Define Job Settings.

For now we are going to just run this job once. This is called a on demand job.

13. Under Schedule, Select when to run this job: check Now, and save.

Right away a job success window pops up.

Lets take a look at the job to verify the job’s running status.

14. Click view Jobs.

15. Click on the job, and click View Details.

Once it completes you will see a Successful Status.

Congrats! You have just protected your first VM!

Roger Lund

June 2, 2015 3 comments

News

Installing and Configuring Unitrends free edition

by Roger Lund June 1, 2015

written by Roger Lund

Last week I wrote on Unitrends offers free backup’s with Unitrends Free. Unitrends is a leader in the backup space. And they recently announced a free edition. Today I am going to cover deploying the software via a appliance, and the post deployment configuration. This is our first Step to backing up our virtual environment, for free!

Once we finish this, we will be ready to login to the UI, setup asset protection, and create a new backup job.

Before we start:

This requires a windows machine to launch the setup with .net framework 4.0. Note this does not install on the device you run it from, but deploy’s a appliance.

Ready, get set, and GO!

1. Run the unitrends Installer.

unitrends free edition exe

2. Fill out the vCenter information, and click Next.

3. Next name the appliance and select the VMware host and Datastore and click Next.

4. Now select your network, and give the appliance the correct network information for your environment, and click next.

5. Now Configure the disk size, select the datastore, and disk provision method, and click install.

6. Now browse to the IP Address, and proceed by ignoring any SSL warning, and agree to the agreement.

7. Next we will setup the Date and time on the appliance. Once you have made any adjustments click next.

8. Now we set the hostname, domain name, and password. Click Next.

9. Next we set the mail server information and click Finish.

On the next write up. I will cover protecting assets and creating jobs.

Roger Lund

June 1, 2015 0 comments

Datacenter News Storage

Unitrends offers free backup’s with Unitrends Free

by Roger Lund May 28, 2015

written by Roger Lund

Product overview:

Unitrends is a software company that has been doing backup’s since 1985 according to Wikipedia. On may 12th they announced a open beta to a free version of Unitrends free..

Unitrends free is a Virtual Appliance that offers data protection in the form of a Linux based VMware or Hyper-v VM. You can protect VM’s with Full backup’s, incremental backups, on demand or scheduled. You can recover individual files, the entire vm or perform a instant recovery.

Features in Unitrends Free include:

Free vSphere and Hyper-V Backup for Unlimited Virtual Machines (VMs) and Sockets. Unlike other tools that restrict usage by number of VMs or sockets, Unitrends Free provides hypervisor-level protection for up to 1 terabyte (TB) of data.
Instant VM Recovery. Unitrends Free makes it possible to quickly run a VM directly from a backup to reduce downtime. Instant recovery also allows users to spin up copies of their VMs for recovery verification, testing and development.

Automated Daily Scheduling. The product features “set it and forget it” scheduling with daily recovery points to keep a user’s system protected at all times – even when no one is around.
Fast, Incremental Forever Backups. Unitrends Free delivers changed-block tracking and incremental forever backups to ensure that backups complete rapidly every day – without using a lot of storage.
Cloud Integration. Users can also take advantage of low cost long-term storage via integration with third-party clouds such as Google Cloud Storage, Google Nearline and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).

Unitrends Community Integration. Users benefit from limitless support provided by the Unitrends Community. Directly integrated into the Unitrends Free user interface, IT professionals can search the forum and collaborate to help one another, while also earning attractive rewards. Source http://www.unitrends.com/company/press-releases/2015/unitrends-redefines-free%E2%80%9D-virtualization-backup-w

Availability:

The beta version of Unitrends Free is available to download now. Here is the Unitrends Free Administrator’s Guide

In celebration of the launch, one lucky user will win a $1,500 Visa Giftcard.

UnitrendsFree

To download the software and obtain more details regarding the sweepstakes, please visit: http://www.UnitrendsFree.com.

I will be following up with installation and configuration of the product.

Roger Lund

May 28, 2015 0 comments