"Introducing support for Microsoft HyperV is a significant announcement for us," said Doug Hazelman, VP of Product Strategy at Veeam. This will reduce the cost and complexity of managing multi-hypervisor environments, particularly since it is all done through one single product.

"We have had very positive feedback from the channel about this, that it is one product, not one for Microsoft and one for VMware," he said. "This makes it easier to use."

Hazelman said the expansion of support to Microsoft will also likely bring some significant new partners to VMware, as well as strengthening their existing partners.

"Most of our VMware partners are also Microsoft partners, so this will let them take a solution they are already selling on the VMware side into new opportunities on the Microsoft side. A lot of our channel partners are very excited about this."

Hazelman said this will also make Veeam more appealing to integrators who have Microsoft shops, who have shied away from VMware in the past.

"This will make us much more attractive to them," he said. "They didnt push our management pack because it required VMware expertise. Now this gives them a new solution set in their bag."

Enterprise scalability has also been enhanced through improvements to the distributed architecture to streamline deployment and maintenance of remote office/branch offices and large installations, and speed up backup, replication and restore over WANs.

"These architectural changes allow a more distributed architecture for backup and replication," Hazelman said. Previously, the backup server handled everything from the source to the target. Version 6 has backup proxies as well as backup repositories. That allows us, from a single backup server, to manage multiple backup proxies as well as multiple backup repositories. That helps in one large site, but it also also helps if you have multiple branch offices."

These architectural enhancements, combined with the use of the new VMware APIs for Data Protection, also increase the speed and efficiency of replication on the VMware side, which is now ten times as fast as before, Hazelman said.

Other enhancements include1-Click File Restore, which extends Veeam's existing file-level recovery with delegated, web-based restore directly to the original virtual machine, without requiring a direct network connection or in-guest agent.