Data protection vendor Veeam has decided the time is right to support half a dozen more hypervisors in case you are thinking of adopting a new one.

Hypervisor migrations are currently a distinct possibility for VMware user who relies on vSphere for basic server virtualization, as Broadcom now focuses on its Cloud Foundation private cloud suite. That product is powerful and comprehensive, but Broadcom requires buyers to license at least 72 cores, which may be rather more than many small shops operate.

Before acquisition, VMware had literally tens of thousands of small customers. Many are now looking for a home.

VMs are disk images wrapped in metadata and moving them to the format required by different hypervisors isn’t hard. Shifting all the tools that surround a hypervisor can be more complex and therefore the more time-consuming and risky part of a hypervisor migration.

Migration projects also create the opportunity to reconsider an entire infrastructure, including the sort of tools Veeam provides. The company knows this and is working to protect its position by giving those considering virtualization migrations comfort they can change hypervisor without the added chore of finding new data protection tools.

Which is why the company added support for six additional hypervisors – Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, Sangfor aSV, XCP-ng, Citrix XenServer, VergeIO and Platform9 – in version 13.1 of its flagship Data Platform that became available today.

Veeam’s president of products and technology Rehan Jalil today told The Register that the company thinks users will appreciate the chance to protect VMs created to run different hypervisors from a single console.

Adding six hypervisors to a single release is more impressive than it sounds, because XenServer and XCP-ng are based on the open-source Xen hypervisor, and the remainder use Linux KVM. Veeam already supports KVM-based hypervisors from Proxmox and Nutanix, and has previously found ways to backup Xen VMs – just without the hypervisor integration that comes with inclusion in its Data Platform.

Veeam also today launched a product called Cloud Archive that shunts data into an un-named third-party cloud. When The Register asked Jalil to identify that cloud, he noted that AWS’s Glacier service pioneered cloudy archive-grade storage, and pointed to Veeam’s close relationship with Microsoft which operates a service called Azure Archive Storage. Such services operate recovery time objectives that stretch to multiple hours.

Veeam suggests the new service is suited to storing “redundant, obsolete and trivial” backups, with better performance than tape. ®