Veeam Releases Its First Data Protection, Resiliency Software Appliance

‘The Veeam Software Appliance is going to be taking all the complexity out of deploying Veeam software. ... IT pros are taxed and busy and worry about security configurations, hardening profiles, those types of things, even before they get to doing the data protection and backup tasks. This will save clients an incredible amount of time, which is the one commodity they can’t really synthesize,’ says Rick Vanover, Veeam’s vice president of product strategy.

Data protection and resilience developer Veeam Software Wednesday unveiled its first-ever software appliance version of its technology in a move the company said will make it easier for channel partners to bring to customers.

The new Veeam Software Appliance is a prebuilt, pre-hardened version of its data resilience technology designed to be easily deployed and managed initially on physical servers, with plans to also be available for use in the cloud, said Rick Vanover, vice president of product strategy for the Kirkland, Wash.-based company.

“The Veeam Software Appliance is going to be taking all the complexity out of deploying Veeam software,” Vanover told CRN. “And I think that speaks to the skills gap in the market. IT pros are taxed and busy and worry about security configurations, hardening profiles, those types of things, even before they get to doing the data protection and backup tasks. This will save clients an incredible amount of time, which is the one commodity they can’t really synthesize.”

The Veeam Software Appliance, which was first discussed in April, is not only quick and easy, but it’s also secure, Vanover said.

“It’s prebuilt, pre-hardened and predictable from an operations standpoint,” he said. “It’s everything you’d want in how you would deploy something. The alternative today is not bad. Veeam is obviously very successful. But before this, our clients would have to stand up some infrastructure, install it, configure it, harden it. A lot of times, organizations don’t follow through on all those steps. There’s a lot of extra stuff to get it implemented to the highest and most secure level. We’re taking all of that out of the equation. We’re saving people time doing work for them that would otherwise be really hard to do.”

The Veeam Software Appliance is designed with customer choice in mind in terms of hardware and will work with any hardware meeting certain requirements related to CPU, memory, storage medium and so on.

The company also has a hardware qualification list that includes specific servers from companies including Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Lenovo, Vanover said.

“Truly, any environment can take it as long as the requirements are met,” he said. “It also can be deployed as a virtual infrastructure. Even though VMware is a very different conversation nowadays [after its acquisition by Broadcom], I would tell someone who uses our products, ‘Hey, it’s a lot like the VMware vCenter Server appliance,’ and they get it. They understand it can run as a virtual machine as well.”

The Veeam Software Appliance is already configured as a VMware Open Virtual Appliance, he said. For other hypervisors including Microsoft Hyper V, Nutanix HCI, Proxmox, partners can use the ISO installation, he added.

As far as working in the cloud, Vanover said not yet.

“It’s meant for traditional on-premises deployments at this time,” he said. “The emphasize is on ‘at this time.’ But qualified servers, any hardware and virtual platforms, so three modes of ‘yes.’”

While other data resiliency vendors already have introduced software appliances, Vanover said his company took its time with the Veeam Software Appliance because of the high bar it sets with new product introductions.

“That’s a blessing in reverse, and I feel that’s one element of why it took long,” he said. But I’d also say now's the right time to do it because of what we’ve learned from cybersecurity-type scenarios, what our customers and partners want. It was actually really difficult to channel all these interests.”

The Veeam Software Appliance will be 100percent sold via channel partners.

One of those is Prodatix, a Phoenix-based solution provider that since 2019 has focused exclusively on data protection and cyber resilience using Veeam. Prodatix also was a beta-tester of the Veeam Software Appliance.

Matt Bullock, co-founder, CEO and vice president of technical sales at Prodatix, said the release of the new offering is something his company has been clamoring for years.

Bullock told CRN that his company has been building Veeam backup servers based on Microsoft Windows Server for years.

“And the thing that always scared us about it, and we all love Microsoft Server, is that it’s not immutable,” he said. “From time to time, where people would be hacked and we had to restore them using Veeam, we thought there’s got to be a better way to use immutability and a Linux operating system. And so we started building servers with Ubuntu Linux just to help customers who were getting attacked.”

The new Veeam Software Appliance takes care of that, Bullock said.

“It’s 100 percent a game-changer for two specific reasons,” he said. “Veeam is now going to a Linux platform. It’s no longer relying on Microsoft Windows, so right there from the very core, it’s immutable. And it also allows for more inexpensive on-prem appliances. You’ve seen this big rush to cloud. And then people went, ‘Oh no, we can’t do this. Too expensive. It’s just not worth it.’ They started coming back to on-prem and are now settling with hybrid environments. This allows us to meet that on-prem need that’s been there all along. It just got lost in the news over everything cloud.”

In addition to handling immutability, the Veeam Software Appliance eliminates the need to burn a virtual machine license to load Veeam in its own virtual machine or physical server, Bullock said.

“It’s not sitting on top of Microsoft Windows,” he said. “The Veeam Software Appliance actually comes with the Veeam software already built into it, so you no longer have to burn another virtual machine license or put it on a host server. You can just buy a new Dell or HPE server as your backup server and load the appliance. It already has the Veeam software built into it. You just enter the license key to get the license. It automatically spins up, you assign the storage that you want on the server, and it automatically creates a hardened appliance. It has all these scripts already built into it.”

The Veeam Software Appliance is currently in early release rather than general release, meaning that it will be released with full support for sale through the channel to net-new deployments and existing customers with routine deployments, Vanover said. General release, expected in the first quarter of 2026, will make it available for larger wholesale migration from competitive products or prior Veeam deployments, he said.

“The reason this early release is this way is because the whole other rest of our portfolio is not ready to be run on this yet,” he said. “There are some scenarios where customers may be consuming other things that aren’t yet ready to operate on this software appliance.”

Looking ahead, Veeam will be making some of the different components of the Veeam Software Appliance available separately, Vanover said.

“This is speaking to the flexibility because a lot of times when you say ‘appliance’ that can, pardon the pun, ‘box’ you into certain structured, rigid configurations,” he said. “That won’t be the case here. For example, Veeam has components such as proxies or repositories or mount servers or little bits ... that go through a large deployment. Those can also be deployed by themselves, but on a smaller appliance, or they can be put on the single all-in-one type of appliance. Our customers and partners who have done different types of designs will have a lot of options to leverage this appliance as they go forward.”