I work for the SMB space, and many of our clients do not find value in deploying a monitoring suite such as Microsoft System Center. Don’t get me wrong, this software suite is very valuable. Thing is, it is valuable for IT. Convincing SMB owners to purchase this monitoring suite for their smaller networks is challenging. Honestly, I don’t blame small business owners for not wanting to fork out thousands of dollars for monitoring/configuration tools. Microsoft seems to have forgotten the SMB market when it comes to management products, long discontinuing their “Essentials” suite. So I have been on the hunt for something to monitor our Hyper-V deployments that won’t break the bank for our customers.

Enter Veeam ONE Free Edition. This software is a virtualization management platform delivered by a relatively new software player in the virtualization field. Veeam has been winning all kinds of awards for their software solutions, and they are well known for their backup product.

I installed Veeam ONE Free edition only a day ago, it was very easy and straightforward to install and become familiar with the console. This is a great product for those smaller shops looking for better management than what Hyper-V/Failover Cluster manager can do. I’ll cover the installation and configuration steps to get you started below.

Installation:

Head on over to the download page and sign up to download the software for free. You are going to want to download both the 563MB installation ISO, as well as the KB1841 7.0 R2 update. I noticed on my original install that the management software did not want to connect to my failover cluster, but after installing the 7.0 R2 update things were working well.

I’m installing this software on a Windows Server 2008 R2 virtual machine. This current server runs some management software on it already, monitoring AV, WSUS, and running HP Systems Insight Manager. After mounting the iso, I began the installation by clicking on the setup.exe

The installation screen is very nice, we want to install the server so go ahead and click on that option.

I absolutely hate it when I am trying to install software that requires prerequisites and the software installation halts with an error. Nice thing about Veeam is even though you didn’t read the documentation to find out what was required, the installer goes ahead and prompts you to install any prerequisites before it installs the main product. The Visual C++ redistributable required a reboot, but upon logging in after the reboot the setup continued.

I guess the ISO you download, and the product you install is the entire suite. This is nice if you decide to purchase the full version later. We are installing the Free version so choose this option here

Again, a system configuration check is completed before installation. If you are missing any components it will install this for you at that time.

The software does use a SQL Express instance. You can choose to install this manually, or use an existing instance, or you can do what I did and install a new SQL instance during the install portion.

Pointing to the standalone host, or cluster is done during the installation. Enter the details here.

When the installation is complete, you are required to log off before using the software.

Don’t forget to install the R2 update.

The last step in installation is tweaking the amount of RAM that the SQL instance uses. I don’t want to run out of memory on my management server so I tweaked this down to use a maximum of 4GB of RAM in SQL Management Studio

Configuration:

The initial configuration wizard pops up immediately when launching Veeam One Monitor. This is a pretty straight forward setup that asks you to enter notification details for alarms notifications and email reports.

After the initial configuration page is completed, there is really not much more you need to do. The product is agent-less, so there is no further configuration required on the hosts/nodes. The interface is very easy to browse around and get used to. I have only been using it for one day and I can manage to get to where I need to look at.

I love to be able to monitor the infrastructure in real time, being able to monitor things like IOPS on the cluster shared volume is very useful for me.

Please Note: The gaps in the reporting is due to me rebooting the monitoring server

Keep in mind this software is completely free to download and use. Here is a screenshot of the network transfer rate report in real time

You can even use the software to connect to the console of the virtual machine.

I am going to be using this software more and more as the days go on, but initially this software was very easy to set-up and configure without much tweaking. This is a perfect fit for me to use in places where I need something monitor and manage a Hyper-V infrastructure that Hyper-V manager and Failover Cluster manager do not provide. I would definitely recommend that you try this software out to see if it fits. I think you will be pleasantly surprised.

Stay tuned, as I use this software more and become more familiar with it I will report my findings here. I may also look to install a trial of the paid version to compare the differences. For anyone that has used this software (either Free or Paid) please comment with your feedback below.