The hypervisor landscape is undergoing significant change. With VMware’s acquisition by Broadcom and the resulting strategic shifts, new opportunities are emerging for alternative virtualization platforms. This technological evolution is bringing fresh momentum to the IT market – along with new challenges in data protection.
Veeam is more than just backup for VMware environments. Our commitment to innovation means we are uniquely positioned to help organizations confidently navigate this evolving multi-hypervisor landscape offering broad support, flexibility, and enterprise-grade data protection—wherever the workloads run.
Veeam is responding proactively to these developments, helping organizations future-proof their backup and replication strategies beyond VMware. However, not all hypervisors follow the same technological principles – delivering a consistent backup experience across platforms has become more complex than ever. That’s why we’ve compiled an overview of the hypervisors we currently support natively, have successfully tested, or secured through optimized workarounds.
Veeam is More
Veeam’s success is no coincidence — continuous innovation and the delivery of practical, value-driven features have made it a true game-changer in the backup industry. One of its earliest breakthroughs was a major increase in backup performance by leveraging Change Block Tracking (CBT). Features like Instant Recovery and SureBackup have also become essential tools for many IT teams and are now considered standard in modern data protection strategies.
In recent years, Veeam has placed increasing emphasis on backup security, particularly in response to the growing threat of ransomware and targeted cyberattacks. Capabilities such as Secure Restore and malware detection during backup and recovery provide critical layers of defense that are now indispensable in many organizations.
However, these advanced features rely on deep technical integration with the underlying hypervisor — and not all platforms offer the same APIs or architectural consistency. Supporting a diverse range of hypervisors presents a real challenge when it comes to delivering a unified and reliable backup experience.
Veeam’s Product Management Team have already investigated a variety of different vendors and its time to bring them all together.
KVM-Based Hypervisors: Flexible, but Fragmented
KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) has become the default virtualization layer across many Linux-based platforms. Combined with QEMU and various orchestration layers, it powers solutions like Proxmox, oVirt/RHV/OLVM, and OpenShift Virtualization. While these platforms all use KVM under the hood, their management layers and integration capabilities vary significantly.
This fragmented ecosystem poses unique challenges for backup. Veeam supports several of these platforms – such as Nutanix AHV, RHV/OLVM, Proxmox, and OpenShift Virtualization – but the integration approach must often be tailored. For instance, while RHV leverages Libvirt to expose changed block tracking data via API, Proxmox requires direct interaction with QEMU via SSH. These differences affect how backups are orchestrated, managed, and restored at scale.
Despite the complexity, KVM-based solutions continue to grow in popularity – and Veeam remains committed to adapting its approach to ensure secure and efficient protection across this evolving landscape.
- Proxmox VE (https://www.veeam.com/products/virtual/proxmox-backup-recovery.html)
- Nutanix AHV (https://www.veeam.com/de/products/virtual/nutanix-backup-recovery.html)
- Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager (oVirt) (https://www.veeam.com/de/company/press-release/data-freedom-racle-kvm-support.html)
Linux-based Hypervisors
We created an overview of Linux-based Hypervisors we see from customers and partners including requests from the forums and direct engagements. Some of them are on the Roadmap while others need to be further researched. Some of the below have been investigated and have had KBs published on how to leverage native tools to collect environment information combined with Veeam’s PowerShell cmdlets to automate creation of Protection Groups.
Here is a list with information, KB-Articles, blog posts and workarounds.
| Platform | Host-based API Integration | KB/Blog | Vendor Link |
| Nutanix AHV | Yes | User Guide | https://www.nutanix.com/products/ahv |
| RHV/OLVM | Yes | User Guide | https://docs.oracle.com/en/virtualization/oracle-linux-virtualization-manager/ |
| OpenShift Virtualization | Yes | User Guide | https://www.redhat.com/en/technologies/cloud-computing/openshift/virtualization |
| Proxmox | Yes | User Guide | https://www.proxmox.com/en/products/proxmox-virtual-environment/overview |
| HPE VM Essentials | Coming Soon | Blog KB, Blog, Blog | https://www.hpe.com/us/en/morpheus-vm-essentials-software.html |
| Scale Computing | Coming Soon | Blog | https://www.scalecomputing.com |
| Verge.IO | No | https://www.verge.io/ | |
| (Citrix) Xen Server | No | KB, Blog | https://www.xenserver.com/ |
| Vates XCP-ng | No | KB, Blog | https://vates.tech/xcp-ng/ |
| OpenStack | No | https://www.openstack.org/ | |
| Canonical MicroCloud | No | https://canonical.com/microcloud | |
| Sangfor HCI | No | https://www.sangfor.com/cloud-and-infrastructure/products/hci-hyper-converged-infrastructure | |
| KubeVirt | No | https://kubevirt.io/ |
Agent Backup for alternative Hypervisors (Verge.IO, XenServer, etc)
In environments not yet supported natively, backups are typically performed using an unconventional but time-tested and effective approach: deploying agents within the virtual machines themselves.
In general, the goal in virtual environments is to minimize resource consumption. Fortunately, the Veeam Agent is both lightweight and highly efficient, so it introduces minimal overhead while still delivering strong performance. Agents can be centrally deployed, managed, and configured with policies directly from the Veeam Backup & Replication console.
Backup data is stored in a centralized backup repository, which can be further protected according to the 3-2-1-1-0 rule – ensuring resiliency and defense against ransomware. Additionally, both the agents and their backup jobs can be monitored and reported on using Veeam ONE, providing full visibility and control.
This flexibility is at the heart of our philosophy: enabling robust data protection for any platform, even in the most complex and diverse environments.
The most important thing today is a SECURE restore
Having a reliable backup is essential — but it’s only half the battle. A backup is only as good as its ability to be restored effectively and efficiently when needed.
Veeam’s agent-based restore capabilities offer a wide range of flexible recovery options, from granular file-level restores to full system and even virtual machine recoveries. While certain advanced features like Instant VM Recovery aren’t available due to the lack of hypervisor integration, comparable recovery results can still be achieved. By preparing a recovery “template” and using a bootable Veeam Restore ISO, organizations can restore systems quickly and efficiently—even in agent-based environments.
Veeam’s Application-Aware Processing capabilities, including the Veeam Explorers for Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory, SQL Server, and others, work seamlessly with agent-based backups—just like file-level restores.
Additionally, a standard agent backup can be restored as a fully functional virtual machine on supported hypervisors as well as to public cloud. The only requirement is that the appropriate hypervisor drivers are included in the boot image to ensure compatibility during the restore process.
Automation
Not being able to use the inventory management and tagging of the hypervisor platform is one of the major drawbacks to using an Agent-based approach compared with native integration. With the major growth of other hypervisors in the ecosystem today, it has put pressure on backup vendors to investigate, develop and test a solution for the disparate systems people might be looking to move to. Luckily, most hypervisor platforms and Veeam offer automation features that allow someone to create their own integrations leveraging Veeam’s agent-based backups which offer a rich set of capabilities including application-aware processing to ensure applications are backed up in a consistent manner. This helps guarantee recoverability and allow for application-item recovery using our explorers. Examples blog posts that explore how to build an integration using the native CLI and Veeam’s PowerShell modules can be found below:
Looking through the above table of platforms that someone might have deployed in their environment, but hasn’t had a documented method for integration such as Verge.io, someone could start to examine the API guide for Verge, found here. They can decide if they want to leverage a REST API or the yp-api commands to extract VM data and build a list of VM names/IP Addresses and other metadata that can be stored as a CSV. Exporting inventory and configuration data can give you a historical record of VMs in case they are deleted and need to be recreated with matching specs. Running this script on a regular basis can help identify new machines and add them to protection groups for secure backups. If a company is leveraging Infrastructure-as-Code to deploy and configure VMs, another alternative is to add an additional playbook to the process that installs Veeam Agents.
Conclusion
Companies are reconsidering what their on-premises infrastructure runs on and want the freedom to choose new platforms while ensuring they still have a best-in-class solution for data management. Veeam is More—delivering industry-leading hypervisor coverage, adaptability, and innovation to help evolving needs.
Veeam continues to lead the way in adapting to the new multi-hypervisor reality for on premises and cloud infrastructures. Whether through native integrations, smart workarounds, or automation strategies, we’re helping organizations maintain enterprise-grade data protection as they diversify beyond VMware.
To learn more about your specific platform and next steps, contact your Veeam representative or visit www.veeam.com.
The post Veeam in a Multi-Hypervisor World appeared first on Veeam Software Official Blog.
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