Hyper-V 2012 R2 Replica vs Veeam Off-Host Replication

[deyer77]

Greetings! I was hoping someone could shed some light on Veeam replication advantages for me over native Hyper-V 2012 Replica. I know that doubling I/O is the first issue with MS using the journaling HRL files approach. In a small business where the impact was insignificant, though, what advantage would Veeam have? If I understand correctly, the off-host proxy would also need to be Server 2012 with Hyper-V enabled. If that's the case, why wouldn't I simply just use Hyper-V replica to go the other host and stand VMs up there, if necessary.

Also, with the ability to start VMs using Instant VM Recovery on a Veeam server, would the VOSE license of those Windows VMs be looking for the Windows Server 2012 Standard or Datacenter license of their failed host? I'm not looking to break any licensing laws, but curious how this would work in a DR situation.

And I apologize in advance if I'm missing any clearly obvious facets of the software!

Thanks,
D

[Gostev]

I/O impact does not really matter of business size, it is always 2x for writes and unless you are talking about SSD storage, then I would be really concerned about that. When planning storage for any virtual environment, you will find that IOPS is almost always your primary constraint. You will often need to go with twice the capacity you need, because only that amount of spindles will provide the required level of IOPS... so thinking that IOPS will never be a problem is usually wrong. They will become the problem at the worst possible time, when it is too late to do anything.

Overall, there are plenty of other differences, here is my top 10:
1. Hyper-V replica doubles write I/O on each protected VM
2. Veeam supports file and item level recoveries from replicas.
3. Veeam is not limited to 24 restore points.
4. Restore points are stored compressed with Veeam.
5. Bandwidth consumption considerations:
a) Hyper-V does not support page file exclusion.
b) Hyper-V replica does not support traffic throttling
c) Hyper-V replica is very inefficient due to journaling approach, when Veeam needs to transfer only latest state of changed blocks.
6. Cumbersome seeding requires VM cloning, with Veeam you can just seed from backup (including VeeamZIP).
7. No flexible scheduling (limited to selected intervals)
8. Data processing (such as traffic compression) uses significant host resource, when with Veeam you can offload this processing to off-host proxy.
9. No WAN optimizations (Veeam provides TCP/IP multithreading, optimizations for high-latency links).
10. If you go with Hyper-V replica, you still need to buy backup software! Replicas cannot provide neither required retention, nor meet the requirements of having at least 2 copies of your production data. And if you buy Veeam for backup, replication is included at no extra charge as well, so you don't even need to make this choice in the first place...

[deyer77]

Thanks for the thorough reply! Half of those reasons are more than enough to justify Veeam!

[futureweb]

I know this thread is older, but my question matches the info here as we are thinking of using Veeam and I am not sure yet, if we also use replication built in Hyper-V R2 or Veeam.

You wrote about the Pro's, what about the Con's, or is there a way to do it different?
- Continuious Replication (Hyper-V does 30 sec, Veeam Continuuous). But as Veeam always does snapshots, I am limited to 47 snapshots from Hyper-V, which means, that if it does a snapshot once a minute, I only have snapshots on the DR Site for less than the last hour.
In Hyper-V I can say, make a snapshot every hour, so I have snapshots the last 24 hours available, even with nearly continuous replication.

Any workaround or future plans on this behaviour?

Also what I noted is, I am just doing 2 testreplications of 2 VM's, 1 with 50 GB, one with 600 GB. It takes about 4 minutes until replication is finished, which is far away from Hyper-V, and those 2 don't really have lots of writes or changes.
I think, once our bigger VM's with 3 TB are replicated, that this time will goes up a lot.

So not an easy decision, which features we see as more important, a combination would be good
Most lacking for me on Hyper-V is that no notifies are sent if replications have errors, and that they sometimes enter critical state because of odd timeouts, with the only solution to have a script run every 10 minutes to check and restart
replication.

Can you elaborate about "Restore points are comrpessed". On the Target machine, don't they need to be uncompressed, so that they are instant available?

Thanks
Patrick

[foggy]

Can you elaborate about "Restore points are comrpessed". On the Target machine, don't they need to be uncompressed, so that they are instant available?

This relates to legacy replica format, which was the only available one at the day this was written. The replica itself was stored uncompressed, however rollback files containing the changes to restore to previous points in time were compressed. Recent versions use snapshot replica and are uncompressed.

[ortoscale]

At one of customers we are experiencing timeout while doing VMware snapshots - replication jobs. Just wondering, Hyper-V/Veeam combination can also provide full SQL recovery with application aware backup? Any exp about snapshots and timeouts, haven't play with Hyper-V yet? With VMware they seemed unavoidable without adding extra money into hardware.

[foggy]

Just wondering, Hyper-V/Veeam combination can also provide full SQL recovery with application aware backup?

Yes, in this sense functionality is similar between hypervisors.

[Blue407]

I am just testing Veeam at the moment, I have been using Microsoft's built in replication feature for Server 2012 for a few months and it seems to work well apart from the occasional drop-off's when it stops replicating and you have to resume it. Bit of a pain if you don't notice for a few days...

I would like to know what features the Veeam replication has compared to the Microsoft one, is there a comparison table somewhere?

What can Veeam do that the MS native one can't?

Any performance benefits?

Thanks in advance for your ideas and thoughts

[Blue407]

Any thoughts on this?
My thread was merged, but I have had no responses since.

[foggy]

Paul, doesn't the list of differences given above answer your question?

[Net Runner]

If you are considering Hyper-V replica I would rather think towards high-availability and fault tolerance with automatic failover instead of manual one that Hyper-V replica offers assuming you have at least two hosts (the main one and the second one for replication). An out-of-the-box feature with windows datacenter license is the Storage Spaces Direct stuff https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/win ... t-overview which is quite expensive but helps you to follow the 3-2-1 rule https://www.veeam.com/blog/the-3-2-1-0- ... ility.html. If you go all-flash and add some Mellanox RDMA stuff the IO will not be an issue at all.
If the scenario is out of your budget you can look towards Starwind offering (they have VEEAM and Mellanox stuff already present) which is very good in what you get for the money https://www.starwindsoftware.com/starwi ... -appliance.

[milonet]

Hi,
Hyper-V has a one cool Feature: Reverse replication function. In veeam this operation can be manually done.

Will Veeam have this feature in future versions?