Veeam vs. PHD Virtual Backup for Hyper-V

[jkettler]

Does anyone have a feature comparison or real-world comparison between Veeam and PHD Virtual Backup when it comes to Hyper-V? My boss is asking about it since it is cheaper. I'm a big Veeam fan and want to give him valid reasons we should keep it.

[Gostev]

We do not evaluate startups, there are too many to track. But I can provide a generic answer that should apply to most, if not all new players on Hyper-V backup market.

First, I don't know a single Hyper-V VM backup vendor (big or small) today that provides true incremental backup that is based on changed block tracking, which means 20x times slower incremental backup for all of them. This alone is usually sufficient differentiator to choose Veeam.

It is also safe to say that any v1 release will be extremely basic and feature challenged, and will not provide most features listed here:
http://www.veeam.com/backup-replication-features.html

Thing is, basic backup is really simple to implement, because there is a very low technology barrier for any start up to release v1 even with a small team of devs. Heck, you could even create a PowerShell script to backup your VMs quite easily. It is recovery and offsite protection that takes years to master. As such, most newly introduced backup solutions will lack:

VM level recovery:
1. Instant VM Recovery (2 min vs. 8 hours to recover 1 TB VM)
2. Individual virtual disks recovery is rarely available.
3. Out of place VM recovery, if present, is usually limited in functionality and options (e.g. preserving vs. generating new VM GUID).

File level recovery is usually very limited:
1. Depth of guest file system support (Veeam supports 17 file systems)
2. Guest file system indexing and catalog search
3. Delegated self-service recovery

Application level recovery is usually not provided at all, or is 3rd party solution. Veeam does:
1. Microsoft Exchange
2. Microsoft SharePoint
3. Microsoft Active Directory
4. Any other application through U-AIR

Offsite backup is usually not taken care at all, just primary backup. Veeam does:
1. Native tape support
2. Offsite backup with WAN acceleration
3. Backup Copy (to meet 3-2-1 backup rile)
4. Advanced VM replication

Note that I am not even touching all the advanced functionality like SureBackup, On-Demand Sandbox and U-AIR, again something no other vendor provides. But this is focused at larger customers, and I don't know what is your environment.

And of course, even with basic backup, there are major differences:
- Consider how backups are done - not many vendors provide off-host backup like Veeam, in addition to on-host.
- Consider backup infrastructure requirements (Veeam does not require you to deploy backup appliance VM on every protected host, then update them, huge hassle this).
- Consider how backups are stored even - Veeam creates standalone, self-contained backup file for each restore point. You can easily move them around, import, archive. Not all solutions are like that, for example I know that PHD's VMware backup product (this has been around for a while) writes data into a single huge pool, and you cannot really do anything with that - it is completely pinned down to the storage in its entirety, and a single block's corruption can mean all restore points of all VMs being unrecoverable.

Finally, consider the reliability aspects of the code used by thousands of customers vs. newly released from QC lab. While seems obvious, many people tend to overlook this.

Basically, you should identify all functionality that is important to YOU with Veeam today, and see if this or any other solution is able to meet your requirements. Otherwise, it will be a "check box war" which Veeam will always win, because our solution is over 6 years old now, and is accordingly much more mature in the feature set than any newly released software.

[jkettler]

Excellent stuff, Gostev. I had several of these in my draft e-mail to my boss but it's nice to see them laid-out. Man, I wish I had such when we had our debacles with AppAssure a few years ago.

Much appreciated!