Veeam vs vmware DR

[vbussiro]

As vmware essentials Plus gained vmotion, our clients now are more interested in this version, and want to use Data Recovery. Although the main advantage of Veeam B&R v5 is replication, can we have a more exhaustive specification comparison ?

[Gostev]

Hello! I can recommend that you clients open What's New documents for both Veeam Backup v5 and even v4, and try to find a single feature there that is present in VMware DR. Of course, our customers still preferred Veeam even back at version 4, there are existing topics on this forum discussing why Veeam is far superior.

For example: Is this product any good?

If you have any further questions, please contact your Veeam sales rep.

[JJay]

One thing that really annoyed me about VMWare DR was the lack of control you had on scheduling backup jobs! That for me was reason enough to move to Veeam. Then when you look at all the other features you get....there is really no comparison!!!! (for me anyway!)

[mplep]

I grew to loathe VDR fairly quickly. The datastores would take hours to perform integrity checks and quite often I'd have to delete corrupt copies of backups from the stores and kick of the slooooow integrity checks to tidy it up. Quite often VDR would just stop working and the appliance needed a reboot. The lack of scheduling and alerting (manual daily checks required) was a real problem as well the micro management of the whole thing. It was far to flakey to rely upon in production.

[Bunce]

Yeah there's a fair way to go before VDR gets anywhere near commercial offerings such as Veeam.

About the only plus I noticed was that VDR offered proper retention policies - such as the ability to maintain xx backups per week / month / year to match coporate policies commonly in use today.

Unfortunately Veeam's is still linear only which makes it pretty pointless for us. We don't really want to maintain every single nightly backup for 12 months, but we'd like to maintain say 1 per day (for a few weeks), 1 per week (for a few months), 1 per month (for a year), and then a few per year, etc, etc. i.e. the Grandfather -> father -> son hierarchy (often used in tape scenarios).

esXpress does this quite well also, without the complexity of multiple jobs / schedules required to achieve the equivalent in Veeam thereby losing dedup, wasting space and adding admin overhead.

[joergr]

Me, personally, i think your goal would create a kind of complexity when implemented into b+r which would make things go not the way of simplicity i want. To accomplish exactly what you ask for i use a tape device and a backup to tape software on the same machine as b+r, create reverse increments and backup the full vbk to tape. thus i can take away a tape every week (keep it for four weeks) every month (keep it for twelve month), every year (keep it forever).

best regards
Joerg

[Gostev]

Note that even if you don't do tape, the required retention can also be achieve with hard links. You can trigger hardlink creation with the post-job script in Veeam Backup job.

We do some "magic" with hard links on our Linux boxes (which we use as Veeam backup targets) to hardlink our monthly VBK full backups into an "Archive" directory to keep a years of full backups. Veeam deletes from it's directory after the 31 day retention period, but since it's a hard link they still exist in the "Archive" directory. If we need to restore something from a few months back we can just import the "old" VBK file from the Archive directory. Works great.

[Bunce]

To accomplish exactly what you ask for i use a tape device

Yeah, but the whole point is that we want to move *away* from tapes.

'Off-site' for us is satisfied by the DR site, perfectly suited to Veeam's replication features - (or rSyncing the backups across if you prefer), plus the occasional dump to external hard-drive as a last resort for corruption prevention

Veeam's getting closer to ticking the 'all-in-one' solution box now that we're moving toward reliable application-level restores (XGE / SQL / AD / etc).

Offering a solution to replace that final 'offsite-tape' / 'archival' need is about the last step I can think of - until then, its workarounds such as that from Tom..

[joergr]

Yeah I see your point.

But let´s be honest, no-one wants to countermand huge ammounts of data which are ten years old on disk. But to totally abandon the option is also no option right - me personally i guess especially for the long terms tape is still the way to go

best regards
Joerg

[Bunce]

True. The argument about disk v tape for long-term archival aside (and agree, there's always going to be a 'long-term' , disconnected requirement of some type).

If the ability to keep a selection of 'longer-term' tiered backup copies in readily-accessible format exists (eg available restore points in your current (Veeam) architecture), and its such an easy get (minimal space since its deduped), why not use it?

They're really just the additional older restore points 'added' to the short-term restore points you currently maintain, except you can restore from them within minutes, as opposed to ordering in the tape, spooling, inventory, catalog, restore, mount to Veeam, etc, etc..

We can still keep the tapes if its a regulatory requirement, but it doesn't mean you have to use em

Being able to search for and restore an email or file (or VM) from say 6 months ago - all in a few minutes, as opposed to saying "That'll take a day (s) to get the tapes in and find the file" is a pretty big win for us from management. That said, it depends how often that requirement arises in your environment...

It was clearly a popular feature with other vendors and got great feedback, presumably why VMWare have picked up on it. But perhaps its one of those things that you don't realise can become valuable until its there.

Interesting topic though.