Use cases & benefits of Veeam Replica vs Hyper-V Replica?

[Aurock]

Can anyone recommend an article or other resource which compares and contrasts Veeam Replication vs the native Hyper-V replica functionality? I know the difference between the two has been asked here before, but I haven't found a good in-depth comparison of the two. I'm looking for something that explains the best use cases for each product, and the pros and cons of each. Also, something relatively current, as I assume that Hyper-V replica has probably seen some changes since Server 2012R2.

If you have any links to such a reference I'd appreciate you sharing.

Thanks!

[HannesK]

Hello,
I don't have an article but some conversations in the past and the result was the following (I hope I did not forget anything, feel free to add things):

Pro-Hyper-V:
- lower RPO times (30 seconds)

Pro-Veeam
- file / application restores from replica snapshots
- more flexible scheduling options (30 seconds, 5 minutes, or 15 minutes are the only options in Hyper-V)
- easier failback (failover seems also easy in Hyper-V)
- performance of VM not permanently reduced due to background replication (only snapshot performance impact during snapshot replication)
- one UI / Reporting for backup and disaster recovery

So if you need to go to replications every 30 seconds, then Hyper-V replication is the way to go. For most other use cases, Veeam is the more comfortable / flexible way.

Best regards,
Hannes

[Gostev]

By far the biggest issue with Hyper-V replica is that it doubles storage I/O for each protected VM, when storage I/O is usually the most constrained resources in virtualization anyway. So, it's not really usable on a large scale.

[nmdange]

Another option could be to use Storage Replica on your Hyper-V hosts to replicate the entire CSV to your DR site, which allows real-time synchronous or asynchronous replication, if you need an even lower RPO than 30 seconds.

[Aurock]

Thank you all for the responses. I'm amazed that there hasn't been an article or whitepaper thoroughly contrasting the two products.

Hannes - I appreciate the detailed list.

Gostev - Doubling I/O on the primary hyper-v environment would definitely be a concern. I had read about that in an old post, but I thought it may have changed in the 5-6 years since.

Nmdange - While that might be a viable option for some, I don't think it's a good fit in our scenario.

If anyone has other input to share on the benefits of each product, please continue posting, I'd love to read it. I've got to present a recommendation to the boss soon, and any additional info I can use to make a decision and back it up would be very helpful.

[ChrisJ83Knights]

Hi

We are about to implement replication from a DC to one of our offices and we looking to utilise Veeam as we currently use it for backups.

Workloads included will be SQL, Exchange, AD, RDS and file servers.

Firstly is v10 going to bring any new replication features?

Is the only main advantage of Hyper-V replication over Veeam, the lower RPO time (30 seconds)?

From reading up Veeam should offer reduced I/O, file and application level restores from replica snapshots

We looked into Zerto and that seemed to be generally regarded as the best of breed for replication software, is Veeam that far behind?

Any feedback appreciated.

[DGrinev]

Hi,

Please review the existing discussion above. Thanks!

[Antonio V.]

IMHO Veeam Replication is not a replica system. It is just a backup system conveniently linked to Hyper-V manager.
A replica system should be a system that let me have a replica site that is *almost identical* to the production site. A replica site *is not* a copy of 3-4 hours ago of the production site. That is a backup.

In my scenario, production site Hyper-v sends to replica site all new data every 5 minutes (=small chunks).
Once a hour, with random delay, each production VM creates an "application consistent" VSS snapshot, and the modifications are sent in the next 5-minutes update to the replica site.
I end up having a replica site which is *identical* to my production site of 5 minutes ago, *always*. And, If i can afford losing 1 hour of data, I can get an "application consistent" replica VM too, which is equivalent to what you get with Veeam.

[HannesK]

that depends on the use case. if you replicate every 5min and you are hit by malware on Friday and realize that only on Monday... you would be happy about 3-4 hours replication with longer retention

yes, Hyper-V replication can be the better choice - it depends (see my first post)

[jmmarton]

IMHO Veeam Replication is not a replica system. It is just a backup system conveniently linked to Hyper-V manager.
A replica system should be a system that let me have a replica site that is *almost identical* to the production site. A replica site *is not* a copy of 3-4 hours ago of the production site. That is a backup.

Then don't configure Veeam replication jobs to run every 3-4 hours. We tout RPOs of 15 minutes. You should definitely be able to get RPOs tighter than 3-4 hours.

Joe

[Brad-Translucent]

I am trying to find information about the pros of using Veeam over Hyper-V replication. I am not having much with a good document that spells this out. I have a junior staff member come on and has been playing around with Hyper-V replication and now is going to the manager recommending using that and not Veeam. His reasoning it a RPO of 30 seconds. We are a Service Provider and host legacy systems for customers. Up to now, we have not been offering such a service with such a low RPO. I want to keep using Veeam for our replication (been using it, for only daily replication of systems that do not need a real low PRO). I would love to be able to have a document that points out the pros and cons of both technologies.

[HannesK]

as you already found this thread with pro & cons... what is missing?

if it's about a document in "PDF" - I'm not aware that anyone converted the things into a "document". We focus on our technology and not on documenting what other vendors do compared to us.

[sysinfma]

Do we need the same hardware/CPU on the source and the target system? Is Hyper-V or Veeam Replication more flexible in this regard?

[foggy]

The same hardware is not required but both require the source VM virtual hardware version to be supported by the target host.

[sysinfma]

Sounds great. However, what if core counts differ?
Our production server has 16 cores (and some VMs are using 16) while the replication target server has just 12 cores. Is that a problem?

[foggy]

Not a problem from a replication job perspective.

[rennerstefan]

Sounds great. However, what if core counts differ?
Our production server has 16 cores (and some VMs are using 16) while the replication target server has just 12 cores. Is that a problem?

As foggy said there will not be an issues doing it.
As the end, if you have a VM using 16 cores but destination only has 12 cores a over provisioning will happen on the destination VM/host.
That said you should be careful in what you expect from a performance perspective in case you perform a failover.
From that standpoint it would of course be better to have at least the same number of cores available but as always there is a decision to be made between what is technically possible and what are my needs once a failover happens.

Thanks

[sysinfma]

Ok, many thanks for clarifying that!