HPE VM Essentials

[Jos.maliepaard]

HPE is heaviliy promoting their new KVM based hypervisor and telling that the ecosystem is almost ready supporting this hypervisor. I'm wondering what Veeam's statement is to support this new HPE VM Essentials in VBR

[Gostev]

As always and with any other hypervisors, we will monitor the adoption and consider native integration if it gets a decent market share. VBR is easily extensible to support new hypervisors these days and we already have a good expertise with KVM-based hypervisors in-house so it shouldn't be a challenge. However, we need to make sure there's enough opportunity to at least cover R&D and on-going Support costs.

[HPEStorageGuy]

@Gostev - you now have me on the Morpheus team. Day 1 on the team was when you posted your reply.

While I totally understand waiting to ensure the opportunity is worth the investment, you will see the KVM that is in HPE VM Essentials appear in other solutions from HPE - like HPE Private Cloud Business Edition, Private Cloud Enterprise, and Private Cloud AI. Those plans are in motion.

BTW, since I'm not (and haven't been) the HPEStorageGuy, can you point me to someone that can help me update my profile name?

[Gostev]

Nice! So... should it be HPEVMEssentialsGuy now?

[DavidRobertson]

Watching with interest, we have a number of ongoing customer conversations around VME and the wider GL story where the other non-Broadcom options aren't a fit. Veeam is the last piece of that puzzle.

[HPEStorageGuy]

HPE is all-in on VME and how Morpheus will fit into the broader echo-system of hybrid cloud management. "Self-service" automation across many (more than 20) public and private clouds is what the Morpheus platform is famous for. Heard a story of a customer trying to get vRA (Cloud Assembly) running for over a year with an army of professional services. Morpheus had a PoC running in less than a day.

Note there is a 60 day free trial of VME if anyone wants to play with it. Here's where you can download the trial and watch videos (step-by-step) of getting it running. I also just brought up an HPE VME community forum where technical questions get answered.

[Gostev]

@HPEStorageGuy if HPE is truly "all-in" and serious about conquering on-prem hypervisor market, may I suggest that you seriously consider some free offering, which almost all of your competitors offer. It's just highly unlikely for IT Pros like myself to randomly decide to spend their time putting something in their home lab that I can't use long term if I end up liking it. Your best hope is their management forces them to evaluate, which will be a completely different type of marriage - not "by love"

Best of luck with this initiative and I truly am thrilled to see HPE stepping into the playing field. It will be interesting to watch how this plays out given how crowded said field already is, which is of course well balanced by all the horse power HPE can potentially throw behind this offering. Exciting times!

[HPEStorageGuy]

Copy/pasting into Slack for the PM team. As you know, revenue is always a factor, especially when there's an acquistion in the mix.

[vinc720]

The challenge for this HPE VM Essentials using Veeam Agents where is a challenge to manage in enterprise level backup. Hope Veeam can make an agentless solution with it so i believe many people out there and also myself are looking for a better VM Alternative Solution.

[RuaanP]

Hi
Does anyone know if you are able to use Veeam replication from a VMware cluster to a HPE VM essentials cluster? A Veeam replication job and then the Veeam failover and planned failover capabilities like you would have between 2 VMware clusters.
Thanks

[Gostev]

Hi, Ruaan. No as Veeam does not currently support HPE VM Essentials for host-based backup and replication in principle. Thanks

[RuaanP]

Thank you, noted

[larkrist]

About support for HPE VME, it's crucial to have Veeam supporting this with host based backup before we can put this into production, Agent based is not a good alternative in bigger enterprises.
We will need this support fast, and we have already started the process in the market to deliver HPE VME.

[JaySt]

looking forward to VME being supported by Veeam!

[jcollins1]

I am also throwing in here, we are switching to VME pending bid acceptance.

It is going to happen. We love VEEAM and do not want to lose its features. I will echo here that agent-based options are not good enough for our infrastructure. We want to continue being a VEEAM customer, but if support for VME isn't at least on the timeline, we will not be renewing our VEEAM license and support.

Hint: We want to keep paying VEEAM.

[sabicao]

+1 on a request for Veeam to fully support HPE VME.

[MaartenA]

Yes, full support would be very nice!

[JasonOrchardIMNZ]

Hello,
Has there been any official communication regarding the discontinuation of Veeam Agents with HPE VM Essentials and their integration natively within Veeam Backup & Replication (VBR) or the new v13 software appliance?

[Gostev]

There are no plans to discontinue support of Veeam Agents with HPE VM Essentials. But we're also not building a native integration with HPE VM Essentials at this moment based on its current market share and opportunity size for Veeam. However, we do know that many customer are actively evaluating HPE VM Essentials and we keep monitoring the results of these evaluations and adoption trend closely.

[h1jfg]

There's been mention a few times of monitoring market share and the opportunity for HPE VM Essentials before investing in the R&D needed for native integration. How does that work? You have native integration for Proxmox VE, which has a tiny market share and has very limited opportunity (even more limited since the release of HPE VME). Surely the smart approach here would be to be the first (or one of the first) vendors to market with native support for HPE VME? Or is the issue down to HPE potentially dumping Ubuntu as the underlying OS and replacing it with their own distro?

[Gostev]

Nothing special here, all the standard ways to gauge market share and business opportunity: by researching publicly available data and talking to the the vendor directly, our existing customers and prospects, our partners, industry analysts etc.

Another big part of considerations these days are deals already in sales pipeline where customers or partners are willing to commit certain spend with Veeam in the next few years if we're to deliver support for a certain hypervisor within a defined timeframe. Since those commits pay most R&D costs of developing new integration, Veeam as a business does not really risk much making a bet on adopting some new hypervisor, which makes a decision much easier. By the way, Scale Computing integration was quite unique in this sense with its entire development costs "paid for" by a 3-year commitment of a single large VCSP.

However, I must say that your perception of Proxmox market share and opportunity for Veeam is simply not correct. It is actually the fastest growing hypervisor workload right now based on the license usage statistics. Its V1 grew a few times faster than Nutanix AHV V1, and in absolute numbers it's already a few times ahead of our oVirt KVM integration that includes support for not just one but two hypervisors (RHV and OLVM) and was released over 4 years ago.

[Sigurd]

+1 for VME nativly integrated

Veeam is one of the only big show stoppers for us to go for VME, and since its KVM based and shouldnt be a big challange for Veeam to do it, just do it and make the community happy

[Gostev]

TIL that HPE VME does not offer Changed Block Tracking API yet :/

[JaySt]

oh...
is that uncommon for KVM hypervisors?

[Gostev]

It's uncommon for any hypervisors at all because CBT is the core technology that enables efficient, enterprise-grade image-level backup that scales beyond just a few VMs. Without it, each incremental backup run needs to read the entire disk to determine what has changed since last backup.

For KVM-based hypervisors specifically, 3 out of 4 KVM-based hypervisors Veeam supports offered native CBT API.

Only Proxmox does not offer one natively, so we had to obtain changes from underlying QEMU directly, in a sort of a hackish way that comes with a number of limitations. These added complexities were actually the reason why our Proxmox integration took more than 2x longer to deliver than for example our most recent Scale Computing integration.

[JaySt]

I understand.
Then it's HPE's turn to make a move in the right direction.

[tom_2024]

Only Proxmox does not offer one natively.

Proxmox VE provides a backup provider API, read more on https://git.proxmox.com/?p=pve-storage. ... in/Base.pm

Tom

[JaySt]

got word from HPE Tech Marketing. CBT should be coming soon.

[Gostev]

Proxmox VE provides a backup provider API, read more on https://git.proxmox.com/?p=pve-storage. ... in/Base.pm

We were building our Proxmox integration well over a year before the backup provider API has been made available

[Gostev]

got word from HPE Tech Marketing. CBT should be coming soon.

I guess that would be good news if it was not coming from Marketing
Luckily we're also connected directly to the VME dev team...