Any plans for expanding Veeam Backup to XenServer?

[a_user]

Just curious if Veeam has discussed in the past providing a product capable of backing up Xenserver or other products other then strictly vmWare? We have been using Veeam since its public debut and are quite happy with the product. We are backing up over 30 esx hosts with some 600 vm's. But we are looking at some cheaper alternatives for our dev, qa and lab environments and Xen is high on our list. However the one issue we face is lack of a quality third party backup products compatible with it. I think there is interest from lots of consumers and was curious of Veeam's stance on this.

[Gostev]

Not in the next major release. But in general, we are ready to add XenServer support as soon as it starts grabbing measurable market share. Because XenServer has similar architecture with "fat" ESX, technical barrier for adding XenServer support is much lower for us, than in case with Hyper-V for example. We already have many solution pieces needed for XenServer backup and replication.

[Gostev]

By the way, are you only considering XenServer, or other hypervisors too?

[H in OH]

But in general, we are ready to add XenServer support as soon as it starts grabbing measurable market share.

As we have discussed before, the biggest roadblock preventing Xenserver from gaining market share is the lack of a good backup solution. (I even wrote my own little backup utility for it, but file level restores are a complete pain.) You have a serious chicken-and-egg situation here.

You want a business case, here is one: If you wait for Xenserver market share to pick up, then you are effectively waiting for a competitor to come out with a backup product and establish themselves as the standard for Xenserver backup before you are willing to get into the game. If you at least produce some minimal level of backup product for Xenserver, say without some of the features you have for VMware so far, then you will be the catalyst for that required Xenserver market share boost and establish Veeam and the standard for Xenserver backup.

---H

[Gostev]

H in OH do you think XenServer support is more important than Hyper-V? I am interested in your opinion.

[H in OH]

H in OH do you think XenServer support is more important than Hyper-V? I am interested in your opinion.

Good question. Are you asking from a business perspective or a technical perspective?

From a business perspective, I am not exposed to enough installations to really answer that. The only thought I would have is that you have two competing goals both with time constraints. On the one hand, you have the opportunity to get in there first and establish yourselves as the standard in host-based backup of XenServer before someone else does. On the other hand, MS has put out enough hype with Hyper-V and pushed it through their gold partners and official MS shops that competition is already heating up in that space. Who can answer if you have the time to get your product working with Hyper-V before someone else steps in without competition for XenServer?

From a technical perspective, it certainly looks like it would be more logical to move from VMware to XenServer and then to Hyper-V. XenServer bears more similarities to ESX than Hyper-V does, and the differences largely also apply to Hyper-V.

Perhaps a compromise would be to take a little time and chart out what would be required to make Veeam Backup work with XenServer. Then while working towards a Hyper-V version, periodically check how the pieces developed for Hyper-V also apply to XenServer and test them on XenServer. You never know if a XenServer version (even a "lite" version with less features) might just pop out of the Hyper-V development effort even before the Hyper-V version is done. That gets Veeam in the door with XenServer before anyone else while still focusing the business efforts on Hyper-V.

Just my two cents.

---H

[drbarker]

H in OH do you think XenServer support is more important than Hyper-V? I am interested in your opinion.

Tipping this on it's head... Would a guest plugin be OK?

Yes, VM level is better in vmware (esp. with the vstorage api + CBT) - but since Xen & Hyper-V don't really help with backups, would guest level be just as good?

A guest plugin would have the added benefit of being able to support xen, hyper-v, virtualbox, physical et al , while still making use of the dedupe support in veeam...

[fredbloggs]

Just thought i'd raise this one back to attention since phd have announced that they will be supporting XenServer towards the end of the year and I am really looking towards using Xen for ourselves and our customers I really hope you guys can help.

Realise Xen doesn't lend itself as well as VMware for backing up VMs but it'd be nice to have something that performed even crash consistent backups and I can just use other tools inside some VMs to ensure transactionally consistent backups.

Personally, i'd put Xen (i'd be using the Citrix Essentials version) ahead of Hyper-V

[lobo519]

Now that Hyper V is out of the way any word on support for XenServer? We are getting into (as I'm sure many are) VDI. In our Testing XenDesktop trumps VMware View (although part of me wish it didn't).

[Gostev]

No plans at this time. We keep monitoring, but it's market share did not really increase since my above post that was made over 1 year ago...

[jstocker]

Anton,

I'm the Product Manager for Citrix XenServer with a focus on Storage and have been working with some of your competitors who have build backup solutions for XenServer. They have been very successful in selling these solutions so far. Since Citrix does not disclose any revenue information for our XenServer product, I'm interested to find out where you get our marketshare numbers (which has changed since your post over 1 year ago). Typically inquiries around this are being addressed by our Business Development team together with the relevant PM (which is me in this case) and I have not heard from Veeam for over a year. Feel free to drop me a pm if you want to further discuss.

Joel Stocker
Senior Product Manager - XenServer
Citrix Systems, Inc.

[jstocker]

More food for thought: http://www.veeam.com/blog/introducing-v-index.html.

[Rumple]

Well, with the licensing move that vmware just made with vSphere 5 I can assure you that Citrix and Hyper-V both are about to see a whole new level of interest in their products. I've been using vmware since the early 2.x days and have been certified on all levels, but with this latest announcement I have just fired up my first Xenserver at home and will be doing extensive testing.

Since Hyper-V support is coming out, now's the time to get Xenserver support on the roadmap...because I personally think vmware just handed Microsoft and Citrix a rather nice giftwrapped present...

[cvrees]

Agreed, Xen is a serious option in more and more situations. Especially at companies with a high level of Citrix products. The V-index that jstocker posted gives a higher installbase for Xen then for Hyper-V. And Veeam should realize that it is not only the higher level of installations, customers with both Xen en vSphere look for products that can handle both and for that reason Veeam could miss the boat...

[Gostev]

Have you seen what is coming in Hyper-V 3.0?

[thoregil]

Is ther any news and plans for supporting XenServer?
We are currently looking into moving from vmware to XenServer due to pricing and that we allready has a big Citrix infrastructur, but this is a showstopper since we have to change the backup software also.. But ofcorse, what has to be done - should be done...

[Gostev]

XenServer support is not planned in foreseeable future. Thanks!

[lobo519]

FYI -

I was originally all for Xenserver support in a previous post - however - After a short few months on Xenserver, We have since switch to VMware for our Xendesktop infrastructure. We already used VMware for our server virtualization and found Xen to be not even close to the VMWare functionality and to have a huge learning curve compared to VMware. Simple tasks in VMware required too much research for Xen.

Personally - I can't stand Citrix after working with it for a while now. The Xendesktop user experience is by far better than View but the huge costs of a Citrix support agreement combined with the lack of finding updated and useful documentation ..... I'll take the best of both worlds.

I digress.....

This topic is off my radar!

[ortoscale]

Adding support for backing up ec2 instances is what I'm waiting for.

[bbowers]

Any updates on plans to support XenServer?

[Vitaliy S.]

No updates on this, Anton's reply above is still valid.

[jbarrow.viracoribt]

Just curious if Veeam has discussed in the past providing a product capable of backing up Xenserver or other products other then strictly vmWare? We have been using Veeam since its public debut and are quite happy with the product. We are backing up over 30 esx hosts with some 600 vm's. But we are looking at some cheaper alternatives for our dev, qa and lab environments and Xen is high on our list. However the one issue we face is lack of a quality third party backup products compatible with it. I think there is interest from lots of consumers and was curious of Veeam's stance on this.

Stick with VMware. You may save money on the products, but how about the support? Now have to support this totally different environment as well. Just my $.02.

[antiflag1980]

Just migrated all our Hosts and VMs from Esxi/VMWare Essentials to XenServer. I was working with Symantec Backup Exec 2012 which did not yet support esxi5.5 or Server 2012R2 both of which we were using, switched over to XenServer for XenMotion, HA and DR without having to pay another $6000, since all features of XenServer are now entirely free. I would have liked to have gone with Veeam, but had to buy PHD Virtual instead, it's OK, but I have a feeling that Veeam would be better. It's my first experience with Virtual Full backups, which I must say is nice. Even with non-profit pricing we paid around $2400 for 2 hosts. How hard can it be to add XenServer support if smaller companies like PHD and Acronis can do it? It's too late for us now, but I wish there was the option in the future.

[Dima P.]

Back to the times when PHD was a separate company and Citrix was developing XenServer, Citrix invested in PHD specifically to make them deliver XenServer backup. By the way Acronis, as far as I know use agent approach to backup XenServer (just like physical servers) – so PHD looks better from this perspective with their host-based backup.

[Gostev]

Even Citrix themselves has dropped XenServer. Why would we add support for something when even Citrix does not believe in having any future, after trying really hard for a few years?

I will gladly let those "smaller companies" without common business sense be distracted with developing and supporting code for a hypervisor with virtually no market share, while focusing on market leading hypervisors ourselves. I simply do not want Veeam to become PHD, which (despite being much older than Veeam) has never been profitable in all these years, kept sucking investments in, and finally ran out of business and got bought by another company. Partly because they've made a wrong bet on XenServer at some point. We've put our bet on Hyper-V instead, and got more customers there in the past couple of years than PHD managed to acquire in its entire history across all hypervisors!

And frankly speaking, I personally do not see a single reason to go with XenServer over Hyper-V in 2014, but I respect everyone's choice regardless.

[dellock6]

If there would be an additional hypervisor to look after, I would vote for KVM instead.

[emachabert]

I do think KVM is going to be more and more deployed regarding the effort put into openstack by major vendor (HP, IBM etc.)
massive cloud environments (> 50K instances) are hugely using KVM...

[m.digregorio]

Hello,


Can I use Veeam to backup XenServer VM's?

[Shestakov]

Hello Marco,

Veeam Backup and Replication works only with VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V.

Thank you.

[infused]

No serious providers I know of use Xen...

It's kind of like using SuperMicro for your servers...

/me hides

Hyper-V should be a serious consideration if you are looking to move away from VMWare.