Basic usage questions

[jimr6007]

Please forgive me for asking some obvious questions.

I have a vCenter Standard license, 16 hosts, 350 VM's. Since I have a Standard license that means I can do all the basic Vmware stuff, clone VM's, vMotion, Storage Vmotion etc.

It seems like everyone is really excited about Veeam Free but I'm not seeing the use case. If I need to "backup" a vm before an important change I can already snapshot it. If I want to be a little more careful I can clone the VM first, cloning it it give me a "backup" in case I do something dumb with snapshots.

I would hate to miss some of the awesome features of this product or not have them in my Vmware Admin toolbelt just because I was not seeing it.

What are the functional abilities this gives me that I don't already have via a vCenter Standard license?

Thanks !

[veremin]

Actually, snapshot can serve a proper alternative to a backup. Think about the following questions:

- How many snapshots can you have?
- For how long can you keep VM running on a snapshot without performance degradation?
- Would you do, if production storage went down?
- Is snapshot as self-dependent entity or does it rely on source VM disk?

You're likely to face these and many other limitations (just try to google, using "snapshot is not backup" as key word), if you stick to "snapshots" as your primary backup means.

Thanks.

[jimr6007]

Thanks. I am already very aware of the need to not use snapshots as a permanent backup. I probably should not have said backup there, sorry

I meant, "temporary save before make changes". I am the guy at our org that militantly enforces the "no snapshots older than 72 hours" policy.

"Would you do, if production storage went down? "
I'm currently using vSphere Replication to replicate to a second datacenter site connected via a 40 Gb link. My VM's are replicated/backed up to a large RAID 10 disk array, NAS.
I can clone a huge 1 TB VM across that link in about 60-90 minutes.
So, to answer your question, I would recover one or more VM's from my NAS at the other datacenter.

So, assuming I understand snapshots, clones, vSphere Replication and all the tools available to me with a vSphere Standard license, what additional functionality does Veeam Zip give me?

It seems like really it's just the ability to take make a copy of a VM in a nice encapsulated package, without shutting down the VM. I can see some uses for that. It's nice if this "copy' keeps all the same UUID's. And it's nice if during the process the storage is compressed, meaning I could use it as a way to shrink and/or reclaim storage use by a thin disk that was provisioned to large.

We're a small company on limited budget, that's why we don't have a vSphere Enterprise license. And most importantly, that is why I always want to make the most use of the free tools that are available to me.

Thanks !

[veremin]

VeeamZIP can give you:

- Additional copy of production data.
- Copy that is solely independent
- Copy that can be taken to whatever location you want to (even offsite)
- Copy that can be stored as long as you like
- Copy from which restore will be as simple as double-clicking on backup file and clicking Next, Next, Next

That said, if you don't find any value in backing up your virtual infrastructure with VeeamZIP, then, feel free to stick to your current strategy.

Thanks.