Is Veeam's focus VMware or Hyper-V?

[Gostev]

I keep hearing it often these days. VMware users tell me variations of "clearly, Hyper-V is the main focus for you guys these days" or "you are investing much effort in Hyper-V, so you have less time to deliver what I need for VMware". On the other hand, many Hyper-V users seem to be convinced that Hyper-V is not a priority for us because we are so big with VMware, and they always demand assurance that we will not treat Hyper-V as a step child, assigning most R&D resources to VMware related development.

Here are some points which should "fix" this way of thinking hopefully:

• 1. B&R is truly multi-hypervisor solution. Not just two separate products in a marketing bundle, but a single product architected to support multiple hypervisors in development cost effective fashion. In fact, the core data processing engine does not have any dependencies on hypervisor at all, so most things we do are done in a single place. The only non shared parts are actual hypervisor interaction pieces (data retrieving and saving) and some special sauce, so the overhead of supporting additional hypervisor is nowhere near 2x.
  
  2. Despite of major differences in the hypervisors we support, our ultimate goal is to have feature parity between hypervisor. While today we do offer a few unique features for VMware, Hyper-V users will see the proof of our direction to this goal in the very next release - version 6.1.
  
  3. We have been growing our R&D group aggressively, and it is a few times larger today than in the past, when we only supported VMware. Even if B&R for VMware and Hyper were completely different products, we would still have more people on each one than we used to have on VMware-only product before - at the time when many of you have decided in favor of Veeam, and became our customers.

Bottom line is, we will keep you happy no matter what hypervisor you are using. And, what is more important, we give you the choice - you can change your hypervisor at any moment now, without worrying that this will impact your data protection and disaster recovery processes.

Thank you for putting your trust in us.

[dkvello]

I think that us VMware customers that has been around in the business for 20 plus years, fear that if VB&R becomes too good on Hyper-V, chances are Microsoft will recognize the strategic advantage of having it exclusive on their platform. Which usually means they buy you for some ridiculous amount of money (shareholders can't resist, I know this). The second they own you, sport for all other platforms will disappear and VMware customers will have to start looking for a replacement product

[dellock6]

And at this days, it would mean using something worse than Veeam...
But if you look at main vendors acquisitions (Dell with AppAssure to say one...) the have bought worse products, so a guess could be they tried to buy Veeam and they were refused, and went for a "second choice". But is only my speculation

[Gostev]

Luca is spot on. I have lost count of acquisition offers we have had in the past 3 years.

they buy you for some ridiculous amount of money (shareholders can't resist, I know this)

Well, the good news is that Veeam is privately owned and has no shareholders and our two owners are not looking to sell the company, probably because they already have more than enough money from selling their previous business

[tjohnsonlcsd]

Any chance RHEV, plain KVM or Xen (Citrix or other) will be supported in future? We use some other hypervisor agnostic tools and while VMware and Hyper-V tend to be the big 2 there are a growing number of RHEV users (we are not among them...yet) as well as those running KVM on other platform and Xen by Citrix or the open source version.

I realize it is not possible to support all hypervisors and licensing plays into it with some of them but it their a roadmap to add any other hypervisors to your excellent B&R product?

Thanks.

[Vitaliy S.]

Hi Tim, please see more info about XEN support in this post from Anton, the same situation applies to KVM. Thanks!

[Gostev]

Generally speaking, we are ready to add support for any hypervisor at all as soon as it starts grabbing decent market share. However, I believe the upcoming version of Microsoft Hyper-V leaves other hypervisors no chance at doing that. Nevertheless, we keep monitoring the situation.

[dellock6]

I always seen this issue in a completely different way: since data protection is a "priority 1" in a virtualized environment due to its nature, one of the requirements for choosing an hypervisor is "also" the ability to save and restore VMs.
So, if you would have to choose again an hypervisor in these days (and in a certain way I do it everyday for my customers...) having a data protection via dedicated tools os through API for external tools would be one of the requirements.
No backup possibility? Sorry, I choose another hypervisor...

[Gostev]

I don't necessarily disagree this is a bit of chicken and egg thing. However, it's not ALL about backup, since you always have an option to backup your VMs "old" way. And you can't imagine how many companies are still doing this.

[dellock6]

I can imagine that, going to customers had me saying " I've seen things you people wouldn't believe...", but scripts and tricks, IMHO, are not data protection solutions. I need a rock solid tool to be sure I can restore anything when I need to, without sweating and praying it's all going to work. It have to.

[J1mbo]

Generally speaking, we are ready to add support for any hypervisor at all as soon as it starts grabbing decent market share. However, I believe the upcoming version of Microsoft Hyper-V leaves other hypervisors no chance at doing that.

FWIW I for one agree with this, especially since VMware seems intent on following Novell's model example of how not to stay competitive (notwithstanding their expectation-beating results last quarter).