Veeam Backup vs Vmware Data Recovery

[Alex P]

Hello,

With Vsphere V4 Vmware has released the data Recovery product. We are considering purchasing the Vmware Essentials pack but we are trying to determine if their is any value in the data recovery product in the Essentials plus pack compared to the Veeam Essentials pack. Has anyone compared the data recovery product to the Veeam backup product feature and value wise. We are currently using the Veeam Backup product on another ESX server and we are happy with it however the Data Recovery product appears to be more integrated with Vmware. Any advise would be welcome.

[awiesen]

We're in a similar situation. We bought Essentials, and we considered Data Recovery (available in the Plus edition) and it sounded ideal for us. But then I read through the VMWare forums and was shocked how many people had major problems with it. A common post would be like "VMWare DR worked great to make backups, but the backups didn't work when I tried to restore them ." This was a couple of months ago, so maybe things are better now -- I think they were at a 1.0 level when I was looking at them. I'd also be interested to hear from other people. My feeling is that DR might be a good solution eventually but it sounds like it's not very mature right now. (And as an aside, comparing performance between using Veeam with VCB vs. running agentless -- where agentless is significantly faster -- I'm thinking Veeam probably has some performance tricks up their sleeve that VMWare hasn't perfected yet.)

Of course, I've had my share of issues with Veeam, but the support has been good and the issues I've ran into are generally just a problem where documentation was unclear or something doesn't behave as advertised (i.e. no VSS support on Windows XP 64 bit.)

Sounds like you've been using Veeam so you're probably more knowledgable than I am, really. But I'd definitely check out the VMWare forums and see what people are saying about DR.

- Alex

[Gostev]

According to the feedback I see on VMware Community forums and on various blogs, general perception is that currently VMware DR "does not work well". But I expect that they will make it production-ready with next few updates.

We do have a comprehensive comparison against VMware DR's advertized features, which does not pay attention to these current technical issues and is concentrated on head-to-head feature comparison. You can request it through your sales representative. I am not posting the current version here because it is updated often (right now, we need to update it with Veeam Backup 4.0 features).

Overall, I can say that VMware DR did not affect us anyhow (while we obviously slightly worried about it), and Veeam Backup customer base still continues to grow exponentially past 2-3 months with VMware DR generally available. I guess part of the reason is that VMware Essentials + Veeam Essentials bundle provides much more value for SMB than VMware Essentials Plus.