Veeam Replication vs SRM 5.0 replication

[Daveyd]

I sat through a SRM 5.0 session at VMworld (AWESOME Veeam party BTW ) and saw that SRM 5.0 will offer VM replication. Does anyone have a comparison of Veeam's repication vs SRM 5.0 replication. We own both Veeam and SRM and trying to find pro/cons of each.

[Gostev]

Functionality wise, top 3 differences between host based replication Veeam v5 and SRM v5 are:

1. Multiple replica restore points vs. single restore point
In other words, if you don't spot the corruption immediately, your replica will have absolutely no use. Consider virus infection, or application data corruption - both are very hard to spot immediately.

2. Application-aware image processing vs. basic file-level consistency
We perform application-specific VSS backup step when grabbing the image, as well as application-specific VSS restore steps upon failover (when replica VM is first started) as per Microsoft requirements. vSphere replication just picks up the image without looking inside or trying to meet any Microsoft requirements on how application should be backed up and restored. Exchange webinar goes into specific details using Exchange as example.

3. File level restores from replica
You decide how this is important for you, I know many customers love it.

v6 adds much more stuff to this list (big focus on replication there), but since v6 not generally available yet, it is not fair to use its features as differentiators (even though we are so close!)

SRM is great for storage-level replication and whole site failover orchestration, and our replication is great for smaller scope outages and better protection of individual most critical workloads due to multiple restore points. My take is that vSphere 5 replication is way to basic to provide replacement for our replication (especially with v6 functionality), but neither our v6 removes the need for SRM v5 in scenarios where storage-level replication and site failover orchestration are required to meet RTO and RPO in case of large scale site-wide disaster.

Of course, there is also HUGE price difference, but that does not matter for you since you already own SRM anyway.

[Daveyd]

Thank you for the reply Anton. Very informative. I sat through a Hands On Lab of SRM 5 and they had a replication piece in there. It was conceptually similar to Veeam's Replication but as you pointed out there are fundamental differences. Since we own both, I am anxiously awaiting for v6 to come out so I play with them both.

BTW, very nice session you guys held. Way to speak in front of that massive crowd

[Gostev]

Thank you very much for your kind words. Indeed, we got very high marks and comments in the session survey. However, a few people complained about my accent

[Jay P UK]

[merged]

Hi All

Excellent resource!

What I am looking for is a matrix comparison on functionality between VEEAM and SRM [Both v5 and v6 and v4 and v5 respectively]

We have a vendor that has been pushing SRM but I can see certain limitations and need to air these from a functionality perspective

Our estate would be around 35 Physical Hosts and around 300 VMs

Where can I get this info from?

Jay

[Gostev]

Hi Jay,

We do not have such matrix comparison against SRM, because our offerings are very different. SRM in not a backup tool like B&R, and B&R is not a site recovery orchestration product like SRM. Basically, until SRM v5, we did not have any overlap at all. With SRM v5, there is small overlap around host based replication functionality only (answered above), but overall still 2 absolutely different solutions. If you buy SRM, you still need a backup product.

Thanks.

[derekf]

One of the things SRM are planning on is to provide vCloud director awareness to support multi-tenant offerings. Do you have any plans for multi-tenant support for replication where neither client or service provider need to share vCenter or ESX credentials to allow Veeam to connect?

[Gostev]

Well, we don't typically like to talk or "sell" future. But yes, vCD support is of course in our plans for both backups and replication. However, the second sentence is not very clear. Either way, credentials to vCenter has to be specified somewhere by someone to allow replication engine to connect to vCenter, no matter what this replication engine is?

[Rohail2004]

[merged]

We are in the process of building our secondary datacenter, and need to deploy a Replication software to our DR Site in case of disaster to make sure we can get our servers up and running within hours or days to our secondary location, if we lose our primary Datacenter. We are going to have 2GB line connectivity to our secondary location.

Should we use VEEAM Replication OR VMware Site Recovery Manager for Replication?

We are already using Veeam for backup and loved it! but never used it for Replicating VMs, any recommendations, advice, best practices for replication comments are welcome. Thanks in advance,

[Andreas Neufert]

Hi Rohail ...

Install V6 and place One proxy at each site. Test our replication... You will love it.
Andy