Veeam vs AppAssure

[fredbloggs]

Good summary bmcchesney-nv that does cover a lot of things.

I to am a service provider / partner with both Veeam & Appassure and just want to say why we choose Appassure over Veeam in certain circumstances.
Pro Appassure

• Veeam obviously doesn't support physical servers
  You have to have separate jobs for backup / replication
  WAN replication is a lot higher with Veeam than Appassure
  You require Enterprise edition to make sure your data is recoverable (although Veeam SureBackup is heads and shoulders above anything else in the market place for comfort)
  With Appassure I can backup my data, Exchange & SQL servers every 10 minutes with minimal impact to the live system, even if it transfers the data across the production network the data transferred is far lower than with Veeam and so the load on the SAN is lower (also respects SIOC policies for that protected VM)

Pro Veeam

• With Veeam I simply know that whatever I had on the source server is simply there on my DR server. Have things like NLB in the source server, they work on the target, no finding hardware no anything difficult like that. This I really like, I also like the ease to restore a server with Veeam, I have full confidence that because i'm restoring everything including NIC, PCI slots, MAC addresses whatever that whatever I restore will be as it was on the source VM.
  Support is more responsive with Veeam

The one major wish list i have, is if I could run Veeam snaps every 15 minutes on live systems without the impact of VMware snapshots and then use this backup to replicate to my target storage, I would probably go Veeam on everything except physical servers, however I know from experience that snapshotting my Exchange servers every 15 minutes would take a few minutes to complete and does impact the server with the amount of time to process.


For those of you using Veeam, do you snap your live SQL, Exchange and file servers every fifteen minutes?

[zoltank]

For those of you using Veeam, do you snap your live SQL, Exchange and file servers every fifteen minutes?

Not us. We do one backup at the end of the day after business hours.

[lobo519]

I run replication of my two exchange servers in continuous mode over a VPN to a Co-Location. There is an impact but it doesn't seem to really affect the servers. My exchange servers are on the small side 200 mailboxes total but we do A LOT of business via Email.

Under normal load the jobs complete in about 9-12 minutes (Pre 6.1 these were about 4-5 minute longer)

I have been running this way for about 2 years.

[stevenrodenburg1]

Just felt like sharing this:

I stumbled on the website of a british Distributor. They sell AppAsure and have a FAQ on Veeam. The bullshit they ventilate about Veeam ist just mindboggling. How can anyone look at themselves in the mirror each morning and be proud of themselves after telling such untruth and garbage.

Their webpages concerning AppAsure are oriented towards "bash other vendors and products into the ground" than anything else. Some statements they make are even funny, in a pathetic way...

Here is a small snippet from their FAQ:

"Veeam is focused solely on VM backup and restore, using VMware (or HyperV) image only backups utilising ESX storage (like Vmware snapshots). Compared to AppAssure, this approach is slow, provides no deduplication, no file level integrity checking, limits restores, replication."

"Veeam does not natively integrate with nor inimtately backup or restore selected items from within applications like Exchange, SQL, Sharepoint etc."
(they are only right about Sharepoint, the rest is donkeydoo...)

"Veeam recovery is only possible to the last replicated instance"
Yes, and my name is Bond...

There is more jibberish scattered on other pages. Have a look at http://www.softek.co.uk/prod/ap/appassu ... ay_faq.asp to have a laugh (or cry)...

What strikes me is that they talk an awful lot about everybody else in the industry and how crap they are, instead on how good they (AppAsure) are. If you have a good product, you don't need to vomit over others but focus on your own strengths instead.
The more i read about AppAsure, their strategy becomes clear, and the less serious i can take them.

Just my two cents..

[stevenrodenburg1]

For those of you using Veeam, do you snap your live SQL, Exchange and file servers every fifteen minutes?

Yep. Works fine and to add to this, we do a "SureBackup" check once a day to make sure the backups are really restore-capable.

[LTParisKIC]

Reviving a little bit of an old thread, doing my due diligence on deploying a new virtual environment, storage, etc, I was going to default to Veeam but decided to let AppAssure to have a discussion. In general their whole sales approach is "Veeam is OK but our product is vastly superior". Yes AA has physical capabilities, and their WAN backup might be a bit less on the kludgy side, but that was all they really had.

I'm still waiting to see a price so I can do a compare between AA and Veeam Essentials.

[dualdj1]

Veeam Backup is just as easy to get running. It lacks the control of retention periods that AppAssure has - something I would like to see improved. Veeam seems to be more simple: take recovery points according to this schedule, and keep the last X of them. Having hourly backups 'roll-up' into daily and then weekly backups after certain periods would be very nice to have.

Not to dig up an old post, but I was wondering if this specific point is being addressed. The lack of recovery point management and rollups is one of the biggest downsides to VEEAM that I see. I would be able to keep a lot more data online, if we had this sort of functionality. Is this being addressed in a future version, such as B&R v7?

[Gostev]

Yes.

[dualdj1]

Great, thanks Gostev

[flavor4real]

I've seen the AppAssure presentation when our Dell Rep came by and it was pretty impressive. Everybody was stunned with its quickness and all that. Everything seems to be perfect but we know that they just trying to sell their product. However, I've been using Veeam for 2-3 years and It is getting better and better with each new version. We still have the 6.0 version and it just works. There are a few feature that I would like to see but as it is common with every software, some features are good, others are nut so good, and some would be good to have.

At this point, I would not even think going away from Veeam. Their customer support respond quickly and I get quality answers from all the forum members.
Just my 2 cents ....

[jeddytier4]

This is a moot point, like Gostev said they are not really competitors. There are 2 things that I wanted to add to this conversation though.

1. I am using a Hyper-V cluster for virtualization. Veeam and Appassure both do not support this well. Veeam appears half done with their Hyper-V Support(Scripting is just terrible) and there are speed problems when hardware snapshotting is not available. Appassure, doesn't support Hyper-V in any meaningful way.

2. Support for both of these products(for me) has been spotty at best. I have been evaluating both for different reasons, but when I asked regular support for "Best Practices" or configuration advice, they were unresponsive to "read the website/forum". My sales support engineers have been great, but I worry about support on both products. When I ask how or why to do something, it is almost as important to me as "help it's broke" and so far neither support team has been helpful with those.

Overall Veeam keeps getting better, but if you aren't using VMware, don't expect it to do everything that these forums say it can. Sadly though, the competition for backups in Hyper-V at an enterprise level (I have over 100 VM's) is quite terrible, which I think leaves Veeam without enough competition to push innovation in this space.

Appassure looks like a great product for small to medium business, but it hasn't been able to be stable enough at higher data sizes for me to recommend it for larger businesses. Also, whoever thought that tape is unnecessary, has never (IMHO) worked with a doctor's office. Seriously keeping a disk for 15-20 years...

[Dima P.]

jeddytier4,

Veeam appears half done with their Hyper-V Support

Maybe you would like to see this Virtual Lab to Hyper-V

[jeddytier4]

As I said, they are getting better. I do not like buying a product based on features coming in a new release. I assume that each release they will better support Hyper-V, but as for the current release, it leaves a lot to be desired.

[tsightler]

I'm curious if you could be more specific regarding what features you feel are missing from Hyper-V. The goal for Hyper-V is feature parity but it takes some time for that to develop and V7 will be a lot closer in that regard. Some of the problems you mention are caused by the architecture of Hyper-V (for example the software VSS performance issues which are largely caused by redirected mode and can only be mitigated by architecture) and many of these are addressed, or at least significantly improved, in 2012. And I agree there are some significant misses in scripting for Hyper-V, but I think the majority of those will be addressed in V7 as well.

[mongie]

After having trialed appassure, they really are different products.

Dell like to call AppAssure a "CDP - Continuous Data Protection" product, because you can run backups very regularly with no snapshotting required... With Veeam, you get the issues with snapshot removal on production machines...

I can't see how - short of moving to an agent based system - that Veeam would be able to do "CDP", obviously you can schedule regular backups, but there is an IO impact on production vm's.

Veeam has a lot of other features that are very handy, but app assure seems like a decent product too.

[dellock6]

Well, there are several ways to skip the latency introduced by snapshotting activities, and so offer a real CDP technology. Just to name a few, EMC Recoverpoint and Zerto both have introduced a way to basically intercept every write I/O of a VM and replicate it elsewhere. There are NO guest agent involved so. Both however are meant to be replication technology, and not backup technology, infact thay can offer for example limited retention (few days) and in order to have "consistent" point in time, they still rely on VSS just like Veeam.
Veeam has never claimed to be "Full CDP" but they have always used the term "Near CDP", how much value you feel that "Near" has it's up to you, there are situations where 15/20 minutes RPO is fine, in others no. We for example are using a mix of Zerto AND Veeam in our datacenter, for two different goals, and we feel both have strong values in what they offer.
I never tried AppAssure, but if it has a schedule, than is not at all a CDP protection...

Luca.