why Veeam B&R is not a virtual applicance

[pcrebe]

Hi,

Why does Veeam don't think to a virtual applicane with web interface or other interface like vmware DR, acronis vmProtect and others competitors?

Thank you,
Carlo

[Gostev]

Hi Carlo,

Sorry for late response, just came back from VMworld 2011 and am catching up on the forum posts.

No, we are not considering this, there are lots of reasons, but the top 5 are as follows:

1. This would limit our solution to SMB market only, and of course we do not want to limit ourselves to specific markets. Veeam Teeam has strong background with enterprise IT (from our previous company), and we very well know that most enteprise customers will not run anything they cannot secure, control, monitor and patch, so custom Linux-based virtual appliances are no-go for too many enteprise shops. Solutions you have mentioned are specifically designed for very small businesses, where many customers do not have any issues with using Linux-based appliances (and, in fact, see the benefit from Windows licensing perspective).

2. Using virtual appliance prevents performing recoveries in case of virtual infrastructure disaster. For example, if production storage holding the appliance goes down, you will not be able to perform any restores, for example, even simply restore the affected VMs to another storage. This is why many customers have a policy that software that protects virtual environment has to run outside one. Additionally, Backup v5 and vPower NFS gave our customers even more reasons to deploy Veeam on a physical server, as this essentially gives you standalone storage device that you can run your most critical VMs of while repairing your production storage. By now, I've heard quite a lot of cool stories from our customers on how this saved them during storage disaster.

3. Using virtual appliance prevents using direct SAN access processing mode, which is, by far, the most popular and the fastest job processing mode. This is also the mode that VMware have always been recommending its enterprise customers to use because of multiple benefits (which may be irrelevant for very small businesses though).

4. Single appliance prevents deploying the product in a distributed manner (e.g. use existing managed IIS server for web interface, use existing managed SQL for configuration, use existing managed Search Server for guest file search capabilities). Again, when very small business prefer to have a single do-it-all VM (which you can still do with Veeam), larger customer prefer to deploy products in a way that makes better sense to their specific environment. And we want them to have this flexibility.

5. Finally, going this route would have prevented us from supporting multiple hypervisors within a single product/console/install, as we have did in our v6.

What are the major benefits you see in virtual appliance approach, comparing to our current approach? I can try to address all of them.

Thanks.

[pcrebe]

Hi Gostev,
thanks for your reply.

What are the major benefits you see in virtual appliance approach, comparing to our current approach? I can try to address all of them.

is faster to install
a Windows Licence less
GUI to perform backup/recovery tasks remotely
Dashboard

I think that many options aren't used daily in small shops where there isn't an IT staff but where is really important RTO.
I think it could be an opportunity for that small shops and offices, that choice VMware for HA, so they could have only 2 hosts one of which could be used for replicas. In this case a Veeam B&R virtual appliance located on the target ESXi, with a secondary DC, could perform a easy restart of replicas in case of SAN disaster.

My situation is a pharmacy with 6 VMs [1SBS + 1MySQL + 1vCenter + 1Terminal Server + (1DC + 1VeeamB&R on the target host)] and Essential Plus licence. Naturally i could use vmWare Data Recovery without Replicas and "magic restore" of DCs : that the reason why i chose Veeam B&R.

and then 2 choices are better than one...
IMHO

Before Veeam B&R i used ABR10 but one day my DC2 has gone and the restore created USN conflicts and headaches...

Thank you,
Carlo

[Gostev]

Thanks Carlo, I will try to address your points.

is faster to install

I would say, the difference is insignificant, as the time you need to copy the appliance to VMFS datastore is comparable to our setup time. Our setup takes under 10 minutes, most of which are spent on SQL Express install... and even faster (under 2 minutes) when you point it to the existing SQL database.

a Windows Licence less

You can always install Veeam Backup on one of your existing Windows servers, and save this license. In fact, this is exactly what most of our smaller customers are doing. It is definitely an overkill to have Veeam Backup installed on a separate VM for a six VMs shop.

GUI to perform backup/recovery tasks remotely

Well, using virtual appliance is not a requirement for this feature. Any product can have this, no matter of architecture.
And in fact, we DO have the remote GUI (Enterprise Manager web UI). It support managing backups tasks today in v5, and recovery tasks in v6.

Dashboard

Again, using virtual appliance is not a requirement for this feature. Any product can have this, no matter of architecture.
And we do have dashboard in our Enterprise Manager web UI, this is available today in our v5.

[ThinkGrid]

[merged]

Hi

I saw this feature in another VM backup product, but won't give name so it doesn't get publicity here

Basically, the VM machine comes in a Virtual Appliance with all the settings already installed and preconfigured and stuff, and the cool thing was that it added an additional Tab to vCenter, like Update Manager does

Now, I don't suggest this is done for B&R as I'm happy to install it in a windows server, but AT LEAST have the Enterprise Manager in this manner. Comes in a Virtual Appliance (or not) but when installed it adds the extra Tab to vCenter. This would be awesome as it would give managers who aready have vcenter up and running ability to just glance and see the backup status

Regards
Petrit

[Gostev]

You can add Enterprise Manager UI tab into vCenter today, don't need to have EM as a virtual appliance for that. There was a tool for that even, posted somewhere around here (or on some blog?)... the tool automates vCenter tabs creation and customization.

[ThinkGrid]

Gostev, do you know where I can that tool, (don't even know what to type in search field) or link to that blog ?

Many thanks

[Gostev]

Here, I googled it up for you:
http://virtualizationreview.com/article ... lient.aspx

[pcrebe]

Thank you Gostev!
Now my Veeam Enterprise Manager has his Tab into vCenter...

Carlo

[bishoptf]

I am in the process of evaluating veeam and others and one thing I wanted to ask is that is their any chance that in the future a version would be developed that would be able to be installed on a Linux vm vs. Windows platforms. While I realize that most do not mind paying MS for the software I would love see a version that would run on Linux similar to what vmware is doing with vcenter, which is what I am using today, thanks.

[foggy]

Tom, if you are talking about Veeam backup server as appliance, then please review the discussion above.