General comparison between Veeam and VSphere 5.1

[jansmits]

Hi Folks,

I am new to the forum, so I hope you will have a little more patience with me incase I affend to a rule or so.

Can anyone here point me to a document location or tell me what the major differences in functionality are between the current VEEAM implementation
in comparisson to the Backup and Replication functionality said to be nativly incorporated in VMWare's VSphere 5.1?

During a resent "chat" with a VMWare engineer, I was given the impression that VMWare intends to provide VEEAM comparible functionality in regards to backup/replication natively, thereby negating the need to buy/use Veeam and so saving additional software (licensing) costs.

Who can give me a more or less simple indication of the differences between the two?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Regards,
Jan

[veremin]

From my perspective, even though VDP provided by VMware is a nice product, which is likely to meet a variety of end-users expectations VB&R still has several advantages over it. To name a few:

• No limits on backup repository
• Orchestration between multi-appliance deployment
• Instant VM recovery functionality, which allows you to instantly recover any VM into your production environment by running it directly from backup file.
• SureBackup technology. Automatic recovery verification functionality.
• VDP needs vCenter to work. It cannot backup VMs on “standalone” hosts.
• Veeam can recover individual application items (email messages, database records, directory objects, etc.) from any virtualized application. VMware defers to third-party vendors for this—and other—advanced backup and recovery capabilities
• Veeam can also boast of its Direct SAN processing mode. Backup proxy server retrieves protected VM's virtual disks directly from production storage over SAN fabric, thus providing LAN-free data retrieval mechanism that does not affect production ESX(i) hosts or management network.

As to vSphere Replication/VB&R comparison, here is a list of those vSphere limitations that cross my mind:

• vSphere Replication in contrast to Veeam provides single restore point only. And it seems to be a limitation number 1.
• No traffic compression.
• No traffic throttling.
• No re-IP upon failover.
• Basic VSS quiescing (no application-aware processing, which is necessary for replicating VM running VSS-aware applications (such as Active Directory, Microsoft SQL, Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint), since this functionality guarantees backup transactional consistency of such VMs).

If you have any further questions, or are willing to get more subtle answer regarding abovementioned products, kindly contact our system engineers through your Sales Rep.

Hope this helps.
Thanks.

[jansmits]

Yes thank you. I am not all that familiar with thge workings of VEEAM, but I will try to read up on these.

One additional question in relation to this subject...

Currently the storage is "connected" via a 10GB connection NFS link. I want to add new storage based on an iSCSI link. Can Veeam backup a VM based on the NFS storage to the iSCSI connected storage. And in Addition, if the NFS storage fails, can Veeam run the "NFS-VM" directly from the secondary iSCSI connected storage?

[Gostev]

Yes and Yes.

As far as comparing VDP and Veeam, there is really no comparison as VDP is way too simplistic. Vladimir mentioned just a few points, and I don't want this to come across as the excessive list of differences. For example, missing above are some core architecture things for scalability and redundancy (intelligent job load-balancing between proxy servers), application-aware image-level processing (VDP cannot perform proper application-aware backups on the image level), advanced virtual disk processing options (such as swap file exclusion), WAN-optimized offsite backup (VDP can only backup locally), extremely flexible scheduling (vs daily jobs with VDP) and large amount of other smaller features not available with VDP.

Just the feature difference you would come to expect from version 1.0 solution versus version 6.5 solution that has been around for 5 years.

[jansmits]

Thanks Gostev, your point is clear and noted.

But could you perhaps also answer the second part of my question?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Regards

[Gostev]

Yes and Yes

Actually, these were the answer to the two questions from the second part of your post

You can certainly host your backups on iSCSI LUN, or run VMs from backups residing there.
If you'd like to discuss this part further, please create the new topic, not to derail this one.