Veeam vs Acronis vmProtect

[chi-ltd]

Just a quick update on Veeam & Acronis that we have in place at present.

We were using veeam6 for our single host and it backs up very well, quickly and reliably.

We have since decided to opt for acronis vmprotect7 due to its 'apparent' benefits over veeam (as recommendation from someone) + its cheaper...

However, the software simply fails to work, intermittently failing on backups & replications. Support have had the issues for over 3x weeks, and cannot resolve the issues. Their appliance is terrible, their windows agent is better but simply does not come close to veeam.

Acronis are now not willing to refund the supplier (a well known UK distributor) as they well the software is working as it should.

I recommend you all stick with veeam and avoid acronis... As they say 'you get what you pay for'

[Gostev]

Thanks for your feedback, Gaz. This is inline with what we are hearing from other customers, and especially our partners.

Thing is, it takes tens of thousands of customers using your product for years (thank you all) to create really stable DR solution that is good for any environment. Obviously, you won't get that from the product released less than a year ago. Unfortunately, just putting some random high version number next to the product name does not add the required stability and functionality their very first release was v6 just to match our version number I guess, they are so obsessed with us...

[chi-ltd]

Out of interest, what is Veeams returns/refunds policy?

[Gostev]

Have not heard of any refund requests in a long while.
Will check with sales on the policy though.

[bmeyer99]

As per the EULA (Section 10.0) if there is an issue and Veeam cannot remedy the issue then you have until the end of the warranty period (90 days).

[vmexpert]

I am doing some research on vmProtect as well and found this feedback http://communities.vmware.com/thread/413626 not very promising huh. think i rather renew veeam hehe

Hey all,
just want to warn everyone that is considering to use Acronis vmprotect in their environment. Initially we used veeam and everything was fine. After we growth we must extend our licenses and we made terrible mistake ... where we changed to Acronis vmprotect - mainly because of price. This product is not working at all (backups are failing quite often for several unknow (even to Acronis "support") reasons). Support is 1 big tragedy .... they are working for more than 1 month and doing nothing than just talking and suggestng craps ... however no solution. Of course the problem is everywhere else just not the Acronis .... vmware, backup storage .... etc. So really .. if you want to stay away from troubles with your backups go for veeam, DP, windows backup or whatever else backup solution just not the Acronis vmprotect. Try to learn from others mistakes ... Now we have not working backups and they are refusing to return the money.

[paul]

hmm so this is yet another case when they refuse to give you money back for a product that does not work, hmmm interesting business model i must say.........

@vmexpert thanks for heads up really useful find

[rawtaz]

I feel I must give my comments on this topic as well.

I haven't tried vmProtect 7, but when searching for a backup solution for my VMware stuff I looked at a lot of software and tried out a few. Among the ones I tried were Acronis vmProtect 6, Quest vRanger (I don't remember the exact version) and Veeam 6.

Starting with Acronis vmProtect, this was the product I initially liked best. I had quite modest needs, and I got this software running and it backed up fine for starters, and it had encryption of the backups as well (something Veeam is still missing and it's a really big shame that this is the case). However, in summary it did not always work. Sometimes it would sit there and not back up, and the restoring just didn't work at times. I don't remember the exact reasons/symptoms/problems, but I can tell you that I was pretty detailed in setting it up and it was a simple environment, so it not working there simply means; Don't bother with it.
In the end I also tried to get some answers in their forum but it was just dead. No response from the Acronis guys. This too makes me feel that one should not bother with Acronis vmProtect. That was for version 6, but given the experience there I don't think that company is worth consideration for their new version either. Oh, and let's not get into what the unhappy users of their other software feel about them

Quest vRanger I've heard some good things about, and know at least two people that use it, but for some reason I couldn't get it running. Again, simple environment, very careful setup, yet it didn't work. What I mean is that I couldn't get it to make even one single backup. This was some time ago and I've moved on, so again not much details here. It "didn't work" to the level that I did not feel it was worth any more attention. At least not when I still had Veeam to try out.

So, I tried Veeam and after reading the entire user guide for it and figuring out a lot of stuff that are quite well documented but still leave a lot of open questions, this is what I settled on. I do not regret it, it is a fine product. That said, it still has some downsides (no encryption for example) and I have a support case going where HotAdd is not being used when backing up my VMs using only the Veeam console VM itself as the backup proxy. HotAdd works fine when I make the console use another VM as the backup proxy. So far support haven't been able to find a solution to or reason for this, and we both agree that this should indeed work, but I still have a couple of tests to do so I'm keeping my fingers crossed. In any case, in general I'm happy with Veeam, and I don't know another VMware backup product in the same level of pricing, i.e. that small business can afford.

In the end it's up to one another to try the products that might be relevant to meet ones requirements. I just wanted to tell you my experience on the subject in case it has any value to someone. I know there's a lot of "didn't work" up there, but I can assure you that I'm not the type of guy that conclude something just "doesn't work" without trying to figure out why that is. I usually spend a lot more time before giving up on things like this than many people would.

[low351]

I feel I have to chime in here. I have tried vmProtect7, but I didn't get past go. Reading some of the comments here I am glad I got hung up early.

We have an IBM xSeries 3630 with a whopping 24TB internal disk array and a FiberChannel connection to our SAN. Naturally we wanted to employ it to take LAN free backups from the VMs on the SAN to the internal 24TB array as a repository.

When I tried to use vmProtect7 it wouldn't let me run any backup task against the internal raid array. When I investigate further I found out that the error was related to the use of uEFI bios. There was a work around posted that had me change the boot mode to legacy. Problem was that in legacy mode my Windows 2008 R2 64bit installation no longer saw any more than 2TB of the array space. Useless. vmProtect7 can be installed as an appliance on an ESXi host, when I tried that I had to chop down the array into 2TB chunks and spoon feed it as <2TB vdisks to the virtual in any case. Less than ideal, I'd always be micromanaging my storage containers.

So I gave VeeamZIP a try first. Quick install, a backup of one of my virtuals in minutes. No issues with the uEFI and the 24TB E: drive... Yay! Now I'm on a trial of the full blown product and easing into it. I haven't tried a LAN free backup yet, I haven't exposed my LUNS to the server, have to double check that I don't accidentally automount and resignature, but I will be trying it soon. So far the scheduled backups of the VM hosts that don't use SAN space are working out nicely.

PS. I too tried to install vRanger and it got too complicated, I want dedup and compression out of the gate, I didn't feel like reading through the installation docs with a fine comb so I abandoned it to try Veeam, glad I did....

[Gostev]

Welcome to the good side

[oren_ben_nun]

hi
I wonder which is better to purchase.
My budget is up to $ 7,500.
The need is especially the feature of transferring information to the DR (replication)
Why choose the VEEAM?
I hope it's not rude to ask this forum

[Gostev]

Just deploy trial of both products, and you will find that replication to DR site over WAN is completely unusable with Acronis due to the architecture. It is implemented as a check box feature to make it look like feature parity with Veeam, however everyone who actually tried to use the replication could not make it to work other than locally in the lab conditions... that's what I read on Acronis own forums, and also noticed how their staff avoids commenting those topics.

Even if Veeam does not fit into your budget, I don't think it is a good idea to buy the product that does fit - when it is not going to work for you.

[chi-ltd]

Ok, we have been one of those customers who moved from veeam 5 to acronis 7 some 18 months ago and had major issues with acronis.

However its getting better with v8 and we do not have a SAN which means the linux appliance mode compliments our standalone esxi5 hosts well.

I would love to move back to veeam, however is there an appliance version included in v6.5?

Thanks

[foggy]

No, Veeam does not provide appliance version. You can read more about the reasons in this topic.

[chi-ltd]

Hello, we have had issues with acronis and its replication from host to host on local storage. im now looking at veeam.
i don't believe there is the option for veeam to install as a an appliance, but my question is, is veeam is better if i were to install the software on a physical machine and manage the two hosts backups to NAS and replicate between hosts over lan?

[Gostev]

Hi, it makes no difference to functionality, as Veeam server itself does nothing but management tasks. The only time where you MUST have a physical server for Veeam roles from technical perspective, is to use Direct SAN Access more for FC SAN (which requires physical backup proxy).

As for the management server, there are certain benefit of making it physical (or virtual), but they are mostly "political" or driven by company policies. For example, many companies require that data protection system has absolutely no dependencies on the system it protects to ensure recoveries are not impacted, which of course requires physical server. This is also an easy choice if you do not have a dedicated backup storage (in which case, stuffing that physical server with a bunch of disks also makes a perfect target). Finally, this takes a load off your virtual environment, letting you achieve higher VM density.

Other customers want to be fully virtualized (except hosts), or looking for simple protection of the backup server itself, so they go with virtual server.

Across the entire Veeam customer base, I would say it is 50/50 currently, with me personally being with the first group primarily for the "dependency" reason.

I cover this topic in a little more details in the VMware Backup with Veeam Best Practices: 2014 Edition VeeamON breakout session.

[dellock6]

And just to play the advocate of the other 50%, I'm among the ones preferring the Veeam server being virtualized, especially when used only as a management console. It's much easier to protect it by simply using a Veeam replica job towards a secondary host not part of the cluster it's protecting. An isolated host with the Veeam VM on it has the same failure domain of a physical server, there's just the ESXi in between.
As you see, you have options.