Veeam Backup & Replication vs PHD Virtual Backup & Replication

If you are looking to obtain a backup & replication solution for your VMware Infrastructure to build your Disaster Recovery, then this comparison was meant to help you compare between two backup & replication software leaders for VMware vSphere PHD Virtual  & Veeam which we have posted at Veeam Backup & Replication vs PHD Virtual Backup & Replication. This comparison compare the latest release of each product that was just announced right before VMworld 2012. The version that was utilized into this comparisons are as follow:

  • Veeam Backup & Replication v6.1
  • PHD Virtual Backup & Replication v6

Our team had cooperated with several other teams in pulling up this comparison. Every single item in the comparison had been tested and proved in lab. It took us a good while and effort to come with this comparison & we hope others will find it useful and appreciate it.

Although we had tried so hard to get every detail of the comparison to be right, we still can miss something as we are human over all. This post is in here for you to share what do you think of the comparison? Do you have a different experience with either of them? Are we missing an important fact or detail that we have to include? Do you not agree with any of it at all and can prove us wrong? If you think you got anything to add to it at all this is the place to do it. Just leave it in the comment and we will be right on it and try to verify it as soon as possible.

Thanks for sharing your opinion as its very important for us, though please don’t give us any sales facts. We are only looking for sounded facts, which can stand up in our labs. Please not as well we try to avoid including a future release features and stick to what is currently available to keep it real.

As usual we are getting active again after VMworld and we are hoping to update some of our others comparisons and post new ones so stay tuned and keep checking back. If you have a comparison in mind, then please feel free to share your request. We are eager to hear from you, so please leave us your comments below.

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13 Responses to Veeam Backup & Replication vs PHD Virtual Backup & Replication

  1. Pingback: PHD Virtual Backup version 6.0 is here - Virtualization Team

  2. (disclaimer: I work for Veeam)

    I read the post and it seems as a good comparison at first sight. There are some footnotes to take into account here.
    * The versions used at this point do seem to have a lot of the same attributes. However, a lot of these features that are newly included (copied?) in the latest PHD have been around at Veeam B&R for a longer while.
    * The version 6.1 of B&R is almost ready to be upgraded to v6.5 so in a few weeks/months this comparison has no use anymore as more features will be added.
    The bottomline of these 2 points is that besides features at one point there is a difference between an industry leader and a follower.

    No support for Hyper-V seems a bigger deal to a bigger part of the customers than no support for Citrix Xen-Server. Veeam has always looked at the customers first and was one of the first in the industry to support Hyper-V when it became important enough. Therefore the v6.5 that will come out soon will already support Server2012+HV3 (and vSphere 5.1).

    • admin says:

      Hi Hans,

      With all respect, but we had to compare the versions we had at hands. When your next release is out, then you can reach out and we will consider updating the comparison. Though we believe its quite fair to everyone to compare what is on the ground today.

      In regards of not supporting Hyper-V being a bigger deal than not supporting Citrix, I guess that depends on the customer you are targeting/talking to. If you are talking to a VMware only shop, then they don’t care about either. If they had Citrix only, then they don’t care for Hyper-V. If they have Hyper-V then that what they care for. By the way PHDVirtual has pointed to us out that Hyper-V will be supported shortly and wanted us to include that in the comparison, but we made sure to keep it real to what we were able to see in the current product releases.

      I am glad that you see it fair over all, & quite thankful for your feedback.

      Thanks,
      ITComparison Team

  3. @Hans De Leenheer

    As you already know I work for PHD Virtual

    I’d like to move away from any insinuation that some elements of new functionality in PHD Virtual Backup 6 have been “copied”.
    I have made it clear on several other articles that Veeam employees have commented on that just because the functionality provided is very similar does not mean there is a strong case to suggest that the exact same methods are used.

    I’d say that I agree with the ITComparison Team’s comments and say that this article is a fair representation of the two products as they are at the moment.

  4. Me says:

    I’ve been evaluating Veeam for a couple of days now, and am very impressed. It seems to meet my needs better than Trilead VM Explorer, which I had previously evaluated, although it costs significantly more.

    Based on this comparison, I downloaded a trial of PHD. However, in reading through the installation instructions, I am not sure I even want to bother. A separate PHD VM is actually required to be installed on every host unless they share storage?? I think I prefer the simplicity of not having to use a VM at all, much less having to install it multiple times! Why can’t a single installation of PHD simply connect to all the hosts it needs to?

    • Me says:

      It’s also kind of ridiculous that PHD requires you to manually install guest agents (such as for Exchange).

      Shouldn’t things like this have been part of the comparison?

    • Greg says:


      A separate PHD VM is actually required to be installed on every host unless they share storage??

      Sorry to tell you this, but Veeam is requiring me to have a proxy on each server for backup. So I don’t see the difference. In my case each server has local storage so that may be the difference since we don’t have a SAN for a small company… but I have to have a VM AND an extra Windows license on each host. In my case PHD makes more sense as the VM is an appliance and doesn’t cost me a windows license. Something for you to consider.

      • admin says:

        Hi Greg,

        Not totally related, but as you mentioned you have a small environment and no shared storage. Maybe you should investigate VMware VSA which is a great fit for such situation.

        Thanks,
        IT Comparison Team Member

  5. @Me

    It sounds like you are interested in having a single physical backup server that uses a “network backup mode” to protect all the VMs on multiple hosts using local storage. Is this correct?
    While this might seem like an easier solution to set up when you don’t have shared storage, network backup mode is a legacy process that even VMware does not recommend for doing VM backups. This is a main reason why VMware now has the vStorage APIs for Data Protection – to allow backup vendors to read directly from storage to speed up the process and limit impacts to the network and hypervisor.

    Veeam’s own documentation will tell you that network mode is a last resort for backing up VMs.

    If you’re going to use this as your primary backup strategy for production, be sure to do thorough testing to examine the impact it has, as well as its ability to scale.

    While PHD does make you use the more efficient methods of backing up VMs, a VBA really does only take just a couple minutes to deploy and configure. You won’t have to worry about Windows patching of the backup server or any other physical server maintenance as well. There are always trade-offs to the approaches, but with PHD you will definitely get good performance and be able to scale easily.

    Regarding the PHD Guest Tools, yes, the install is manual. This will take an extra step, but it’s only needed for specific VMs like Exchange and SQL, and users are aware that this small application is getting installed and have absolute control over which VMs perform this type of processing.
    Veeam’s automated install approach actually installs, removes, installs, removes, installs, removes every single time you back up the VM. That’s a lot to do on a production VM without users always being aware that it’s happening. We’ve heard different users have different opinions on which approach is ideal, but some were also very against Veeam’s.

    • Me says:

      As a physical server, veeam can connect directly to Fiber Channel and iSCSI SANs without using the network mode (this direct SAN access is also part of the vStorage API for data protection). This can be much faster than a shared storage connection, and keeps the backup server away from a single point of failure.

  6. Evaluating_vmwarebackup says:

    I am currently evaluating backupproducts for our VM environment. So thanks for this good comparison of two products I had under investigation. One thing that is unanswered in your comparision though (as I see in most of the product comparisons around) is for example the scalability of either product. In my evaluation it is also of big importance to know whether and how the size of one’s environment translates into the functionality, performance, manageability and costs of the product. I fairly can imagine that an environment based upon 3 hosts serving 50 vm’s is of a different magnitude than a 100 host 1500 vm shop. What if the latter environment was mine, would any of the tools be able to do the job in an efficient, effective and costly manner? If things like these would also be part of the comparison, your work would be even more usefull than it now is.

  7. arik lev says:

    Can you please provide an update comparison table against Veeam 6.5?

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