VizionCore vReplicator vs Veeam Backup & Replication

If you are looking to obtain a replication solution for your VMware Infrastructure to build your Disaster Recovery, then this comparison was meant to help you compare between two replication software leaders for VMware Infrastructure VizionCore & Veeam which we have posted at VizionCore vReplicator vs Veeam Backup & Replication.

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 usefull 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.

We are eager to hear from you, so please leave us your comments below.

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18 Responses to VizionCore vReplicator vs Veeam Backup & Replication

  1. Pingback: Virtualization Disaster Recovery Solutions Comparisons.

  2. MB-NS says:

    Hello,

    Great article !

    I have several questions :
    – the pricing given seems too unbalanced ($500/VM is very expensive !). Is it a typo ?
    – do they support dedup ? as we’re talking about replication and not backup, I’m talking about source-dedup in order to decrease the bandwidth needed to replicate (WAN links aren’t cheap)
    – how does the restore process works ?

    After reading this, Veeam seems a clear winner, unless you want to encrypt your dataflow (but it could be done using a VPN, if at least the LAN media is trusted).
    Which triggers my last question… are there plans to include PHD esXpress in the comparison ? I’m curious, because I think it could beat Veeam in several areas.

    Thank you very much for your work.

  3. admin says:

    Hi MB-NS,

    I am glad you like it, and we are working hard to get more of these online as fast as we can :). Below as well is the answer to your questions:

    – The price for Vizioncore vReplicator is $500/VM is correct & I wish it was a typo, but that the price they had chose for their product.

    – As far of our team knowledge & as what we had seen in the lab no dedup on the source is done & it will not make much of sense as deduplication has always been used to save disk space when backup is done & could not really have been used in the source as it usually save on duplicated bits on where you are saving your data. This only would work if you do backup in your source then replicate your backup not continuously replicate which is what is done in esXpress. esXpress backup to disk on the source side then only it can replicate & benefit of dedup. I am not sure if I agree with esXpress approach much, as I am not sure how many of us want to have to backup its VM each time it replicate. Though when asking about deduplication I assume you are talking about Veeam as they are the one who use deduplication for their back up. If so its worth to mention that Veeam has compression enabled to save bandwidth for subsequent updates, but not the first replication. That is as per their documentation:
    “In case of virtual machine backup, both a full backup and subsequent incrementals are compressed. In case of virtual machine replication, compression is not performed for full replicas — it affects only subsequent
    incrementals.”

    – Well, both Veeam & VizionCore has a failover button available in their interface where you will have to manually use it to failover the Virtual machines you desire to initiate a fail-over for. The main difference in case of fail-over is that Veeam will have an extra question if you want to fail-back to an earlier replica, where VizionCore only allow you to failover to the most recent replica.

    In regards of who is the winner, it will always depend on your needs & you can decided from seeing which one better meet it through the comparison.

    In regards of PHD esXpress we are working in comparing to vReplicator & Veeam in the near future. Though we still need to test it in our lab and see how it perform at the same tests we had applied to Veeam & Vizioncore.

    I hope that help, & if you would like to contribute in anyway you will be appreciate it if you post in comment :).

  4. Paul McGee says:

    We appreciate you taking the time to perform this comparison, as it can help better guide users toward choosing the replication solution that best meets their needs. And to make your good comparison a little better, we’d like to provide a few clarifications and corrections.

    In your comparison you noted that in vReplicator’s “hybrid” mode, a snapshot that is kept open between replication passes to record the changed blocks that are then copied to the target host. We’d like to note that vReplicator also provides the differential replication mode, which operates without maintaining an open snapshot; it scans the source VM and compares the results with the replica to determine the changed blocks that are copied over. With a choice of these two replication modes, customers can select the right one based on their environment and replication needs.

    With regards to failover, vReplicator provides the capability of test failover, an advantage that confirms the integrity of the DR VM by powering it on in an isolated state.

    Another clarification is that neither product supports ESXi as a replication target. In addition, along with several performance improvements the Q4 release of vReplicator 3.0 will be licensed at $499 per socket. The Beta Program is currently open and we can provide you with a copy of the beta release, if you’d like.

    To learn more about the upcoming release of vReplicator 3.0, please go to our corporate Blog site, Vizioncorum http://vizioncorum.com.

    Paul McGee
    Product Manager

  5. admin says:

    Hi Paul,

    We appreciate your note & your professionalism. Our team have actually e-mailed your team as well Veeam team to provide their thought on the comparison, though it seems the dedicated ones on both side had spotted the comparison, before anyone check the e-mail which is a good sign of the needs for this comparison.

    We have just confirmed that Veeam backup & replication still does not support ESXi as a replication target, which put it on the same boat with Vizioncore. This was verified in their manual as well in the lab. So thanks for pointing that out, and the comparison has been updated accordingly.

    We have put a small note on your upcoming pricing model for vReplicator in the comparison as well.

    Again thanks for your notes, & would love to receive a demo license of the upcoming vReplicator 3.0, though we can’t update our comparison with features in it till its a final release.

    Thanks,
    ITComparison Team.

  6. Anton Gostev says:

    A few comments from Veeam side:

    1. Veeam supports ESXi as replica source, Vizioncore does not support ESXi at all. You would think – no big deal? But we have

    customers who are 100% on ESXi in their production, while using single “full” ESX as standby host because this is what our product requires – and they are quite happy. Can Vizioncore work in such environment? No. Thus, I believe our ESXi support on source is very important and must be reflected in comparison.

    2. You said both products has VSS integration, but they are dramatically different as for depth and maturity. You have even run into the actual issue demonstrating that Vizioncore approach to VSS integration is flawed, and does not let the product produce *working* replicas. Forget about all the other features both products have, and please tell me: what is the use from replication products that produces replicas which cannot be powered on in case of emergency without manual intervention? To me, this issue alone means big red sign to any DR product, no matter how fast it is, and how great other features are. More on this here: http://veeammeup.com/2008/08/vss-and-vmware-esx-what-your-vmware-backup-vendor-isn%E2%80%99t-telling-you.html (and

    you’ve run into the actual issue yourself anyway).

    3. What I believe is extremely important for a replication product, but not mentioned in this comparison, is network traffic compression. Would you agree that this feature is absolutely critical for WAN replication? Now Veeam has it, Vizioncore does not have it.

    Other than this above, comparison looks good, thanks for being objective to both vendors.

    On a side note:
    a) “Though both are promising to support [ESXi] in 1st half of 2010” – are you sure you heard about this from Veeam? I am actually product manager for Veeam Backup and Replication, and I am a bit surprised to see this statement. I am also surprised to see this statement from Vizioncore given the recent post on their forum from one of their officials stating H2 2010 timeframe for ESXi support. OK OK, I will mind my own business here 😉

    b) Thank you for NOT updating comparison with the next version’s features. Some companies out there love to sell future. I would even kindly ask you to remove the pricing change remark. Let’s deal only with software that is available for download today, and prices you have to pay if you would by the software today. Would you agree? Up to you, of course.

    Yes, we are also releasing new major release of our product later this month with lotsa great new features, but it does not matter for this specific comparison, right?

    I think this is it from my end, and yet again – great job – thanks so much for taking time to evaluate both products and post such a great summary. It will be even better if you consider some of my bullets above 😉

  7. Anton Gostev says:

    Ah, I wish I could correct some formatting and typos in my reply above… cannot do this! 🙂

  8. Jewel says:

    Great post and follow-ups. Now we have a good understanding of what we have today, and to some degree of what’s coming. I certainly do care about the future and am curious to hear more about “lotsa great new features” in Anton’s post if details are available.

  9. A Potential Customer says:

    As a potential customer looking at both products I liked the review, a little hard to understand the English but hey its readable.

    What I noticed in both product managers replies is how Veeam seem to like to beat up Vizioncore. Come on guys say positive things about your own software and dont bash the other. Thats our job as customers.

    I agree that the ability to power on a vm in isolation is important, how else will you be able to tick the box in your audit that states ‘dr environment tested and works’. Vizioncore take note before I fork out for my 24 enterprise cpu licenses…

    What I would like;

    dedup
    compression and network throttling
    failover and failback
    better linux support
    Ability to purchase direct!

  10. A Potential Customer says:

    Oh and full ESXi support, some of us dont want the overweight ESX running. We dont like having to patch servers so ESXi is our choice.

  11. Frank says:

    I would be very happy if you would expand your test (or add it as second one) in which you take a detailed look to the backup functions of the products. Your tests for replica-functions are good but this is the 2nd step for an typical environment, or not?

    Veeam will offer a new version of their backup-solution which contains support for the new vSphere vStorage API in one or two weeks.

    This is right timing for us because we must find the a solution for our new environment with 3 or 4 ESX Enterprise Servers while next month – at january 2010 the new servers should be ready to run and we must find and buy the best solution for it before!

    In our actual (very old) environment with physical servers we use Symantec BackupExec v12. They offer an addon to backup ESX-Servers / VMs. But is it a good idea or was another solution a better choice? We try in moment the new solution from Acronis, “Backup & Recovery” v10, a week ago we have seen a presentation about the bundle of a quantum DXi (with dedup) and esXpress which works as virtual appliances and it looks / sounds very smart.

    We need definitely help to find the right solution but we haven’t the hardware and the time to make all the needed tests for different products on market. Your site and you was the only help, because no other does compare the products… 🙂

    A big point for us is the support for MS SQL 2005 / 2008 and Exchange 2007. Both products should have VSS-Support but is it enough to make consistent backups of these servers? What is with logfiles? While a “normal” backup with integrated mechanism you can cut them after backup. Is this also possible when I use “Veeam Backup” or “ESX Ranger” with VSS? If I follow the message from Anton from Veeam above VSS isn’t VSS…why that? I thought it is a standard API?

  12. admin says:

    Our team has been busy building another comparison lately, which was the cause of our late reply to this post. It seems stuff got heated up in here so fast, that we had missed apart of the fun.

    Ok, for people who is following up we had just modified the comparison after all the information feed to us from VizionCore, Veeam, & others on our blog. We had went back to the lab and validated the technology points. As well we had a team members online gathering where we had discussed other points brought up on our blog post & below what has been modified & what has been left & why.

    ESXi support as a source disk by Veeam but not VizionCOre was added to the comparison. Although Veeam does not support ESXi as a target, we thought supporting it as a source might be an important to know for some customers.

    ESXi expected full support date for both products was removed, as neither party was able to commit to the date listed on their forums. We had decided it was fair enough to remove the expected date as requested by both vendors.

    Thin Provisioned disks are still not fully supported on both solutions. We had went to the lab and tried to replicate Thin Provisioned disks with both solutions, and what we had end up with was a think disk on the target side. Although that will do the DR failover trick, it will waste way more space than if thin disk provisioning was totally supported.

    We had not added the compression point as requested by Veeam in the earlier comment on here, as VizionCore claim to do inline compression. As well while testing the replication we could not really calculate the compression advantage of neither vendor as both of them use a different method of replication.

    We have not omitted VizionCore planned product price, as that was committed by VizionCore & that will not change based on technology.

    We have worked hard to verifying each of the above modifications & tried to keep it as accurate as possible. If you have any points which you still think it has to be modified please point it out in the next 3 days, as we need to close the lab for this comparison. Any comment will be posted after three days it will be posted to the blog, but will not affect the comparison unless its a serious mistake.

    Enjoy,
    ITComparison Team

  13. admin says:

    Dear Jewel,

    For future release information of both VizionCore & Veeam I would recommend you look at their site. We have decided to keep the comparison as much as possible to the currently compared products as we can’t verify future release features. Thanks for your understanding & hope you come back & check our upcoming comparisons.

    Enjoy,
    ITComparison Team

  14. admin says:

    Hi Frank,

    We will look into providing a vRanager & Veeam Backup comparison, though we started with the replication part as we have not seen any one comparing the replication products, where there is few comparisons of the backup solutions available on the net.

    Enjoy,
    ITComparison Team

  15. admin says:

    Veeam has just announced Veeam Backup & Replication which is fully supporting ESXi. For more information please check out the post at:

    http://www.virtualizationteam.com/veeam/veeam-backup-replication/veeam-backup-replication-4-1-with-full-support-for-replication-to-esxi-hosts.html

  16. Michael Reed says:

    This blog was excellent and helpful. I also like the Archie Hendryx write up on the Virtualization Magazine: http://virtualization.ulitzer.com/node/1291083
    We will certainly be looking into Veeam.

  17. Everett says:

    We have been using a product called Replistor from EMC. It replicates fine on a Gigabyte Lan for initial replication but when we move it to a slower WAN (10mb) it no longer replicates. Worse yet the interface is so bad I have no idea what I am looking at other than a bunch of kernel counts, yellow folders and some green buttons. Supposedly if the folders are yellow and the buttons are green your ok. We found this not to be true. Is Veeam as robust as Replistor? And does it have an intuitive interface.

  18. Everett says:

    We use Vranger backup for VM and its works very well. (We did resolve some of the issues mentioned in your blog by upgrading to the lastest version) Unfortunately I backup the data on the same raid config that all the servers are running on. So for protection I put them on a symantec backup tape and take them offsite. We can recover individual files from the Images but there is no way to recover the vdmk images (or the servers themselves offsite) Can the Veeam backup files be transported via backup tape then restored offsite — import the vdmk images back onto offsite hardware that does not know about the original. In other words can I restore an entire server to a remote site with a backup tape.

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