Chris comes to Veeam after 9 years of working with Microsoft as an IT Pro Evangelist. He loves technology and has a passion for helping others implement solutions that make their lives work better. Chris is an accomplished public speaker with a fun style that conveys deep technical concepts in ways that are easy to understand. Chris is the co-author of “Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Administration Instant Reference” as well as a contributing author of “Mastering Windows Server 2008 R2.” He loves to write and says, “It is a great experience writing technical material! People use that book to make their environment better. I love being a part of their solution!”

Chris spends a lot of his time working on emerging technologies and teaching IT Professionals how to take advantage of those opportunities. One of his key areas of focus in the past 2 or 3 years has been on Hyper-V and the virtualization space.

While delivering a series of seminars focused on Cloud design Chris was introduced to Veeam and its Backup and Replication tools.

“I knew right away that this was something I wanted to be involved in! The tools were focused on the future of IT. They were designed with virtualization in mind. They were easy to use and they just worked. As soon as backup and replication v6 came along with support for Hyper V I knew I had to get on board with Veeam! The opportunity here is Amazing!

Chris loves Hyper V and thinks that it will be a key player in the hypervisor marketplace. He is excited to be a part of the growth and development of Veeam!

You may have also noticed that we’ve done some redesign on the blog. All posts will now feature a header that includes a photo of the author, an example including Chris’ picture is below.

Welcome to the Veeam Teeam Chris!

This is important because today we have released Veeam Backup & Replication v6 after over a year of R&D effort. What makes this release so significant in my view is that it’s your release. When I say it’s your release I mean that if you take a look at all the new features and enhancements, they were almost all driven by direct customer and partner feedback.

Better Scalability? You got it!
Our new proxy/repository architecture allows you to scale out a single Backup & Replication server to thousands of VMs. You can still go with a single server and let it be the proxy and repository but as your environment grows you can now grow with it.

Enhanced Replication? Yep!
If you take a look at the What’s New around replication alone you’ll see that this is one of the areas we focused most of our attention on. Re-IP? Check. Failback? Check. Traffic Throttling? Check. Better seeding? Check.

Support for multiple hypervisors? Yes!
Now I know not everyone asked us to support Windows Server Hyper-V but a fair number of customers and partners did, as well as a lot of Hyper-V shops that wanted the functionality of Veeam Backup & Replication. The fact that you get support for VMware and Microsoft virtualization all from a single install and interface is huge news.

I'd like to give a big Thank You to all of our customers, partners and prospects who had so much to do with this release. We get our best feedback through our forums so please continue to post great feedback there. We're already working on the next release and we'll have some BIG news to share early next year (again, from YOUR input) so watch for the countdown clock.

For a comprehensive overview of v6, please check out the webinar series that includes product demos: http://vee.am/v6webinars

As Kevin pointed out in part 7, there are resources to help VMware IT Pros understand how to work with Hyper-V. This is extremely helpful, especially if you need to run a mixed environment of both VMware and Microsoft virtualization technologies. If you end up with a mixed environment, the next question is how do you manage it all? SCVMM has been able to connect to your VMware environment since the beginning. With System Center 2012, you’ll also be able to connect to a Citrix XenServer environment. Of course with SCVMM 2012 you’ll have the ability to define your compute “fabric” as detailed in Yung Chou’s post, Fabric, Oh, Fabric. This means that once defined, it shouldn’t matter if your hypervisor is ESX(i), Citrix XenServer or Hyper-V.

Coexistence is key

Getting all these virtualization platforms defined in SCVMM is a great start but then you have to consider how to keep track of it all. How many times has “virtualization” been blamed for issues in your environment when the real cause is something unrelated? Only through comprehensive monitoring of the virtualization fabric can you get true app-to-metal visibility in your environment. For Systems Center Operations Manager, Microsoft already has a Management Pack for Hyper-V and Citrix recommends the ComTrade Citrix XenServer Management Pack. On the VMware side, Veeam has been offering a Management Pack for VMware since the MOM days.

I bring up the importance of monitoring because when you have multiple platforms it’s very important from an operational sense to make sure you have solid metrics for each. Thanks to the extensibility of System Center Operations Manager, there are numerous 3^rd party management packs available for a wide range of systems and operating systems. Veeam just happens to make a great Management Pack for VMware. For a good overview, check out a recent Webinar we did with Pete Zerger, MVP – OpsMgr, Cameron Fuller, MVP - OpsMgr and Alec King, product manager for the MP.

Author bio:

Doug Hazelman is the Vice President of Product Strategy for Veeam Software. Doug shares his expertise via the Veeam blog, and other social media outlets. Doug has spoken about virtualization management at VMworld 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011, Interop, and other events including regional VMUG meetings.

We released our hotfix on 20 October, 2011, that means it took us a full 57 days to release a hotfix for Veeam Backup & Replication to FULLY support vSphere 5. One of the main issues with Veeam Backup & Replication 5.0.2 was that it didn’t work for all processing modes with VMSF5 (just like every other vendor at the time of this writing). A processing mode popular with our customers is direct SAN access utilizing the vStorage API for Data Protection (VADP). In order to support direct SAN access for VMFS 5, we had to move to the latest version of the VDDK API which was only made available the same day as the GA release of vSphere 5.

57 days to incorporate a new version of a low-level API
1368 hours to fully test
82,080 minutes to fix things that worked previously

So, rather than trying to shout from the rooftops that we supported vSphere 5 the day it was released (or even weeks before), we wanted to make sure everything worked. We make backup and DR software after all, and we don’t want our customers getting into a mess with their production data based on claims by marketing. I think Anton did a good job of explaining our position in the forums, please take a moment to read his post.

Before you go checking our downloads page for the hotfix, please be advised that it’s only available through Veeam support. Since this isn’t a full release, and not all of our customers will need it, we are only making it available via support. Of course, Veeam Backup & Replication v6 will have full support of vSphere 5 when it’s released later this year, and that will be our official release vehicle for vSphere 5.

We have repeatedly asked Tolly who is sponsoring the report but they have declined to tell us. As of this writing, Veeam has no idea who is paying Tolly for this report (but we have our suspicions). So, in an effort to be truly fair and accurate, we proposed the following to Tolly:

• Veeam co-sponsors the tests and the report, and pays half the sponsorship fee;
• Veeam participates in determining the test criteria on an equal basis with Tolly and the other sponsor; or, alternatively, test criteria are determined by a mutually agreed-upon neutral third party;
• Both vendors’ representatives are present during the tests;
• The tests are conducted in September 2011. Veeam’s key people who can participate in the project are on vacation or on other projects until September 15; and
• The tests are conducted with Veeam Backup & Replication v6, which will be released in Q4 2011.

The above proposal was not accepted by Tolly, and we were told the process was too far along with the sponsoring vendor. They did tell us that we could sponsor our own report at a later time if we like.

My question now is how fair and accurate will this report be? According to the Fair Testing Charter (parts below, emphasis mine), we will be allowed to review the findings and provide feedback.

Finally, we provide them [Veeam] with the opportunity to give us an official commentary on their results, the essence of which is included in any documents we might publish.

It’s interesting they say the “essence of which.” To me it means that they will listen to our feedback but will edit it into an “essence” that puts their client in a better light. Likewise, “might publish” says to me that if Veeam were to come out ahead in the test, even with cherry-picked criteria, the report will never see the light of day.

It appears that Tolly has been doing this type of “fair and accurate” testing for quite some time; I just hope no one loses millions of dollars this time based on Tolly’s findings: http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/business/compressed-into-nothingness-20100808-11qdh.html?from=age_ft (the Tolly report is available here)

Steve Duplessie from ESG has a great take on head-to-head testing and why ESG doesn’t do it: http://www.thebiggertruth.com/2010/03/the-politics-of-testing/

And I particularly like Simon Bramfitt’s assessment of Tolly: http://blog.simonbramfitt.com/2011/06/tolly-trumps/

Vendors in the backup space have also had their share of problems with Tolly, including Quest: http://www.infoworld.com/d/data-management/just-when-you-thought-backup-wars-were-dead-654?page=0,0[BB1]

It’s clear to us that one of our competitors intends to use this Tolly report as part of a competitive marketing campaign against us. Veeam did NOT participate in the testing and, from our vantage point, the criteria have been designed to avoid testing typical customer scenarios as well as very features that make Veeam Backup & Replication v5 stand out as the best solution on the market. So please treat any report from Tolly as suspect.

From the site:

V-index is an online virtualization industry study performed by Vanson Bourne, an independent market research company. It is based on a survey of 500 enterprises across the US, UK, France and Germany and is designed to measure 3 parameters – virtualization rate, consolidation ratio and primary hypervisor in use.

So what do you get at V-index.com? First off, you get a quick look at virtualization adoption in a series of 3 different areas: penetration rate, consolidation ratio and Hypervisor in use:

You also get access to a series of snippets that you can put on your own blog or website. The data behind these snippets will be automatically updated each time the v-Index is updated (currently quarterly). Here’s a sample snippet:

V-index There are many different sizes and styles to choose from so feel free to pick the one that works best for your site. Also on the site is a page full of infographics on the v-Index results. These infographics show the splits by country for each of the 3 areas in the survey:

Of course, you can also download the full V-index report in PDF format and also provide feedback on other areas or data points you’d like to see in the V-index.

Again, V-index is meant to be a community resource, Veeam’s involvement is to sponsor the survey by Vanson Bourne and make the results available to everyone. You can use any of the data on the V-index site, please check the privacy policy for more information..

Take the guesswork out of capacity planning

• Look beyond consolidation ratios and constraint-based optimization
• Analyze trends, perform what-if modeling, forecast and make recommendations to provide guidance for when, how and where to intelligently grow the virtual environment.
• Perform what-if analysis for adding custom VMs and hosts
• Analyze thin-provisioning and identify over-committed storage
• Provide recommendations for host and storage resources

Fig. 1 - Sample report showing when to add a host

Veeam ONE is more that just capacity planning, in fact, it also includes all of these monitoring and reporting features as well:

• Real-time monitoring
• Hundreds of vSphere metrics
• vSphere Events
• Reporting Dashboards
• Customizable reports
• Change management
• Automatic business categorization
• End-to-end view: through Microsoft System Center and HP Operations Manager

This update is available for free for any Veeam ONE (or Veeam Reporter) customers current on maintenance. If you’d like to download a trial of just the advanced capacity planning, you can download Veeam Reporter.

SureBackup and vPower

We started off the Spring of 2010 with our big announcement regarding SureBackup. This announcement was important for us because we knew that it was going to take some time to understand just what Recovery Verification was all about.

When you introduce something new to the market, you need to give enough time for it to soak in. When the summer came around, we started talking about vPower or Virtualization Powered-Data Protection. I gave the first live demo of SureBackup Recovery Verification, Instant VM Recovery and Universal Application Item Recovery (U-AIR) at TechFieldDay 3 in Seattle and it was very well received. So well received in fact that one of our competitors announced something very similar to our patent-pending Instant VM Recovery a few weeks later that to this day still has not been released.

Microsoft Partner of the Year Finalist

At Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference held in June, Veeam was recognized as a finalist for Partner of the Year in the Core Infrastructure Solutions, Systems Management category. This was great recognition for Veeam, specifically around our Veeam nworks Management Pack for VMware.

Launch of Veeam ONE

Veeam is more than Backup & Replication, we also have a major focus on VMware infrastructure management. Veeam ONE was launched to create a single solution that customers could look to for monitoring, capacity planning, change management, reporting and chargeback. Also, since different customers need different monitoring solutions depending on their environment, Veeam ONE comes in 3 different flavors, including flavors for Microsoft System Center and HP Operations Manager.

Best of VMworld

For me the best part of VMworld 2010 in San Francisco was winning 4 “Best of VMworld” awards. Not only did the then current version of Veeam Backup & Replication (v4) get a finalist award in its category for the 2nd year in a row, Veeam ONE also was chosen as a finalist in its category. Of course when it comes to new technology, Veeam Backup & Replication v5 was the big winner with the Gold award and the top prize, Best of Show. This was the first time in the history of the awards that one vendor received 4 awards.

v5 Launch

With all of the excitement and buzz we created around SureBackup and vPower, it was great to finally release v5 to the market and watch it take off. For the launch “event,” we had more than a thousand people on a live webcast and on that day we hit an all time record for web traffic to veeam.com. So far we’ve had over 60,000 downloads and so many positive comments regarding the revolutionary functionality.

Informal poll at Gartner Data Center Conference

While not an official Gartner survey, this quick poll of 178 attendees at the 2010 Gartner Data Center Conference shows that Veeam Backup & Replication is used by the same percentage as backup solutions from the “bigger” vendors. Here’s a graphic showing the results:

The Awards!

There has been no shortage of awards for Veeam in 2010 and they seem to keep rolling in. The following were all in addition to the VMworld awards mentioned above.

• Best Free vSphere Tools – As I previously blogged about, Veeam took the top 3 spots in the VMwarevideos.com and vChat Best Free vSphere Tools survey.
  
• Virtualization Review – Veeam was also awarded 2 Reader’s Choice Awards from Virtualization Review in their 2011 Virtualization Buyer’s Guide. Veeam ONE took a merit award and Veeam Backup & Replication v5 was named a winner. These awards are based on reader input so we would like to thank everyone who voted for Veeam.
  
• SearchServerVirtualization.com Products of the Year 2010 – We were very happy to have won 2 Product of the Year awards from SearchServerVirtualization.com. Veeam Backup & Replication v5: 2010 Product of the Year in the Backup and Storage for Virtualization and v4 was also the Product of the year for 2009 in the same category – that’s 2 years in a row! Also, Veeam ONE: 2010 Product of the Year in the Virtualization Management category, that marks the first time in the history of the awards that one company has taken GOLD in 2 categories in the same year.

  

• Storage Magazine | SearchStorage.com Product of the Year – Veeam Backup & Replication v5: 2010 Product of the Year in the Backup and Disaster Recovery Software and Services category. When looking at who we beat out, this is a pretty significant award for us!
  

The Results!

155%

Of course all the awards don’t really mean much without good financials to back them up. As our press release announced, Veeam had a very, very good year financially with 155% growth over last year. Being a private company we don’t detail the exact revenue, but when you consider we’ve grown over 100% each of the past 4 years it’s not difficult to figure out. So when you consider Veeam as a company to do business with, understand that we’re still growing, we’re still 100% self-funded and we’re profitable!

According to the report, CommVault received “Best in Class” honors for overall functionality in comparison to other solutions in the market, across seven categories encompassing technology, management, backup, restore, deduplication, media and support. CommVault outranked offerings from legacy software providers, including EMC, Symantec, CA and IBM, as well as point-level virtualization software vendors, such as Veeam.

It is important to note some facts:

1. This “Guide” is created by an analyst firm DCIG and technology advisory firm, SMB Research. But, it is distributed EXCLUSIVELY by CommVault, not DCIG.
2. CommVault also sponsors DCIG web site. DCIG has the following disclaimer on their web site: “DCIG is paid a fee by CommVault® Systems, Inc. in connection with this blog. CommVault® undertakes no obligation to update, correct or modify any statements contained in this blog; these statements represent the views and opinions of DCIG only.” See here: http://sales.dciginc.com/about/index.html. Not once does CommVault disclose this relationship with DCIG, either in the guide or in the press release mentioned above.
3. DCIG is stating that 30 vendors were identified and sent a questionnaire and 24 responses were received. The “Guide” includes Veeam as one of 24 vendors, however, Veeam never responded to the questionnaire! Here is DCIG’s description of the process: “We identified some 30 vendors who provide Virtual Server Backup Software solutions. You will find all of these vendors identified in this Buyer’s Guide. After making contact with all the vendors, we sent out a questionnaire with 130 questions. We ultimately received back 24 responses to our questionnaire.” Again, Veeam did NOT respond. How did DCIG included Veeam’s responses if Veeam didn’t respond? Is DCIG lying about the fact that they received Veeam’s response?
4. DCIG positions this document as “The Insider’s Guide” to Evaluating Virtual Server Backup Software. However the guide is NOT based on:
   1. Customer interviews, or
   2. Technical evaluations in a lab.

   Instead, the “Guide” is based on vendor responses: “After making contact with all the vendors, we sent out a questionnaire with 130 questions. We ultimately received back 24 responses to our questionnaire.” Insider means somebody who is intimately familiar. How can DCIG claim it if they purely compiled some of the vendors responses?

The EXCLUSIVE LICENSEE of the “Guide” is the vendor who is selected as the TOP vendor by the “Guide”.  If the “Guide” was paid by the vendor, can you trust it?

VEEAM should really give every VMware VCP a full copy of their complete catalog! If I had gotten that I would have made them some money! 2:04 PM Oct 16th via Tweetie for Mac

cape2000

This got us thinking, should we do this? I talked to a few people, including Maish Saidel-Keesing who has a popular blog called Technodrone and TechHead Simon Seagrave. They agreed that this would be a great idea for the community.

After discussing the idea internally we got the ball rolling, everyone agreed it was a great idea. Of course it’s taken us some time to get the announcement out there, one of the reasons is that we wanted to wait until we released Veeam Backup & Replication 5.0.1 since it fixed several minor issues. With 5.0.1 released and the Dutch VMUG on the horizon, we decided to go ahead and make this our 2010 Holiday gift.

From our official press release:

Veeam Software, innovative provider of VMware data protection, disaster recovery and VMware management solutions for virtual datacenter environments, today announced that Veeam Backup & Replication™ v5 with vPower™ is now available free to all VMware vExperts, VMware Certified Professionals, and VMware Certified Instructors. Any vExpert, VCP or VCI can receive a free two-socket software license (valued at approximately $1,800) for non-production use, including training, evaluation and development.

Ready for your NFR key? Simply visit this link and register and you’ll be on your way to trying out the best products for managing and protecting VMware infrastructures.

Update: Maish has blogged about the holiday give on his Technodrone blog: http://technodrone.blogspot.com/2010/12/veeam-holiday-present.html