There've been some interesting blog posts lately about dedicated VMware data protection solutions such as Veeam Backup & Replication and whether those solutions will continue to thrive. started the discussion in his blog post "" This post caught the attention of Mr. Backup, , and he posted a response "", and then Jay posted a response to Mr. Preston "". All of this responding created yet another response by own "". With all of this talk about us, we figured we'd throw our own response into the fray.
All 4 blog posts make very valid points. The purpose of this post is not to call into question any of those points but to explain Veeam's position in the dedicated VMware data protection space. In fact, I wrote an article for Virtualization Review a few months back . The backup and DR space was very different in the age of the mainframe…then came Windows…now comes virtualization. Read more>>
The screen shots below were created with a pre-release build of Veeam Backup & Replication v5 featuring vPower, many dialog boxes and text will change with the final release of Veeam Backup & Replication v5.
Another new feature in Veeam Backup & Replication v5 is the ability to create a catalog (or index) of the files contained within the Windows image backup. Cataloging is only available for Windows file systems with version 5 but we do have plans to extend this to other file systems as well as applications in future releases.
The following screen shots are taken from an early "Alpha" build of Veeam Backup & Replication v5 featuring our patent pending vPower technology. While the functionality is there, some of the dialog boxes and text will change before the official release of Veeam Backup & Replication v5. The screen shots and wizards are very self-explanatory, I have provided additional text where needed. Read more>>
For more information about Veeam Reporter Free Edition, click here
What: Shameless promotion to drive downloads for the new FREE product for VMware: Veeam Reporter Free Edition and also do some good at the same time via charitable donations
How: Bloggers who participate each get a special download link that tracks how many unique downloads each blogger sends.
Some of you may have noticed that it’s been a while since there was a post on VeeamMeUp.com. The reason for that (besides the fact that I’ve been busy) is that we’re moved the “un-official” VeeamMeUp blog to a new home, Veeam.com/blog. What started out for me 3 years ago as an experiment and play on words has now grown into a full fledged corporate blog.
The move was necessary for several reasons, most of which have to do with the fact that Veeam recognizes the value of blogging and rather than starting from scratch we decided to move VeeamMeUp. We’ve imported all of the content over and have redirected the traffic from VeeamMeUp to this new address so (hopefully) any incoming links will be preserved as well as any internal links. Of course with any migration there’s always the chance for an issue so if you notice something, please comment or let me know at VMDoug at Veeam dot com.
I will still be providing much of the content as VMDoug but you’ll also see some other contributors here as well. Our goal is to open up the blog to the smart people we have here at Veeam so that they can contribute as well. Who knows, we might even see a post or two from Ratmir.
For now, here’s a quick list of what’s been going on the past month…
Not desperate for Veeam of course, but maybe for our competitors.
Recently you may have seen a blog post created by Kelly Polanski, from Wave Break, and Jason Mattox from Vizioncore. In this blog post they say a number of things about Veeam as a company as well as about our Veeam Backup & Replication product. With the , we can only guess that this is a last ditch effort by Vizioncore marketing to try and convince customers to choose Vizioncore over Veeam. While we’re not going to address every point in the blog post, we do want to make sure our customers and ProPartners can feel confident with their chosen solution of Veeam Backup & Replication.
The intro is provided by Kelly Polanski who works for , a marketing agency that Vizioncore has hired to help them with their social media. Wavelength is also affiliated with , a company that is known to be a “pay for play” blogger service and we assume the only place Vizioncore could turn to for something . We’re also aware that Vizioncore is using this paid analyst briefing in their training to partners.
If you have followed Veeam’s announcements over the past several quarters then you know that Veeam is a financially strong and growing company. Our results from the first quarter of 2010 were announced several weeks ago and point to our continued success. Veeam is also an international company with offices across North America, Europe and Asia Pacific and 24x7 support worldwide. It is through our strong ProPartners that Veeam has been able to see such tremendous growth, a fact pointed out by . We’ve chosen not to name names previous to this, but the fact is that many of these partners came to Veeam because of their dissatisfaction with Vizioncore.
If you have any questions regarding the technical points of Jason Mattox’s blog post, please feel free to reach out to your local Veeam Team and schedule a time to discuss your questions with them or email me VMDoug<at>Veeam<dot>com. If you know Veeam and you’ve tried Veeam Backup & Replication then we’re sure you’ll see that most of Jason’s points were simply a desperate plea to try and spread rumors and make their product look better. Don’t believe Jason or us, put Veeam Backup & Replication in the lab and decide for yourself why Veeam is the #1 solution for VMware Backup and Disaster Recovery as chosen by .
Interestingly, more and more customers and partners are choosing Veeam. In 2009 Veeam added over 8,000 new customers while Vizioncore added less than 4,000* - that is two times more customers choosing Veeam! In Q1 of 2010 Veeam added 1,400 new customers while Vizioncore added less than 600* – that’s more than two times more customers choosing Veeam. The graphic representation of this is below:
*These estimates are based on Vizioncore marketing materials.
But of course don’t just take our word for it; here is what our customers and partners have to say about Veeam:
Another interesting trend is what Google shows in the terms of interest in our brand. As you can see, Veeam continues to rise while Vizioncore continues to fall. Desperate? Maybe...
Today Veeam released Veeam Reporter 4.0. This release is significant for many reasons but one that I’d like to focus on here is the new tracking and auditing capability. We introduced change tracking with Reporter 3.5 but we were missing one critical piece…who made the changes? With Reporter 4.0 we now pull in the vCenter audit logs and correlate every change back to the person (or system) that made the change. Another feature that’s not available from the vSphere client is the ability to not only see the new value, but the previous value as well.
Let’s take a look at an example.
You come into work on Monday morning and you’ve got an inbox full of emails about a particular virtual machine. On Friday everything was working fine but on Monday it won’t respond, even though you can see it’s powered on and you can access the console through the vSphere client.
After a reboot doesn’t fix the issue, you now need to determine what changed. Using the vSphere client, you can see that doug.hazelman changed a custom attribute:
The screenshot above shows that the Custom Attribute “TEEAM_FUNCTION” was changed to PROD for the VM “XPViewTemp”. This is slightly helpful in that you know you have an automated process that reconfigures VM’s based on custom attribute values. Setting “TEEAM_FUNCTION” to PROD kicked off a script that moved it to the production network which is why people who could access it on Friday can’t access it today. The easy fix it to change “TEEAM_FUNCTION” back to the previous value…but what was it? The proper setting determines how this VM works, you need a quick resolution. Veeam Reporter to the rescue! All you need to do is run the infrastructure changes report showing all changes for that VM over the weekend. Clicking the name of the VM in the report, you can easily see that the old value was DEV:
Now all you have to do is change the attribute back to the correct value, let your automated script reconfigure the VM and you’re good to go!
The above example is a bit of a stretch (who automates VM configuration based on attributes?) but was meant to show how quickly and easily it is to get this data from Reporter 4. While the scenario above shows a change made in a relatively short time frame, what if the change had been made 2 months ago? How would use us the vSphere Client (or even PowerShell) to find who changed it as well as what the previous value was? Reporter 4 can give you that audit data for any time frame, you choose a date and Reporter shows you the configuration as it was on that date. If you want to see how an object has changed over a period of time (including WHO changed it), just select a time “window” for your report to get the detail.
There are a lot of powerful, new features in Reporter 4. I did the voice for this quick overview video, check it out and then download Reporter 4 to see what YOU can do with it.
I have to say my first was a great experience. Not only did I have a chance to meet a lot of great new people, I also go to see first hand Microsoft’s messaging and go-to-market strategies around the entire System Center platform. The keynotes were great (thanks for streaming them live), if you didn’t catch them, you can watch them online here: and . I thought Bob Muglia did a great job explaining “the cloud” in his keynote on Tuesday and provided some nice examples of how Microsoft is utilizing their own management framework for Azure and Bing.
I sat in on Edwin Yuen’s session, “BD02 Understanding How Microsoft Virtualization Compares to VMware” and I thought he did a great job at keeping it high level. I tweeted a few things while at the session, I think the best message I heard was:
: "It's all about management, pick the hypervisor that works for you. You don't need to replace VMware"
That message fits in perfectly with the announcement Veeam made on Tuesday about closing the loop on VMware management. With the new Veeam/nworks Management Pack and PRO Pack combination, customers will be able to monitor and manage VMware from System Center the same way they manage Hyper-V. I know to a lot of the VMware crowd this may seem like a bit of a stretch, but remember, it’s about management, not the hypervisor. You can check out a video explanation by Veeam’s own Alec King here on YouTube:
Another great success at MMS was our book giveaway. Veeam gave out 500 copies of the book “”. Two of the authors, Kerrie Meyler and Cameron Fuller (pictured below), were at the Veeam booth signing copies and the lines were pretty long.
If you didn’t get a copy of the book at MMS don’t worry, Veeam has additional copies that we’ll be giving out at special events throughout the year.
I’m really looking forward to my first . Veeam is a gold sponsor at MMS this year and with good reason, we have some exciting announcements to make. If you listen to my , you’ll get an idea of what those announcements are (around 28 minutes in). I’m not going to write about those announcements yet, I’ll do a post after MMS and share my thoughts on what I learned as well as the reaction we get regarding our Microsoft System Center strategy moving forward.
The giveaways!
Of course people want to know what kind of they can expect from Veeam when they visit our booth #111. We will have our popular “” as well as some fine (loaded with Veeam goodness), but what about the “big giveaway”? I’m happy to announce that we’ll also be giving away copies of the latest and greatest book on Microsoft System Center Operations Manager: by , , , . We will have a limited number of copies available and as always it will be first-come-first-served so make sure to make you way to booth #111 quickly. We’re also happy to have the authors of the book on-hand in our booth to do book signings, the schedule is below. If you’d like to get an idea of the type of content in the book, check out a recent post on where the authors talk about the Veeam nworks MP for VMware.
MMS Book Signing Schedule
The following times are when the authors of will be at Veeam Booth #111 for book signings:
If you’re a Veeam ProPartner then you should have received this update already but I wanted to get this out there for the rest of the world. As we move towards the next release of Veeam Backup & Replication which will include SureBackup, you will start to notice that we will have 2 versions, Standard and Enterprise. The idea behind offering 2 versions is to give customers a choice when purchasing, they may not want all of the features that will be included with Enterprise (at a higher price point).
So what does that mean for current customers? Will they get Standard or Enterprise if they’re current on maintenance? They answer is the choice is yours! Yes, for a limited time Veeam will be offering customers current on maintenance the choice of Veeam Backup & Replication 5.0 Standard or Enterprise once it’s released. This means that all of our current customers can rest easy and know that they’ll have the option of getting all the great new Virtualization-Powered Protection features that will be released later this year. Of course anyone who’s not a current customer but purchases Veeam Backup & Replication by 18 June 2010 will also be eligible for this offer.
If you’re not familiar with the put on by and , be sure to check out Episode 6: “The Mean Green Veeam Team”, also available on iTunes. Rich and Mark invited and myself on to talk a little about Veeam and the virtualization market in general. I made an announcement about this offer on the podcast (right around 6:12).
What’s the difference?
While the exact details of the release a still being worked out, the table below details functionality that we know at this time to be included in Standard and Enterprise. You can also register for the upgrade here (along with more details on the offer): http://www.veeam.com/go/free-enterprise-upgrade
Feature
Standard
Enterprise
Notes
Data Protection Modes
Backup
Replication
2-in-1: backup and replication for one price, in one cohesive solution; includes replica rollback and replication to/from ESXi
Hot VM copy
Facilitates ad hoc backups and migrations
FastSCP™
Integrates Veeam FastSCP, the #1 file management tool for VMware administrators, into the operator console
Architecture
vStorage APIs
Highly efficiency and “future-proof” solution that uses the vStorage APIs for Data Protection
Changed Block Tracking
Lightning-fast incremental backups to minimize backup windows and allow for more frequent replication
Multiple backup options
Back up directly from SAN, over LAN, with virtual appliance, or direct from target
Centralized control of distributed deployment
Includes Enterprise Manager, a web-based console that provides a consolidated view of your distributed deployment; includes federation of multiple backup servers, centralized reporting, and consolidating alerting
FastSCP
Leverages Veeam’s proven FastSCP engine
Synthetic backup
Eliminates the need for periodic full backups (provides “forever incremental” backup), thus saving time and space
SmartDedupe™
10x space savings on backup storage
SmartCDP™
Near-continuous data protection (near-CDP) at a fraction of the cost of traditional CDP
Instant File-Level Recovery
Windows
Linux
Other
Unix, Solaris, BSD, Mac
Indexing and Search
Windows guest file system indexing
Creates an index (catalog) of all Windows guest files that have been backed up
Search across backups
Current backups
All backups
(current &
archived)
Quickly search for guest files across backups
SureBackup™
Recovery verification
Manual
Automated
Advanced VSS support
Application-Item Recovery
Universal application-item recovery
OS- and application-agnostic object-level recovery for application administrators
User-directed recovery
Available for any application with a web front-end
Sign In
Leave a Comment
