A good friend of ours, Michael White with VMware let me know about a blog post he had forthcoming following the public announcement of VMware's vCloud Director product general availability. Michael is the Americas Solution Specialist SE for business continuity and disaster recovery for VMware. He contributes to the Uptime (Business Continuity) Blog at vmware.com.

Michael has been doing a good deal of testing with vCloud Director specifically in his domain of expertise. In his latest blog post he describes some of his results. Specifically of interest to me is Michael's testing of Veeam Backup & Replication v4 and the native ability to protect VMs that have been provisioned by vCloud Director.

If you are using agent based backups already in your organization, you can continue to do that. This may not work for you depending on the security that you have enabled in your cloud. If you are using the vStorage API set for the backup it may or may not work for you. Currently, the VMware Data Recovery (vDR) product will not work when backing up vCD provisioned VM's. This should be fixed in the next release of vDR. But generally, your software should work. In my testing I used vDR v1.2 (which didn't work), Backup Exec 2010 R2 13.0 Rev 4164 (agent based and worked) and Veeam 4.1.2.125 (which worked).

So if you want to start testing the new vCloud family of products, know that Veeam Backup & Replication, which is built on a solid architecture using available APIs and best practices, has you covered both today and in future.

A big thank you goes to Michael White for the testing and acknowledgment.

"We've received numerous questions from our partners and customers on why a competing product won the Gold award in the Business Continuity & Data Protection category. We know that judges are put in a difficult position when they have to choose from almost 200 products in a short period of time. For this award, the judges cannot, and do not, install, test or evaluate the products in a lab. Instead, they mostly rely on vendor statements in their judging process. We encourage all customers to "Put Veeam in the Lab" for a head-to-head comparison with competitive products, and make the right decision for your environment. We are confident you will find out why Veeam Backup & Replication is #1 for VMware backup."

So, if you're interested in seeing why Veeam is #1, fill out the form here and we'll send you some information as well as help you get started on evaluating Veeam Backup & Replication in YOUR environment so you can makeup your own mind on who the winner really is.