Veeam Backup 4.0 Release

[Maverick]

This is not correct, our System Engineers have been demoing v4 on request starting 3 weeks ago. In case you missed, we have a link where you can register to live demo with our systems engineer on this page.

We had one lined around 4 weeks ago and we were then told that it wasn't possible, I've been on leave in between and wasn't aware that we could have a live demo of version 4 now.

This is not correct, as a Product Manager for Veeam Backup I can swear that we DID NOT slip the GA date we have set for this product all the way 3 month ago (which is when the product got into condition where release date became predictable). Many of my colleagues will be reading this post and I would not lie in front of them. We did recently take attempt to release v4 a bit earlier than planned, but based on closed beta feedback we decided to stick with originally planned GA date to better polish the product and implement some feedback.

The information that I was given (around the time of the demo arrangement) was that it would be out within a few weeks in early October which suited our time frame,

I am sorry to hear, but of course it is completely your choice. I hope you are aware about at least some of the vRanger 4.1 shortcomings. Our competitive analysis against them (that you can request through our sales) is actually 5 pages long bullet list, and having evaluated vRanger in-depth I just cannot understand why would anyone prefer it over the current Veeam Backup 3.1 release (not even talking about v4).

That's a good point but other factors come into play, Vizioncore have some larger resellers in Australia as opposed to Veeam so the perception is that support and integration will be better with Vizioncore (this is a factor after our failed rollout of another product). This is why running version 4 in our environment would be advantageous as we can compare properly, our backup replacement project is running months behind so there's pressure to get this resolved.

Have PM'd you with a request for some info that may assist me.

[Gostev]

Ahh, all sales like to make up dates... this is so frustrating... we will investigate this specific occurence.

Vizioncore have some larger resellers in Australia as opposed to Veeam so the perception is that support and integration will be better with Vizioncore (this is a factor after our failed rollout of another product).

I know that we have 300+ customers switched to us from vRanger while we used to run competitive upgrade program Q2/Q3 this year, hopefully some of those customers from Australia (who are registered on this forum) can stand up and confirm that this perception is just wrong...

One thing we can agree on (based on vRanger 4.0 forums), is that this product does require a lot of communication with support right now (the release is complete re-write).

I replied to you in PM.

[dlove]

Maverick,

Good luck with vRanger. Having run from them (very quickly and glad we did), I know first hand of the headaches I've had running their product (not v4 DPP but the beta was horrible at best). I ran the vRanger 3.x product for several years and while it worked for the most part, I just don't believe in their future. Talk about a company that never makes a release date, how many months and i mean many months did they push back releases? The forums are horrible there, 999999 views on each thread and 2 responses? I call BS on inflated views or everyone is incapable of contributing or responding.

They were a good company way back when but like most acquired companies, support dwindles and the new owner sets the rules I'm looking forward to the new veeam release and in the meantime we've got the 3.1.1 release humming along with no problems other than some architectural changes.

You will end up paying more for a product with less features and replication will be a separate product making the cost unjustifiable. Our maintenance was up with Vizioncore and we were able to move over to Veeam for about the same price and we get support for free in the first year! To me it's a no brainer but to each his own...

[tsightler]

Yeah, I agree, good luck with vRanger. I think I'd have to be held at gunpoint to ever user one of their products again. About 18 months ago we looked a Veeam and vRanger. Veeam was a young product, version 1, and we already thought it was looking impressive, but it had enough limitation that it just didn't fit and, while version 2 was coming, we thought we were happy with a nice bundle of vRanger 3.2 and the replication product. The only real weakness we saw with vRanger was the lack of support for "fast" file level restores but they promised that would be fixed with vRanger 4.x "in a few months". Well, we lived for a year with vRanger 3.2, while the dates for vRanger 4 were pushed and pushed. The 3.x product was OK, but certainly had it's share of problems, and the replication product had major flaws, like requiring a system running with a snapshot always open, which causes performance and management issues.

After waiting and waiting for v4 for nearly a year we finally got the "beta" version. Wow, what a horrible product. We understood it was beta quality, but it probably should have been alpha. After taking a year to get us a poor beta product which, when we purchased they claimed was only "months" away actual release, we decided it was time to run. Veeam had their "competitive upgrade" offer, we ran Veeam 3 through it's paces in the lab and saw how much it had improved in only a year (a time in which vRanger had only regressed), and we jumped and never looked back. Now I'm not saying vRanger 4 DPP might have finally matured and become usable, I actually don't know, but I lost all faith in the company and I've seen huge amounts of complaints about that product. Veeam has been great, both as a product, and as a company, and we can't wait to get v4 into production. The beta is astoundingly impressive both in performance and features, and when paired with vSphere 4 is practically the perfect vmware backup solution.

[withanh]

Anton,

Nice tweet about backup speeds with Veeam 4...now throw a guy a bone, when do we get it???

[Gostev]

Later this month

[withanh]

Not much month left

[AJ83]

Is there anything changed to the way data is stored, so we need less tapes for offsite copy`s?
Now i need to copy the VBK`s to tape every day, wich takes alot of tape (6 LTO2 tapes) And with a retention of 2 weeks, thats alot of tape!

There is also the problem of the copy taking al day! So we have no time on tape drive to restore if needed, we would have to kill the copy2tape job, and lose a days worth of offsite copy.

I.E. i would like to be able to make incremental tape copy`s.

[withanh]

We copy to disk (i.e. Buffalo Terastation) and take that offsite. It's fast and it's big and arguably as reliable as tape.

h

[Gostev]

We do this as well in-house, but nevertheless we will be adding tape-friendly backup modes in the next minor release for those customers with tapes.

[alexr]

Anton,

Could you elaborate on tape-friendly mode? We are considering LTO4 library to replace our LTO2 but it is not cheap. We would be happy to keep the old one if we can decrease amount of backups every day. Will it be incremental backups alternative in addition to synthetic ones?

I wish VMware "modified blocks tracking" API marked swap file blocks differently so it can be optionally excluded from backups. Swap files make big chunk of useless daily changes in backups

Thanks,
Alex

[Gostev]

Alex, did you think about moving swap to a separate disk on all VMs, and excluding this disk from backup processing? This is something you can do today, with the current version.

Yes, we will just have "regular" incremental backups alternative in addition to "reversed incremental" as we do it today for our synthetic backup.

[alexr]

Anton,

I thought about it. Do you allow exclusion of OS logical disks (disk on partition created by OS) or only separate VM level disks (created in VM config)
If it is VM disk than it seems to be lots of disks... Not sure if a shared disk could work (never used them) because file names are the same. Also
I wonder if it will have any effect on restoring VMs. Would it still be "restore and play" (particularly important when shadow copy processing should be done after restore)?
Does disk exclude mean restore would not restore data but re-create excluded disks?

Thank you,
Alex

[Gostev]

Alex, excludes are on VM disk level only. No, restore will not re-create the missing disk, they would need to be restored manually. But Windows should boot fine without swap disk (I believe it will just create swap file to the system disk automatically in such scenario).

[alexr]

Alex, did you think about moving swap to a separate disk on all VMs, and excluding this disk from backup processing? This is something you can do today, with the current version.

Yes, we will just have "regular" incremental backups alternative in addition to "reversed incremental" as we do it today for our synthetic backup.

Would it be possible to do both? That would be great - keeping latest synthetic backup on disk and taping incremental backups. How do you plan to define retention policy for incremental backups? It should probably be separate from synthetic backup policy. I assume you would specify how often to replace "full" part of incremental backup (from synthetic or full) and to keep all increments between "fulls"? Will incremental part be one consolidated or each increment separate?