As discussed briefly in my previous blog post comparing
Traditional and VMWare specific Backup applications, Veeam and vRanger have
both been built from the ground up specifically to backup Virtual environments,
and hence have some fundamental similarities. Before I get into discussing the
differentiators between the two products in detail, I thought it would be
worthwhile providing a quick overview of some of the key similarities…
Both Veeam and vRanger leverage the vStorage
APIs for Data Protection (VADP’s) which allow them to backup VMs across
multiple vSphere hosts, without requiring the installation of agents either in
the ESX servers or the vSphere hosts. When compared with traditional backup
software approach of installing agent on each Server or Virtual server to be
protected, this approach substantially reduces the complexity of installation
as you don’t need to spend time installing agents in each VM to be protected.
Additionally, ongoing management of your backup solution is easier; product
updates can be applied centrally, and both products allow you to backup either
individual VMs, or by vSphere host, so if you add a new VM to a protected host,
it will automatically be included in the backup job.
Another major benefit of this approach is that the VADPs
allow Veeam / vRanger to perform backups from a separate backup server or VM
without placing a load on vSphere hosts. By utilising the snapshot capabilities
of VMware
vStorage VMFS backup snapshots can be performed without any disruption to
the VM’s, or applications that run on them, effectively eliminating the
traditional backup window. In contrast, using an agent based or guest level
approach to backing up VM’s can lead to significant resource issues on the host,
especially if backup jobs are scheduled to run simultaneously. Staggering
backup jobs can offset this effect, but will increase backup windows.
Veeam and vRangers integration with the VADPs also allow
them to take advantage of Change Block Tracking (CBT) to increase the speed and
efficiency of incremental and differential backups. The CBT feature creates a
ctl.vmdk file for each VM containing a map of the virtual disk, that indicates
the timestamp and last modification for each zone of the disk since the last
snapshot was taken. Veeam and vRanger can access this information, and only
need to process the blocks of the VM disk file that have been modified since
the last full, incremental or differential backup was taken.
Currently, Veeam and vRanger also share some common
weaknesses; they are both only capable of backing up Virtual Machines, so if
you have any physical servers you will need a separate application to protect
them, and there is no tape support in either product, so if you need to backup
to tape, you will need a second solution to push the backups generated by Veeam
/ vRanger to tape. In addition to this, for applications that are not VSS aware,
backing up at the host level can cause problems as the applications don’t know
they have been backed up, so won’t truncate logs etc. It’s worth noting that
both companies have plans to address some of these issues, I will discuss this
in more detail in a later post discussing development roadmaps.
In summary both Veeam and vRanger have similar fundamentals,
both can offer some substantial advantages and have some drawbacks when
compared with traditional agent based backup software. Once you move past these
fundamentals however, there are some fairly substantial differences between the
products. In my next post I will compare both products approaches to data
reduction, and the methods they employ to minimize the amount of storage
required to hold backup data.
Next Up: Veeam Vs.
vRanger Part 3: Data reduction techniques
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