For the last week I have been implementing a VMware vSphere
5 environment with HP DL380 G7 hosts and EMC VNXe3100 storage*.
*The VNXe3100 is
very easy to use. One thing to watch out for if you’re creating VMware
Datastores from the Unisphere GUI, is that it formats them as VMFS3 - not a big
problem as can easily do a live upgrade from VMFS3 to VMFS5 via the vSphere GUI.
EMC Avamar vs Veeam
The customer already had EMC Avamar backup appliances
(one appliance in the Head Office, another in the DR site,) which they were
using to backup their physical environment via EMC Avamar agents loaded on the
guest O/S.
EMC Avamar comes as either the:
·
EMC Avamar Virtual Edition - a VMware virtual
appliance
·
EMC Avamar Data Store - a purpose built hardware
appliance (like the below image.)
EMC Avamar feature notes:
·
Can backup physical servers (via an agent) or
virtual servers (via a proxy virtual appliance).
·
Dedupes at source (via the agent); so if you’re
using it to backup physical servers in branch office sites, it only transmits
the changes across the WAN links.
·
Data Store appliances cannot be bought singly -
must buy at least two to make a replicated pair.
·
Data Store appliances can be configured in a
Redundant Array of Independent Nodes (RAIN) for high availability and
reliability.
·
Licensed per TB.
·
Can make deduplication reductions of up to 95
percent, meaning each licensed TB can be worth 20TB of backups.
·
Pricing (don’t quote me on this) is something
like £20k per TB for the physical appliances of which you must buy two, and
gets cheaper the more TB you buy.
After reading the above, then it is pretty clear that you
cannot really compare EMC Avamar vs Veeam Backup and Replication. Veeam would
need to be considered with a deduplication appliance like DataDomain, Dell
DR4000, Falconstor, Exagrid, …. Veeam is also licensed per host socket. And
Veeam is not able to back up of physical servers.
Veeam has the upper-hand with regards replication; as far
as I could make out with EMC Avamar (please feel free to correct me if I am
wrong here), in a DR situation the VM backups replicated to the DR site would
first need to be restored to a virtual infrastructure; of course, if Site
Recovery Manager is being used as the DR solution, then this would not be a
problem. Also, I don’t see an instant recovery feature, and …
All said, for a pure VMware and/or Hyper-V environment, I’d
favour using Veeam with deduplication appliances. For customers who’ve already
invested in EMC Avamar and are happy with the solution, there’s unlikely to but
much value for them to purchase Veeam, unless it is purely to use the
replication functionality.
Double-Take Availability
Tip: If P2V-ing servers where only the absolute minimum
of downtime is acceptable, see if you can get a free-trial of Double-Take
Availabilty (or even a paid for edition) and use this to configure a virtual
replica of the physical server, then failover when you’re ready!
Additional note on
Double-Take softwares:
·
Double-Take
Availability competes with PlateSpin Protect.
·
Double-Take
Move competes with PlateSpin Migrate.
I would consider Symantec System Recovery if you need to P2V-ing servers. That goes for V2P too. It's an imaging product that's lightening fast. Can’t get much better than that.
ReplyDeleteCA ARCserve Replication and High Availability is a great tool for P-V and V-P (even V-V) replication with Zero downtime and much much cheaper than doubletake.
ReplyDeleteCA also offers an imaging solution called D2D that can do P-V and V-P if you prefer a snapshot approach. That's very similar to Symantec System Recovery proposed above.