Replication product comparisons - vReplicator, Veeam etc

[FredPeterson]

Does anyone have a link comparing the various 3rd party replication products to vSphere Replication?

I'm going to guess that ultimately it will come down to cost first and then likely personal preference, but I'm curious if there are actually performance differences in the products.

With V.R. available now as part of the licensing, it seems like it would be entirely pointless to continue using something like vReplicator - but I'd like feedback if anyone has made the switch or chose not to, etc.

Thanks!

[gommog]

I've recently done a comparison between Veeam, vmware replication and double-take, we wanted to upgrade to esxi 5.1 so double take was out as it's not compatible with 5.1. What i found was that Veeam had a lot of useful features, way more than VR, and was very easy to use but it uses snapshots to provide the replication function. This ultimately slowed VMs down so was a no go for us, if you don't mind taking the performance hit and you've got the environment to support it then take a look at Veeam. We'll be pushing out VR and i'm just hoping it will catch up to veeam in terms of features in the future.

[ch1ta]

First of all, I’ve to admit vSphere Replication seems to be nice products capable of meeting variety of end users’ expectations. Nevertheless, even the good product might have several limitations. So, here are my 2 cents regarding comparison VR and VBR, or more specifically, short list of VR limitations (from my perspective):

• vSphere Replication provides single restore point only. It can be considered as a limitation number 1.

• Lack of failback functionality.
• No traffic compression.
• No traffic throttling.
• No network customization (network mapping).
• No re-IP upon failover.
• Basic VSS quiescing (no application-aware processing, which is necessary for replicating VM running VSS-aware applications (such as Active Directory, Microsoft SQL, Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint), since this functionality guarantees backup transactional consistency of such VMs).
• Works within single vCenter only.

Hope this helps.
Thanks.

[mvalkanov]

Hi,

Some of the features mentioned are available when using vSphere Replication together with SRM:

- Failback with automated reverse replication configuration (available since 5.1); manual configuration of replication in the reverse direction and using initial copies is available since SRM 5.0 (or in VR 5.1 without SRM)

- Network customizaion (network mappings) (available in 5.0 and onwards)

vSphere Replication works in both single vCenter server topology (so called ROBO case - remote site hosts replicate to hosts at a central office, managed by a single vCenter server) and also per-site vCenter server topologies.

The other features mentioned by ch1ta are being addressed in upcoming releases.

Regards,

Martin

[ch1ta]

In fact, my thoughts were completely about vSphere Replication by itself.

Anyway, thanks, Martin, for your clarification about VR features and VMware roadmap.