VMworld 2009 Fool’s Gold Award

As a person who follows VMware Backup market and evaluates all of its players closely every day, I decided to share my opinion on this VMworld 2009 award for Business Continuity and Data Protection category, where Vizioncore Inc. took the gold award for vRanger Pro 4.0.

Here’s what we know officially:

The gold winner provides a cleaner interface and all-around faster tool, speed being crucial in this category.

Let me review these claims now, one by one.

Faster

Unlike other finalists, vRanger 4.0 can only perform backup with a service console agent. This approach provides awful performance with VMware vSphere, which is a recognized issue per numerous threads on Vizioncore support forums. What it means in the real world is 18 hours to back up a single Exchange server. Simply unacceptable performance for real production usage. Are you saying “speed being crucial in this category“? Hmm…

On the other hand, Veeam Backup, besides having exactly the same service console agent mode with direct-to-target architecture, also offers VCB-integrated backup that allows us to back up directly from the shared storage, achieving some truly great speeds.

That’s right, this makes Veeam Backup more than 5 times faster when doing full backups, and more than 10 times faster when doing incremental backups.

10 times faster than “all-around faster tool”.

But wait… forget about VCB-integrated backup mode for a minute, and check out the independent test results for backup in service console agent mode.

Veeam Backup is still faster than vRanger.

Cleaner interface

Not to spend much time on this, the “user interface cleanliness” is extremely subjective topic, and in my personal opinion, it is simply unprofessional to list this as a first and most important bullet. Just like some people may like the vRanger 4.0 UI, other people love the Veeam Backup UI (you can find multiple positive comments about this on the Veeam Community forums).

Technically speaking, vRanger 4.0’s user interface dialogs and especially wizards do not follow Microsoft management UI design guidelines, but this is something I would not mention even in internal comparison, because again, UI design is an extremely subjective thing.

These two features conclude the official “test matrix” for VMworld 2009 award – no other benefits were mentioned for vRanger. Would it be safe to assume that this is because there are… none?

But don’t take my word for it, let’s continue with a few more bullets that I consider completely crucial for any good VMware disaster recovery solution to have.

Reliability

This one is completely outstanding. As we all know, vRanger 4.0 is a complete re-write, and based on comments anyone can see on the Vizioncore support forums, is extremely buggy.

However, it is one thing is when bugs affect the actual product (e.g. cannot backup or restore VM), and it is completely different when it affects the whole production environment.

Officially recognized fact:  Vizioncore vRanger 4.0 Pro Crashes vCenter 2.5. Apparently, the “best solution for VMware Business Continuity and Data Protection” is actually about making disasters and preventing business continuity by crashing vCenter servers!

Are you saying that the “best” VMware backup solution is the one that VMware support recommends disabling and not using?

Hello?

ESXi support

As all of us know, ESXi is VMware’s recommended platform going forward.

VMware ESXi is the recommended platform for both new and existing customers. Future hypervisor releases will solely be based on this architecture.

I personally know about several of the world’s largest enterprise deployments (10000+ VMs) that run 100% on ESXi today. But the vRanger 4.0 architecture is based on a service console agent, and with such architecture, ESXi can never be supported.

So the “best” VMware backup solution is the one that does not even support VMware’s primary platform?

You must be kidding me!

VCB support

VCB has always been the only recommended way to perform VMware backups in enterprise environments because it allows for LAN-free backups directly from shared storage, without affecting production ESX hosts CPU cycles or taking network bandwidth from production VMs. vRanger 4.0 does not support VCB.

Apparently, the “best” VMware backup solution is the one that does negatively impact production ESX and VMs.

These are just three most important features.I could list many other bullets of important functionality that vRanger 4.0 lacks – our feature-by-feature comparison against them has a list of bullets that is five pages long. Features that long ago became quite standard for VMware backup and are present with both the other finalists: inline deduplication of backup data, built-in replication, Linux file-level restore, and many other are just not there in vRanger 4.0.

So it should be very clear from the facts presented above that vRanger’s gold award means nothing. It is clear to me that this award is extremely political at the very least. This definitely does not present the award sponsoring organization in a good way, and puts big question marks on its credibility.

Lastly, my only request to the community is the following: please don’t trust questionable awards blindly, put us in your lab instead!