vRanger Pro vs Veeam vs ???

blargoe

Looking for your opinions on the latest versions of vRanger Pro and veeam Backup, if you have any experience with either. I'm in dire need of changing our VM backup strategy and I have some $$$ to spend I'm currently starting to evaluate vRanger 4.5 and Symantec Netbackup's vStorage backup functionality that is included with Netbackup 7 (since we already own NBU and are familiar with it).

Currently, we are running backup agents inside of the guests and running traditional backup to tape...

Our environment is a vCenter with 5 ESX hosts and about 110 Windows VM's with another host or two +20% VM growth in the next year. Light to medium utilization on the VMs. Looking to backup to disk and, possibly, copy to tape.

Thanks in advance

blargoe

jgiambr

We have been using vRanger Pro for almost a year. Overall it is a pretty good product. I just recently upgraded to 4.5. A disappointed in the upgrade process though as I lost all my settings and had to re-create them. That is easy to do in VRanger. Why did we choose vRanger?

No agent needed.
Disk backups.
Fast backups, semi-fast restores.
Easy setup ( I was up and running in 15 minutes and I hardly needed to look at the docs to do it.)
Very intuitive interface.
Cost was reasonable.
Compression of backups.
File-level restore.

I have had very few problems and when I did have a problem support from Vizioncore was pretty good. I was in the same boat you are in now about a year ago and vRanger Pro has worked out pretty good for us so far.

A couple of cautions though:

Vizioncore was bought by Quest Software recently and I am not too impressed with them so far. Lots of marketing fluff now, vRanger is probably their best product the other ones are not that great and are more expensive.

Storage-make sure you have lots and I mean lots of storage, VRanger can compress the backups (and it is good) but once people realize you can image their VMs everyone once a backup and more then one backup. I started with 1TB for 30 VMs which I thought would be fine but once we started doing alot of P2Vs that space disappeared. Also make sure you have enough space to do the snapshots because that is how vRanger does the backups.

Good luck!

blargoe

My experience with products that Quest takes over isn't that great either. But most of my peers that I've talked with use vRanger and really like it. I will have to determine whether the difference is significant enough to warrant adding a new backup platform to our shop though.

astorrs

I'll throw in my vote for Veeam over vRanger. While esxRanger used to be the innovator Veeam has really taken over that segment in the past 2 years. In fact if you buy Veeam 4.1 by June 18th you get a free upgrade to their new 5.0 Enterprise Edition (here) which includes their new SureBackup technology - which in and of itself is pretty damn cool.

And just to be fair. PHD Virtual is the other player in VM optimized backup. Also the vSphere integration in NBU7 is really good and you can get away from guest backups (and if you didn't have a substantial amount of virtual machines I'd be tempted to leave it so you only had 1 product handling backups), but I'd probably throw them all in a ring and see who comes out on top.

VancouverTechie

I second the vote for Veeam over VRanger Pro. Hands down a better product. Now with the new version and just block level changes for backup.