Greetings Spiceworks community,
I'm curious as to how the community has fared in comparison of VM level backup solutions. I'm currently testing a few solutions, and wondered not only if anyone else out there had made the same comparisons, but if there is anything else I should consider.
Currently, at the top of my list are NAKIVO and UNITRENDS. Working for more than one company, I've had the chance to test out VEEAM already, and both NAKIVO and UNITRENDS blew it out of the water right off the bat.
I'm hoping to have a solution that runs throughout the day invisible to my users, which doesn't sound all that difficult, until you look at the way these solutions do their backups.
The environment here is simple - a few Windows Server 2008 VMs, a few Linux VMs, nothing showstopping ... until we get to my MS SQL server (also running on Server 2k8). This is where I'm having my troubles.
For recovery purposes, the backup software has to do a quiesced snapshot of the VM - which means VSS is used to take a point-in-time snapshot of the current drive states to recover from. This VSS inclusion is where we have our problem - VSS will pause all disk activity and transactions until this snapshot process is complete, and while that is less than 30 seconds to accomplish, it causes a fault in our ODBC connections to the SQL server.
I've spoken with NAKIVO about this issue and their solutions were very poor, including bad advice like "Why don't you just backup when not production isn't happening then?" and "Well, you can turn that feature off, but you might have troubles recovering. Why don't you turn it off and see what happens?"
I haven't spoken with Unitrends on the issue yet, because my reading has led me to believe that I can get past this limitation by using an Agent on this server (I would LOVE to get verification on this fact, by the way...), which is something that I haven't tested yet (need to build another test VM for this, there's no way I'm installing an agent on a production unit until I'm sure it's the solution I want to run).
So community - little help? I'd love to hear from anyone who has compared these guys to each other, and see what everyone came up with. The VSS pause is the deal breaker for me, and the main reason I'm steering away from Nakivo. My other solution with them was to run it without quiesced snapshot, and have the server transactional logs offloaded elsewhere so we can replay them - but that's a "bailing wire and duct tape" answer to the problem, and frankly, I'm not shopping for bailing wire...
Thanks in advance for any feedback I receive!
Bill