Posted by mattr on September 27, 2009 at 9:28 am
Vizioncore have finally released 4.1 of vRanger DPP – it has a plethora of fixes for various issues that have been raised since 4 was released in July.
A list of the fixes are detailed here
A few people on their support forums suggest they were a bit premature in releasing 4 – I was surprised that it was released so quickly after the beta 3 – so perhaps they were right. I am still waiting for them to fix an outstanding bug about restoring to hosts that reside in folders within Virtual Centre.
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Posted by mattr on May 26, 2009 at 9:56 pm
I have begun playing with the new vRanger 4 DPP Beta 2 to see how it compares with the current version and more importantly with the current rival Veeam 3.0.1.
Firstly it is important to note vRanger 4 is beta – there are bugs but the basics seem to work. I am not going to go into the differences between its predecessor – there are numerous major changes which you can check out at Vizioncore’s website.
However I thought I would just try a little test to see how vRanger and Veeam compare in a simple head to head backup.
I was using an HP Minitower with SATA drives as the backup server running both products – connecting to the same VMWare ESX 3.5 host (an HP DL380 G5 with local SAS disk). All were running 1Gb NICs.
The VM Guest being backed up was a 20GB Windows 2003 image – the results were as follows:
Vizioncore vRanger 4 DPP Beta 2
Time Taken : 17m2s
Backup Size : 4.9GB
Reported Throughput : 22MB/s
Veeam 3.0.1 (Set to Optimal compression)
Time Taken : 15m17s
Backup Size : 8.9GB
Reported Throughput : 22MB/s
Veeam 3.0.1 (Set to Best compression)
Time Taken : 14m6s
Backup Size : 8.9GB
Reported Throughput : 24MB/s
EDIT: After advice from Anton (see below reply) I recreated the job for the Best setting – the results were as below so Veeam still wins the race on speed / compression
Time Taken : 15m23s
Backup Size : 4.5GB
Reported Throughput : 22MB/s
I ran multiple tests for vRanger to ensure the same result and two different tests as noted above for Veeam as it had the option for altering the compression settings – ironically while this ‘Best’ function improved the speed of the backup the resulting file was the same size. Overall vRanger was acheiving compression of 75% versus Veeam’s 55% – it will be up to the individual to whether speed or size is most important.
So things are looking hopeful for vRanger at this stage although until a finished product is released there is no certainty what the final build will achieve. There are still quite a few glitches in the beta gui that need attention before it will be as clean as Veeam in terms of speed and usability.
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Posted by mattr on May 7, 2009 at 8:49 am
The company I work for is heavily HP based in the datacentre – so I was quite disappointed to find that my first foray into Hyper-V was somewhat scuppered by the lack of compatibility between HP Network Teaming and Hyper-V. As ESX 3.5 could handle teaming itself it remained the natural choice for our virtualisation elements.
However having seen Windows 2008 R2 RC was on route, I wondered if the new version would allow for greater compatibility – to my surprise my first google search found this white paper explaining how to install this successfully with the current incarnation of Hyper-V.
While I love VMWare, I am always reminded by my manager that our worldwide MS licencing gives us a very competitive cost model for Hyper-V – the ability to run a host with sufficient NIC resilience may mean a dual platform will be on the cards …
I will most likely download the R2 version and test this … Will post my findings.
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