Virtualization Spotlight

PHD Virtual Technologies, provider of the pioneering esXpress data protection and recovery solution for virtual machines, today announced that esXpress 3.6 has been extended to support VMware vSphere 4. This new release of esXpress also includes significant enhancements for all versions of VMware’s ESX platform version 3.0.2 and above.

An optimized deduplication engine dramatically increases backup speeds and fuels performance for file-level restores, as well as VMDK restores and data archival via a Windows Share.

“PHD Virtual’s esXpress was the first solution to truly take advantage of virtualization by intelligently using the virtual machine to back itself up,” said Dave Bartoletti, senior analyst and consultant, Taneja Group. “With new support for vSphere, esXpress is a scalable, cost effective backup solution which can protect virtual environments without additional hardware or software investments.”



esXpress, with new support for vSphere 4, performs backup and recovery using the virtual environment itself. By creating virtual backup appliances (VBAs) – small virtual machines – the solution can be deployed in minutes on VMware servers, and provides the most scalable environment for backing up virtual machines.

New performance enhancements include:

1. Improved file level restore speeds are now up to four times faster
2. Data Restoration and Archival via Windows’ Shares are now up to four times faster
3. Improved PHDD deduplication image-level restore speeds up to twice as fast
4. Accelerated deduplication engine provides initial backups that are seeded at double the previous rates

esXpress continues to support up to 16 concurrent backup/restore streams per host and all backups can be self-restored without using esXpress or other proprietary virtual machine infrastructure. esXpress’ block level backups are de-duplicated source side, ensuring data is compressed and deduped before it every leaves the host. This ensures that network traffic is kept to a minimum even while backing up over a WAN link.

“Along with now supporting VMware vSphere 4, we continue to enhance esXpress’ performance so that all customers can benefit from these performance improvements in any VMware environment, 3.0.2 and above,” said Joe Julian, executive chairman, PHD Virtual. “esXpress continues to simplify backup and recovery for virtual machines while lowering costs by reducing hardware requirements. This helps organizations relying on their virtual infrastructure to receive unprecedented economies of scale, simplicity and management.”

Pricing and Availability

esXpress 3.6 supporting VMware vSphere 4, is currently available in small business and enterprise versions. Pricing starts at $1,000 per host with unlimited number of sockets. For more information or to download a trial version, please visit http://www.phdvirtual.com/products/esxpress-virtual-backup.

On Sunday Eric Sloof wrote a blog post highlighing a potential issue with version 3.1 of Veeam Backup. The main focus of the discussion surrounds drastic reductions in back-up speed with servers upgraded to vSphere 4.

The people at Vizoncore and Veeam have posted on the subject in several online spaces also. One of Veeam’s product managers who runs a blog has posted on this topic here: http://www.vnotion.com/?p=38 explaining testing he has done on the issue.

View the VMTN discussion thread here: http://communities.vmware.com/message/1302322

Jason Mattox and Steve Philip also contributed to the discussion (excerpts below from Eric Sloof’s blog):

Jason Mattox :

Putting my differences aside, (I’m from vizioncore) and wanting to see this fixes for all VMware users, here is what it think is going on. I think this is due to the read speeds from VMFS on ESX 4 VS ESX 3. Give this test a try, create a 10 GB VM and run this command, how does it take on ESX 3 vs ESX 4? You have to remember that VCB over the network is using VMware API’s which are going to get more disk/read time. I think VMware has starved the COS reads again. I think this same thing happened from ESX 2.5.x to 3.0 and when 3.0.1 came out it was fixed, I’m not 100% on that ,but I think that’s what happened. time cat
JM_10GB_Test-flat.vmdk > /dev/null

Steve Philp :

As the person that posted the original question both on VMware’s forum and on Veeam’s forum, I can tell you that we’re all just waiting for VMware to acknowledge and fix the issue. We have been working with VMware tech support for a few weeks now, providing them with backup and file copy performance data involving the Service Console. We have no idea whether they’re seeing other reports of the issue, they haven’t been very forthcoming with info. I can confirm that the backup speed problem ONLY affects transfers using the Service Console. Using VCB / SAN mode in Veeam Backup allows full backup speed. Here’s the followup posting on my blog with our “lesson’s learned”.