VMware Communities: Message List - Pro's and Con's for Esxpress and ESX Ranger

Re: Pro's and Con's for Esxpress and ESX Ranger

ronzo — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 00:04:58 GMT

Brian-
All in good spirits! With the VMware market growing everyday, us and those guys are going to be crowded out by the big boys soon enough. (or crushed like bugs)
The only high blood pressure I know of is from MS not wanting to support VMs!

thanks
ronzo

Re: Pro's and Con's for Esxpress and ESX Ranger

kix1979 — Tue, 06 Mar 2007 00:01:59 GMT

Good point, where are the points I need to widen the gap between Mr. T! hehe

Re: Pro's and Con's for Esxpress and ESX Ranger

BrianG — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 23:57:16 GMT

Hey look at that.

Gasprofitt started you guys going again, marked this thread answered and didn't even give you any points for your blood pressure.

'Doh

Re: Pro's and Con's for Esxpress and ESX Ranger

kix1979 — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 23:52:17 GMT

Another question I have for all of us, me included... Is there a set of standardized tests for backups, similar to the process used for SQL testing for hardware? I'd love to have a standardized set of VMs or something that could be used for bake-offs or something.

Also I forgot to mention, if your SAN infrastructure can support 2G+ fibre channel cards, it will improve speeds even further.

Message was edited by:
kix1979 Add the fibre stuff

Re: Pro's and Con's for Esxpress and ESX Ranger

kix1979 — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 23:48:55 GMT

With any product that uses resources on the host, you are not going to run a backup during production hours. There is no reason to run VCB within a 10 hour window, since it uses no resources on the ESX hosts. Therefore you can run VCB 24 hours with minimal impact. Now granted, there are exceptions to this, but those VM's could be scheduled during what you would consider to be the backup window. In addition to VCB, if you use VCB and network based backups, you are now able to do a combination of backup technologies that scales out and up with minimal costs. Why use one backup technology when you can leverage both?

Re: Pro's and Con's for Esxpress and ESX Ranger

ronzo — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 23:27:56 GMT

In begging to differ, lets review the math.

Suppose I have my physical server, a dually box, or even a 4 way. It has my 1Gb (or 2GB) fiber card. Now mind you, this is a Windows box, running VCB and some type of backup software.

Assuming this machine was getting 25mb/s on backups and you could run 4. OK, I'm assuming that this Windows server could be reading, compressing, backing up data at 100 megabytes per second. Yes, stay with me here.
10 meg/sec = 35 GB/Hour (100mb)
100meg/sec = 350 GB/Hour (1000mb)
So 10 hours at 100meg/sec (1000mb) would get you 3.5TB of backups.

Now I rounded the numbers a bit.
In your 10 hour backup window, your VCB box can backup 3.5TB. So for 10TB, you need 3 VCB proxies?
How does VCB scale, or am I missing something?

thanks
ron

And about the esxpress daemon in the console. There are jobs in the console that create, control and destory the VBA VMs. All the actual data processing happens in the virtual space. So if you have an 8 way host, you can run 8 backups if you choose.

Message was edited by:
ronzo

Re: Pro's and Con's for Esxpress and ESX Ranger

kix1979 — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 23:27:59 GMT

VCB or VCB integration has no impact to your systems when you do a backup vs. console or virtual appliances. Also since you are mentioning, keep in mind that esXpress does install inside of the service console and runs a daemon on the host.

Re: Pro's and Con's for Esxpress and ESX Ranger

gogogo5 — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 23:26:47 GMT

esXpress installs a daemon into the SC, esxRanger does not install anything into the SC.

Re: Pro's and Con's for Esxpress and ESX Ranger

jrhodes — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 23:21:50 GMT

Yes, I forgot to mention the VBA technology.
Vizioncore uses the console to do their backups.
esXpress uses VMs to do the backups (VBAs).

Jim

Re: Pro's and Con's for Esxpress and ESX Ranger

kix1979 — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 23:04:12 GMT

Another plus is the backup speed. Maybe someone has
the numbers, but I think esxRanger can't compete with
the GB/h that esXpress delivers through it's
(parallel-running) VBA-technology.

I beg to differ on this point. When you compare GB/hr as well as Backup Impact vs. GB/hr you might be suprised.

Re: Pro's and Con's for Esxpress and ESX Ranger

cheeko — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 22:05:05 GMT

Definitly a plus for esXpress, they're support is outstandig. Whenever you have an issue, you can be sure that you well have support immediately. And when i mean support, I am talking about in-depth technical support and problem solving.

Another plus is the backup speed. Maybe someone has the numbers, but I think esxRanger can't compete with the GB/h that esXpress delivers through it's (parallel-running) VBA-technology.

People like it because it's reliable - Set and forget.

Test both products, see what works better in your environment and make a decision.

Re: Pro's and Con's for Esxpress and ESX Ranger

jrhodes — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 20:12:24 GMT

I have used ESX Ranger for over 2 years.
Ranger does very well if you have a small shop. For us, we had to pull the plug on it because it just could not handle the amount of VMs we were throwing at it. We have around 500 VMs running on 20-24 ESX hosts. We asked vizioncore to come out and help us get it running. Their response was "We don't do consulting anymore".

We switched to EsXpress, and we having it working much better.
PHD consulting was execellent at providing us what we needed. They came out and set us up and helped us work through our problems.

Jim

Re: Pro's and Con's for Esxpress and ESX Ranger

petedr — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 18:33:40 GMT

I can only speak about the esXpress product. We have been using it in production for about a year now. Think it is very easy to use plus it has lots of features. Backups run in VBAs ( Virtual Backup Appliances ). This offloads the backups to the virtual space. Configuration can be done in a text menu or a GUI helper. Support is excellent and very responsive.

Their free version does Full backups only. They also have an inexpensive Starter edition which enables their Delta Technology. They also have a Professional edition which adds additional features.

Definitely recommend it.

Re: Pro's and Con's for Esxpress and ESX Ranger

femialpha — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 18:26:18 GMT

I will definitely send you one but just to give you a clue, take a look at leostreams P2V virtual appliance. It is much more user friendly and doesn't look like an open source product for geeks. Don't get me wrong, i like your product but in a company where we use lean production principles in decision making, we would consider esxranger a better product.

Re: Pro's and Con's for Esxpress and ESX Ranger

ronzo — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 18:21:44 GMT

Hi Femialpha-

Can you send me a list of your specific complaints, as we're always making esXpress better from peoples suggestions. (support @ p2v.net)

thanks
ron mckelvey
phd technologies

Re: Pro's and Con's for Esxpress and ESX Ranger

kix1979 — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 18:06:44 GMT

No flaming war that I can see. As you said, both products are well respected and perform the functionality you want at the core. However, each has different bells and whistles that you really need to evaluate for yourself. Based on which features you like the most and gives you the reliability you are looking for will determine the product to go for.

Both are available for download to trial/use and are fully functional. Give them a download and if you run into issues at all contact the support for either. I know both give you support during testing.

Kix

PS. I do work for vizioncore

Re: Pro's and Con's for Esxpress and ESX Ranger

femialpha — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 17:10:34 GMT

I have evaluated both products and I am leaning towards esxranger unless my budget can not accommodate it. If i were the only one managing the virtual environment, esxpress would be a no brainer but for my windows centric shop, my team would be better off with esxranger. Secondly, you have to allocate resources to the virtual appliances esxpress uses and the numerous items it registered with virtual center made it look cluttered.

Esxpress is cheaper though and there is a free version, whereas vizioncore is yet to release a free version of esxranger for vi3.

Message was edited by:
femialpha

Re: Pro's and Con's for Esxpress and ESX Ranger

ANSA — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 16:55:44 GMT

Touche

Re: Pro's and Con's for Esxpress and ESX Ranger

mittell — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 16:52:26 GMT

Lol, there's always one. Personally I can't stand Macs but each to his own.

Re: Pro's and Con's for Esxpress and ESX Ranger

ilatimer — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 16:44:14 GMT

mittell,

I am going to have to disagree. Mac OS X is a far better operating system than Windows.

As for Esxpress and Ranger, I agree. I know that Ranger interfaces with VCB, but I am not sure about Esxpress (if you are looking for something like that).

Re: Pro's and Con's for Esxpress and ESX Ranger

mittell — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 16:35:23 GMT

Oh dear, I sense a flame war coming.

They're both good products in their own right and both work well, I believe both do evaluation version so I'd recommend trialing both and choosing the one that you like the best, rather than relying solely on the opinions of others.

As you'll probably see shortly, people tend to like one or the other - it's a bit like Mac OSX vs Windows vs Linux, I wouldn't say one is better than the other, they're just different approaches to the same problem.

Pro's and Con's for Esxpress and ESX Ranger

Gaprofitt — Mon, 05 Mar 2007 16:04:56 GMT

Can someone who has reviewed both products give me a pro's and con's of each. I'm looking for some opinions on which product to go with for backing up running VM's.

Thanks,

Greg