Is VDP Really That Bad?

[MPCDI]

We currently utilize EMC Avamar for our backup and restore solution at the client level.  Pushing out EMC Client and Agents for all clients.  The current EMC Appliance isn't aware of our VM Solution?

However, we are looking into adopting VDP or VDP Advanced as an alternate backup/recovery solution since it leverages Avamar too.

Is it really as bad as this forums makes it out to be? Should I just stick with what works?

Currently running vSphere and ESXi 5.1

[schepp]

Hi MPCDI,

in vSphere 5.0 I was quite unhappy with VDP but as I'm running 5.1 now for several weeks the VDP seems to have improved a lot. I currently use it to backup about 60 production VMs and it's running quite smoothly.

The only real point of criticism I have right now is the logging and error reporting. The logs are scattered all over the VDP appliance and the log analysis is really annoying and time consuming. Most times you won't see an error on the web client UI telling you why the backup job didn't succeed. It just says it failed and you have to go very deep into the appliance to analyse the problem (you can of course open a SR everytime a Job fails if you got time for that).

So I think VDP needs some improvements to keep pace with 3rd party vendors, but it's not that horrible anymore as some may say. Also I haven't tested VDP 5.5 yet, so my comments only apply to vSphere 5.1

Regards

Tim