Embotics‘ PR team sent me an interesting white paper a while back. It is called “The Pragmatic Path to Cloud Management.” Embotics is putting forward their view of of the following topics.

• Private cloud and the datacenter
• Challenges to adopting virtualization solutions (considering both resources and complexity)
• Laying out the pragmatic path to cloud management
• Embotics’ recommendation on the proper path to cloud management

If you’re interested in Embotic’s view of cloud management, this is worth reading. It is simple, easy to understand and, for the most part, makes a great deal of sense. Organizations would be well served by thinking through the benefits and challenges of a virtualized environment. If they believe that creating an on-premise, in-house cloud environment would be a more effective way for their departments and business units to consume computing resources and for them to deliver those services, this sort of pragmatic approach is the right way to go.

I have a few problems with one portion of the paper. “VM stall” is is a new buzz word that several hypervisor and management software companies have been putting forward. This paper presents this concept as if it is real and not something that has been contrived to shame, cajole or make people think that they simply must put every component of every workload into a virtual machine.

This, of course, is self serving. These suppliers make their money by helping organizations move things into virtualized environments and then to manage those environments. The truth is that virtual machine software is useful for some tasks, but the wrong choice for many others. Putting everything into a virtual machine might create performance, scalability or management problems. (see When is virtual machine technology the wrong choice? for more information.)

I believe that IT decision makers move tasks into virtual servers when there is a business or technical reason for the move. If there is neither a technical nor a business reason, the workloads are staying where they are.

“All our major shareholders participated in the round, along with one new major external institutional investor. We were fully subscribed and raised all that we were seeking,” says Embotics CEO Jay Litkey, noting that the firm isn’t disclosing the actual amount for competitive reasons.

It’s been busy at Embotics, which makes software that helps companies control costs and IT performance by automatically managing their virtual servers from creation to destruction.

The firm – named an OBJ Startup to Watch in 2009 – just released the newest version of its flagship V-Commander technology, adding the ability for users to automate the creation of virtual servers and measure the effect of those new servers on their capacity and performance, and the new funding will help Embotics grow international sales and marketing for the product, Mr. Litkey says.

The company expects to add roughly 10 new staff over the next year, with plans for inside sales and engineering jobs in Ottawa and sales and marketing hires for its U.S. and Europe operations.

“Quarterly, we’re seeing our business double; in many markets seeing business double year-over-year is good, but we’re actually seeing it every quarter,” he says, adding that Embotics had a 100-per-cent customer retention rate last year, with clients either renewing their maintenance or putting in repeat orders to expand.

Embotics also expects to be able to announce new partnerships with “big brand names” this year, representing the fruit from its channel program.

Mr. Litkey says the company benefits greatly from being in the hot virtualization and cloud computing space, which is currently topping the list of IT focus areas for many companies. Businesses are increasingly turning to virtual servers to save the cost of having physical computers in data centres, but as those virtual machines can be created and removed with the click of a mouse, they require software such as V-Commander to keep track of them and ensure they aren’t clogging up IT resources or causing unexpected downtime.

Embotics got its timing right as well, with its choice to invest a significant amount up front on the infrastructure needed to ensure V-Commander would be both robust enough to support clients and scalable enough that customer growth wouldn’t outstrip the technology’s capacity.

All those factors have combined to make Embotics an attractive prospect for investors, Mr. Litkey says, which meant it wasn’t as challenging for the firm to raise money as it might have been for other companies in this climate.

“We have never had an issue in this company getting financing, largely because we are in this hot market, we have a great team, and we’ve been executing properly,” he says.

Even at the height of the economic downturn in December 2008, Embotics was able to secure its previous round of funding, of which this most recent financing is an extension.

Mr. Litkey notes the company isn’t profitable yet, as it’s choosing instead to grow aggressively.

“It’s always a balance between growing to expand market share and maintain a leadership position, and achieving profitability. It’s a month-by-month, quarter-over-quarter decision, but yes, we could get there. It’s a wonderful position to be in.”

His impressive background includes executive marketing roles at Panasas, the leading supplier of high-performance parallel NAS storage systems, PathScale (acquired by QLogic), Inktomi Corporation and SGI.

Although, I have personally focused on the virtualization marketplace since 2002, I was not that familiar with Virtual Instruments beyond knowing that they are involved in performance monitoring and troubleshooting of FC-based SANs.

Virtual Instruments is a spin-off from Finisar and became a stand alone company in June of 2008.

Finisar has been at the forefront of the optical communications industry, delivering products (GBICs) that enable high-speed communications for networking and storage applications.

Virtual Instruments is focused on Virtual Infrastructure Optimization. They offer both hardware and software products that enable SAN and VMware administrators to accelerate I/O problem identification and resolution, optimize virtual and physical infrastructure availability, improve application performance, and increase server and SAN utlilization.

Those that follow the virtualization marketplace, know that traditional monitoring tools often fall short in finding and solving problems.

Without the proper tools in place, customers frequently hit a“Virtual Stall”. Early VMware adopters (the “wild west days”), virtualized fast and furious and saw tremendous cost savings from early consolidation efforts. As organizations, move beyond virtualizing the “low hanging fruit” to migrating production, mission critical applications to VMware , some hard bumps are being felt.

Beyond a need for more sophisticated tools (Embotics, CA, Akorri), different skill sets are needed coupled with a strategy to gain “operational discipline” to meet the growing demands of a more complex, virtualized production environment.

This is where Virtual Instruments comes into view.

As VMware stated at their recent VMware Partner Exchange, over 80% of VMware deployments are connected to a Fiber Channel SAN. Virtualized applications, when combined on a large FC SAN can be very hard to optimize in terms of performance and availability, especially mission critical applications running on this type of infrastructure require real time I/O monitoring and should look to Virtual Instruments as a candidate to help. If you have hundreds of FC ports or more and hundreds of TB’s of FC SAN storage it is essential that troubleshooting is done fast and effectively.

Their software platform is called VirtualWisdom while the hardware platform is called SANInsight. What really sets Virtual Instruments apart form all other virtualization management and monitoring tools is their hardware devices, which non-intrusively perform deep SAN I/O traffic analysis on all transactions in real-time. Part of the SANInsight hardware is a fiber-optic network TAP (traffic access point), which essentially copies the SAN traffic and diverts it to a real-time monitoring device. The Virtual Instruments SANInsight TAP Patch Panel System recently won the 2010 Product of the Year Award from SearchStorage.com magazine in the Storage Networking Equipment category. According to Virtual Instruments, combining network TAPs with fiber-optic patch panels will dramatically simplify and lower the deployment of network TAPs into new and existing fiber-optic networks.

No one else in the world can do what they do and they accomplish this sophisticated monitoring with special hardware to look into FC SANs Software- only monitoring solutions can not provide the level of visibility that is needed to measure real-time latency data in a Fibre Channel SAN nor can they monitor the SAN physical layer elements, like GBICs, SFPs, and cabling.

Hardware instrumentation, the direct real-time measurement of network traffic data is a key part of their “secret sauce”. Virtual Instruments is unique in that they monitor all hardware and software transactions and provide I/O transaction-level visibility into every FC frame. Software only products normally are polling-based, so they are seeing the data only every 15 to 20 minutes – not an acceptable solution for organizations running business-critical applications. I/O intensive applications (SAP, Oracle), those that are being migrated to VMware, and internally developed core applications all require critical troubleshooting capabilities where real time monitoring is paramount.

The type of customer that would need their solution will have a large FC-SAN environment with 100s to 1000s of ports and often petabytes of data. In these environments, it has become essential to instrument the SAN, especially for those beginning to move mission critical applications to VMware.

Virtualization makes troubleshooting and performance optimization an order of magnitude more difficult than what is typical in a purely physical enterprise. VMware and SAN administrators are hampered in virtual environments since the relation between the I/Os and the virtual machines from which they originated might not be known. Most of the time, where the storage actually resides in a virtual environment is usually not known and IT is blind to the interdependencies between virtualized servers and storage systems.

Virtual Instruments has close to 100 customers. The average selling price of their solution starts at over $100K, but can easily reach $Ms for full-scale deployments at the largest IT organizations. HDS was named as the largest reseller partner of Virtual Instruments, although Dell and EMC have also both resold their products.

Global 2000 companies make up the vast majority of their client base and financial services firms, their largest customer segment, have looked to Virtual Instruments for help since this vertical typically feels down-time and performance slowdowns as extremely expensive headaches. It is easy to understand why a 6-figure price tag isn’t that expensive if down time is costing a company several hundred thousand dollars per hour.

Virtual Instruments is in a unique place, with a very unique product and they are following the money.

The big money being spent in virtual management products is coming from companies with big FC-SANs where virtualization management products are not viewed as just a “nice to have”, but a “must have”.

Back in August at VMworld 2010 (San Francisco) , Veeam announced vPower and Veeam Backup & Replication 5.0.

After taking a quick look at their press release and viewing an introductory webinar, I am beginning to dig in and appreciate that this is an excellent, innovative offering.

What really peaked my interest is that after talking to end user IT and understanding that Veeam v5 address several key issues for them, that this product deserves a closer look.

In the field, customers have been asking for the ability to verify their backups automatically, restoring individual application items, instant image recovery, Exchange and AD granular level restores and a reduction in the number of separate software products needed to manage secondary data (backup, replication, DR, deduplication, etc.)

The majority of readers of Virtual Intelligence Briefing are familiar with Veeam, most recently Veeam Backup & Replication v5 won VMworld 2010 Best in Show.

Veeam also claims several industry firsts:

• 1st to have VM backup & replication in one product
• 1st to add support for VSS & ESXi
• 1st to support file level recovery for Linux
• 1st to support vSphere

Back in the early days of VMware, customers were looking for something, or anything to automate VM backup beyond using scripts. David Bieneman and Vizioncore responded with esxRanger (later named vRanger). vRanger was the first VMware ecosystem blockbuster product.

David and Tyler Rohrer are now on their way to making it happen again with their company Liquidware Labs with products for VDI assessment, VDI management and profile management. David and I sold a great deal of vRanger in those days.

Veeam’s new Veeam Backup & Replication 5.0 comes to the market with several significant industry firsts and features.

With SureBackup technology, one can verify each backup every time instead of just hoping until it is the dreaded time to restore. Veaam calls this Recovery Verification (patent pending). What also is new is U-AIR™ (Universal Application-Item Recovery).

It is pretty impressive that we are now at a stage in which customers will trust the backup of a production exchange VM with a product like Veeam. Veeam can do a hot backup of the running VM, so users & services are not affected. The user interface and work flow are intuitive and, as mentioned earlier, you can recover an entire VM or an individual file from the same image-level backup.

Verification runs when you want, usually in less than a minute since it runs from the compressed and deduplicated file. Veeam v5.0 automatically creates an isolated test environment of your backup, so production is not affected. The promise here is that it can reduce or eliminate the need for a dedicated test lab.

Most organizations treat VM backup the same way that they treat backing up physical servers. The problem is that products designed without virtualization in mind don’t do a great job with VM backup.

Another generalization is that IT usually isn’t thrilled with changing something that “works” unless of course it is game changing.

The definition of “works” often includes not meeting backup windows, RPO, or RTO and stacking tapes on a rack of servers in the corner with a system administrator that couriers home the most recent backup.

VMware didn’t make its way into the data center in the early days because it was embraced by IT; it came in the back door via developers and system administrators that were using VMware Workstation because they figured out that there was an easier way to run multiple servers and different operating systems on one device without needing to buy a separate server for each application.

Some folks figured out 4 and 5 years ago, that a VM was just a file and one can do a first pass at DR “on the cheap” leveraging virtualization by moving the file to a secondary site. IT does embrace virtualization today; however there are a few key areas in which IT is behind when it comes to virtualization: virtualization management tools and the back-up, recovery & DR of VMs.

The Wild West days are over for most mid-sized and large organizations that have already done the easy lifting of virtualizing the low hanging fruit of underutilized servers.

Some of my clients are more than 90% virtual.

Organizations are now realizing that they must “circle the wagons” and look closely at virtualization management and the back-up and recovery of VM s before moving forward with new virtualization initiatives.

A few of the rising stars of innovation are Veeam & Actifio, and they do this by leveraging virtualization. When you build the product from the ground up with virtualization, then you can truly leverage the power of the technology instead of having virtualization as a bolt-on fix for legacy products.

Actfio has been shipping their product for just a few months and their idea is to have one product manage all of your secondary data whether physical or virtual from one place. They remove the normal dependency of the storage management software to the storage hardware and allow you to manage almost any storage. For example, if one had an EMC CX FC SAN at your primary site, you would not need to have a duplicate, expensive EMC CX in the secondary site that is hardly ever used.

With Actifio, you can re-purpose storage or purchase inexpensive disk as your target for DR storage.

Actifio is a company to watch for a few reasons which are that the idea or concept really makes sense and that Ash Ashutosh and David Chang who were co-founders of AppIQ are leading the way at Actifio. AppIQ had a best in class SRM (Storage Resource Management) solution that was acquired by HP.

In summary for VM backup and recovery, Veeam Backup & Replication 5.0 should be on your short list. Delivering granular item-level recovery that is application agnostic is appealing.

The bottom line is that verification can save you from the false sense that a backup was fine even after backing up a corrupted file. You probably won’t realize that pain is around the corner until the next time you reboot your Exchange server and try to recover from a restore.

New innovative backup and recovery software that is based on virtualization technology offers users a much better way to verify the recovery integrity with speed and economy.

I’ve seen your name quite a bit over the years and am familiar with your book “VMware ESX Server: Advanced Technical Design Guide”; it was great to meet you at the recent New England VMUG. Tell us about Vmguru.com and how did this get started?

VMGuru.com is a personal blog that I started several years ago when I was starting to push the envelope on what VMware said I was allowed to do with their software while consulting. I had done some creative things around using VMware ESX 1.5 which, at the time, were quite cutting edge. I was looking for an outlet to share my information and settled upon the name VMGuru, as the “Guru” moniker is something that had actually carried over from a previous life while in corporate IT. Sadly, I do not have near as much time as I’d like to continue to share some of the cool things I do through my personal blog.

Your current position as Lead Architect – Virtualization Business at Quest Software, sounds like the dream job – “Generate new product ideas and enhancements into growing line of virtualization products “? Can you tell us a little more about what you do, and what the drawbacks are?

My daily responsibilities are quite fluid depending on where we are in a release cycle around a new idea or set of features. I normally find myself rotating around 3 distinct tasks. One of the biggest challenges I come across is when I have 3 concurrent projects, each of which are in a different phase. This tends to keep me quite busy, to say the least.

1. First, often at the beginning of the year, I find myself traveling around and getting in front of as many customers as I possibly can simply to talk shop. I still maintain a sizable test lab so can keep very up-to-date on the latest technologies. This enables me to work closely with current and potential customers on identifying key challenges they are experiencing as their datacenters shift towards a more virtual existence.
2. Secondly, I take the various discussions that I, and the product management teams collect from customers and identify any specific trends or common themes, and also investigate upcoming market trends that relate to the identified challenges. We then make decisions around strategies to fulfill those challenges and determine the business value of filling the gaps. Fortunately, with the financial support of Quest Software, we have several options open to us, whether we decide to build the new technology or we investigate an acquisition strategy to lower our time to market.
3. Finally, once the solution is spec’d out and submitted to R&D, I help determine the best way to market the new features or products as solutions that can be offered to our customers. This often involves enabling our sales teams as well as our partner channel with proper training and sales tools. Fortunately, the unique perspective acquired when doing initial customer interviews helps us focus on the key pain points and challenges, which really help us make sure we are doing the right things for our customers.

I can’t say there are significant drawbacks to what I do outside of the fact that my family life takes a hit every once in a while. Quest is actually an awesome company when it comes to understanding a mix of personal and professional life, or at least I don’t give them the choice. The overall attitude is “If our employees extend work hours while they are at home, they should also be able to enjoy a bit of personal life while at work”. This has enabled me to bring my wife with me on my travels on multiple occasions, which helps make up for the time I spend away.

What about your earlier experiences at Invirtus & Vizioncore?

My earlier experiences at Vizioncore and Invirtus (Both Quest subsidiary companies through acquisition) gave me a taste of what it was like in a startup company. Overall, roles within the organizations at the time I was there were quite loosely defined and I found myself doing complete 180’s as a direct reaction to a new feature request or customer comment. I can honestly say it was a great experience to go through the start-up thing not once, but twice, but having a definitive role and an opportunity to learn from some of the best in the business for a while will make me a much better individual.

What market segments are you targeting ?

The segments that we target actually vary by product or solution. This is all a part of properly analyzing the market and how our solutions best fit. There are several areas in which vendor solutions are actually good enough out of the box in the SMB segments, so instead of fighting an often difficult battle, we focus our development and sales efforts on mid-market and enterprise. There are also some areas in which competing at the enterprise level is difficult due to legacy software or technology methods, and the best opportunity is where vendor tools lack in the SMB and Mid-Market space. Our ability to accurately assess the market and attack the key segmentation instead of trying to sell everything to everyone is what actually helps drive our success within Quest.

What is the EcoShell Inititaive?

When I was “growing up” in Corporate IT and continued driving virtualization as a consultant, I found that I was simply amazed when I couldn’t do things that, to me, were extremely simple with the tools that were available. To my astonishment, 6 years later, many of these annoyances still existed, and were still causing all kinds of headaches for my customers. By utilizing some internal Quest Intellectual Property with our PowerGUI product, I was able to create a virtualization-specific version of the software that I branded as Virtualization EcoShell and distributed as free software to our virtualization customers.

Alongside the freeware product, I also launched a website called the Virtualization EcoShell Initiative (VESI) for short, which helps people get the most out of the software as well as share PowerShell scripting tips and tricks around virtual environments. In 11 months of existence, we’ve had over 25,000 downloads of Virtualization EcoShell and a steady increase in traffic to our community site, which to me shows the strength of our understanding of the needs of virtualization users, and our ability to provide them with powerful tooling.

Is there a person or company in the virtualization space that you admire or are keeping an eye on?

I’ll always have nothing but the utmost respect for one of my key mentors while in consulting with Ron Oglesby. He’s surprisingly patient (Even if you reboot his production servers mid-day) and was never afraid to share any knowledge. He really set me up for success. I also have tons of respect for the many virtualization authors out there. I know first-hand what it is like to take the time out of our already busy schedules, often on the personal side, to share the knowledge we’ve collected over many years to help people avoid making the same mistakes we have. There are simply too many to name.

Probably the question that you are asked the most – Quest and the Cloud; what can you tell us? When is the right time to move to the cloud?

From Quest’s standpoint, we are constantly looking at ways to better service our customers and simplify the use of our products through the adoption of the latest technologies. This can be seen by our recent announcement of our Quest OnDemand SaaS Services which are currently in Beta.

Personally, not being one that succumbs to the marketing of “The Cloud”, I’m of the opinion that organizations and consumers are, and have been there for some time. To me, “Cloud” is an overly generalized term to describe one, or a combination of, several key technologies. People who build virtual environments to provide capacity-on-demand are utilizing “Private Clouds” for infrastructure. I did this for the first time about 6 years ago I believe. Even going back prior to that, some would argue that using a service such as Akamai to increase bandwidth and availability of static web content is considered a cloud service by today’s standards. The key shift here is the introduction of off-premise clouds, and even hybrid clouds which enable workloads to seamlessly transition between the private and public clouds

New technologies such as Microsoft Azure, and even slightly older technologies like Google APIs provide a platform to quickly publish new applications using a defined development framework. We also see companies who were traditionally considered “Software as a Service” or SaaS vendors (also considered cloud technologies BTW) enabling platforms for writing applications, such as Facebook for social applications or Salesforce for business and CRM applications.

When it comes to adoption of these technologies it comes down to the simple question of “Is there an application or service being provided that can benefit my business without violating the IT Governance policies in place that must be adhered to at a price point that makes sense?” We have seen the SMB and Mid-Market segments adopting these technologies steadily now. As trust grows and security and compliance concerns are accommodated, we will see enterprise interest in these newer technologies increase.

What things are holding desktop virtualization back from wider adoption? What issue is top-most in your mind and why?

There are several inhibitors standing in the way of what I’d consider “Wide-scale” adoption of VDI. First is simply concern over end user experience. The target recipients of VDI instances are more often than not non-technical users who are prone to get frustrated with technology. Every time there is a change to the way in which they need to access their applications, or they perceive the “Network to be slow”, they get vocal…VERY vocal. If running a fat client application within a remote desktop instance appears to be slower or less responsive to the end user, it is difficult to have success in VDI implementation. That is why there is such a large investment from VMware, Microsoft, and Citrix to tackle this very issue. As more applications move towards using web 2.0 technologies and become online applications, the question of “Why use VDI at all” can also arise, as data is not persistent on the client and all processing is performed on the back-end servers.

In addition, many organizations expect to see cost-savings out of the box as the primary benefit of VDI. In 2009, where IT Spending was limited, this meant that projects that didn’t have quick ROI or were costly to get off the ground simply didn’t happen. When looking at JUST virtual desktops, the ROI doesn’t quite add up, mostly due to software licensing costs and increased storage demand. Organizations need to really stop and understand the processes around how VDI can change user management as well as the provisioning of operating environments and application workloads to see how desktop virtualization as a whole solution fundamentally changes how their users can work, and the cost savings associated with the larger picture.

How would you compare your firm with BMC, or CA?

When you historically look at any of the “Big 4” management companies (BMC, CA, HP, IBM) you get offered solutions that go as wide as anything you can conceive of sticking in your datacenter. What is traditionally lacking is adequate depth into many of the key technology areas. Where Quest traditionally excels is in identifying the top technologies seen in the infrastructure in the Application, Database, Windows and Virtualization management spaces and instead of going 7 miles wide and 2 inches deep, we focus on the depth of giving the internal subject matter experts the level of detail they truly need to most effectively manage their infrastructure. We aren’t focusing on owning all management within the datacenter, which I think is actually one of our strongest traits.

For the technologist reading this or the “virtualization champion” who appreciates “the deep dive”, can you tell this person something that he would really appreciate about a current product that you are involved with?

I’d actually recommend aspects of two different products. For those that are concerned with more than just pulling out VMware metrics and displaying them in a different format, which too many products do today, definitely take a look at the depth of what vFoglight can do. The ability to customize any dashboard, script business rules based on trends, and even chain portions of physical and virtual applications together to report on key SLAs make vFoglight a truly amazing and capable application.

For the guys responsible for administering a rapidly expanding virtual environment, definitely spend the time to check out what Virtualization EcoShell can do. While we provide 250 or so scripts out of the box, we actually mask the fact that PowerShell is really on the back-end of the application. For those wanting to learn this whole “PowerShell Thing”, we don’t hide anything about this application. All of our scripts can be viewed or modified, and the entire UI and set of actions is fully customizable using PowerShell. I have already seen some users and community members do some AMAZING stuff with EcoShell. The best part is that it is free of charge, so there is minimal risk in getting started, and it provides immediate benefit “out of the box”.

Where does Scott Herold go from here?

Right now I wouldn’t trade my job for anything (well, except the chance to retire early to a Tuscan Villa). I have the ability to create and generate new product ideas and continue to blaze new trails not just in virtualization, but as a technologist, and I have the opportunity to work with some of the best minds in the software business. I’m learning everything I can as fast as I can, and we’ll see where that takes me when the next big thing comes around.

Scott M. Herold, Lead Architect – Virtualization Business, Quest Software

Scott Herold leads product design and architecture for Quest Software. With more than a decade of industry experience in operating system, network, security and storage design, Scott has been a pioneer in architecting advanced virtualization solutions. Scott is also the co-author of two best-selling books, VMware ESX Server: Advanced Technical Design Guide and VMware Infrastructure 3: Advanced Technical Design Guide. Focused on helping organizations achieve the benefits of virtualization while minimizing the challenges, Scott is a frequent presenter at industry events and contributes to whitepapers and articles focused on virtualization best practices.

Check out Scott’s blog VMGuru.com

Veeam Software was founded in 2006 and boasts a strong line of VMware management products. They are best known for their backup & replication product and have expanded into other areas including management after they acquired nworks.

I remember exchanging a few emails with Ratmir Timashev, president and CEO , a few years back when they had either no presence or a very limited one in the U.S.

Veeam originally caught my attention with VMware Visio stencils and FastSCP, both of which are free products. There aren’t too many companies that have been able to leverage free products, however these guys have done so and they seem to be on fire. There are more than 100,000 users of FastSCP.

A somewhat interesting side note is that Timashev sold his company, Aelita, to Quest Software in 2004. Veeam’s main rival is Vizioncore whose parent company is Quest Software.

Veeam has had a few technology firsts in recent years – for example the first backup tool to work with Vmware’s free ESX hypervisor. Veeam is expected to begin to start supporting Microsoft’s Hyper-V

They had very early of support vSphere and vStorage and I found that their Smart DeDupe.

One slide included a few quotes from the Veeam Community forums:

“That’s right… 15 minutes… 670GB… insane!”
“Not only does Veeam Backup 4.0 compress this VM to 1/4 of the size but also in half the time “

In December of 2009 with Version 4.1, they announced support to Replicate to ESXi and support for CBT with vRDM disks.

With nworks , they are able to manage and monitor both physical and virtual servers & applications.

Veeam claims over 10,000 customers and say that they are adding over 600 new customers per month.

While Vizioncore continues to be the virtualization volume king in this space, Veeam is gaining ground. It seems that we have two excellent companies with Vizioncore and Veeam; their challenge is managing a large portfolio of products, integrating and leveraging products from recent acquisitions , competing with single product specialist companies such as Akorri & DynamicOps and the hypervisor OEMs themselves. So far both of them have proven to be nimble enough to do this and to continue to grow.