Comments on: Virtual Machine Backup Products vs. Hyper-V Replica

By: Nirmal

Nirmal — Thu, 30 May 2013 03:33:00 +0000

Hi Stephen, Thank you for your comments!

Sorry to say but we’ve already planned as to what to publish in the Part V of this series.

Yes, We’ll definitely write an article on Replica Performance.

Stay tuned.

Thank You,
Nirmal

By: Nirmal Sharma

Nirmal Sharma — Fri, 17 May 2013 10:38:00 +0000

In reply to Michael.

Hi Michael, Thank you for catching that! Fixed it!

Thank You,
Nirmal

By: Stephen Barash

Stephen Barash — Fri, 17 May 2013 03:58:00 +0000

Great article Nirmal, thank you.

I think it should be further emphasised that unlike a normal backup, replication is really only good for one thing – hardware failures. Changes such as inadvertent deletes user objects, mailboxes or files, contracting a virus, installing something that causes problems, etc. will be quickly replicated to the other server. Replication won’t help you here!

Of course if you enabled ‘application consistent’, and catch the software issue fast enough, then you may have an hour window to stop replication, fail over, and save the day. But, like I wrote in part 2 of your replication series, I bet this would bring the performance of most servers to its knees.

I would love for you to write a part 5 concerning performance. To emulate a typical small / medium sized business, take two mid-ranged servers, put a few virtual machines one one (Make one a terminal server), configure replication, and lets see how they actually perform in a (mocked) production environment.

Regards,
Stephen

By: Michael

Michael — Thu, 16 May 2013 13:32:00 +0000

I have one quibble with this article. You said that, “In case you need to backup individual files or folders, you will have no choices expect to use a virtual machine backup software like Altaro Hyper-V Backup Pro software.” However, I am unaware of a way to backup individual files or folders using Altaro Hyper-V Backup. It does not even allow you to select individual volumes to backup. It will backup each volume within the virtual machine, utilizing VSS.

I think you may have meant to say that you can *restore* individual files or folders. That statement is absolutely true. However, the statement that you can backup individual files or folders appears to be false, unless there is a feature in the software that allows you to do that, of which I am unaware.

Michael