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Today Veeam Backup 3.0 was released and the big eye-catcher of this backup and recovery tool is that it is the first tool ever that supports ESXi without the use of VCB:
Veeam Backup 3.0 now supports ESXi backup without VCB. Veeam Backup is the only VMware backup solution that lets you backup and restore virtual machines running on all existing editions of ESXi, including ESXi free.
As I’m using ESXi at home I decided to quickly test if there was a speed difference in backup with Veeam backup 3.0 vs Veeam Backup 3.0 with VCB (over LAN) vs Backup Exec 12.5 with VCB (over LAN). The VM has a disk size of 10GB and has 6,5 GB files on it. In all situations the backup-destination was to disk.
Here are the stats:
Veeam (Agentless):
Total VM size: 10,00 GB
Processed size: 10,00 GB
Avg. performance rate: 36 MB/s
Backup mode: agentless
Veeam (with VCB):
Total VM size: 10,00 GB
Processed size: 10,00 GB
Avg. performance rate: 34 MB/s
Backup mode: VCB NBD
Backup Exec 12.5 with VCB:
Backed up 13 files in 1 directory.
Processed 6.238.658.855 bytes in 9 minutes and 26 seconds.
Throughput rate: 631 MB/min (10,5 MB/s)
So in this situation, Backup of a VM on an ESXi server is the fastest with Veeam Backup 3.0 agentless. It was only slightly faster than Veeam backup 3.0 with VCB, but a lot faster than Backup Exec 12.5 with VCB. Of course, this is not a real test I’ve done. It’s just a quick look at the new functionality that Veeam offers now, and I must admit, it works like a charm.
PS: I think there is a typo on the Veeam site:
Veeam Backup is the first enterprise-ready solution that combines backup and replication in a single product for fast recovery of your VMware ESX servers.
You cannot actually backup or recover an ESX server with Veeam Backup, just the VM’s running on it 
February 18th, 2009 at 12:31 am
Trilead VMX Explorer has been able to back up VMs from any edition of ESXi for a while now! Veeam Backup is not the first.
http://vmetc.com/2008/12/05/free-tools-with-virtualcenter-like-features/
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Sven Huisman reply on February 18th, 2009 10:56 am:
Thanks Rich. It looks like you’re right. Although VMX Explorer only includes BETA support for ESXi, it doesn’t seem to use VCB to backup VMs on ESXi.
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February 18th, 2009 at 12:31 am
Thanks for the mini-review! And you’re right about the typo on our web site … we’re fixing it to correctly read:
Veeam Backup is the first enterprise-ready solution that combines backup and replication in a single product for fast recovery of VMs running on your VMware ESX servers.
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February 18th, 2009 at 4:58 pm
vRanger was a month earlier with 3i support.
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Sven Huisman reply on February 18th, 2009 5:37 pm:
According to Vizioncore’s site vRanger requires VCB.
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February 18th, 2009 at 11:40 pm
Thanks Sven for the review… especially appreciate quick performance testing you’ve performed.
I guess I also have to respond to both comments above since they are very misleading.
1. “Trilead VMX Explorer has been able to back up VMs from any edition of ESXi for a while now! Veeam Backup is not the first”
a) Trilead support is in BETA yet – no production code available.
b) Trilead is about 10 times slower than Veeam on 1Gbps LAN (OK, this is my own testing, so I encourage everyone to retest)
c) Not really a backup tool (honestly… paid product gives about same level of functionality around backup as free Veeam FastSCP 3.0, also in beta now). Again encourage everyone to compare Backup offerings head to head.
2. “vRanger was a month earlier with 3i support.”
a) Not really. Veeam supported ESXi backup via VCB since version 2.0 release in August 2008.
b) vRanger does not support all ESXi editions – so they cannot claim to have full 3i support at all.
c) vRanger requires VCB for ESXi backup (mandatory). Cannot even restore network backups from ESX servers to ESXi – only VCB backups!
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Sven Huisman reply on February 19th, 2009 10:35 am:
My test was actually performed with an upcoming version of ESXi I’m not allowed to talk about
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