I just attended a webinar hosted by vizioncore about their new esxRanger 3.0 and esxCharter 2.0. If you are into virtualization with VMware ESX, you should definitely check out their products.

The nice thing about esxRanger 3.0 is the integration with VMware's VCB platform. VCB as a platform provides services to get the vmdk off the ESX host using the fiber adapter of the VCB proxy (a separate physical box). Normally, when you integrate traditional backup products such as BackupExec or Tivoli Storage Manager, VCB creates a file on the proxy with a size equal to the vmdk and then dumps the vmdk data into this file. The backup software can then pick it up. What vizioncore is doing is intercepting the data as it is delivered by VCB and do their work such as compression and performing a differential backup. The advantage here is that you do not need as much storage and it is much faster.

VCB in itself does not provide restore options but esxRanger 3.0 does. It is just a matter of selecting a previous backup and specifying additional restore options. Note that the restore is done over the network, exactly because VCB does not provide a mechanism to get the backup to ESX using the fiber connection. This will probably become available in a later release of VCB although that is just my thought.

esxCharter 2.0 now works with VI3 and provides interesting performance views and reports of your entire VI3 environment (above what VirtualCenter 2.O provides). Useful reports include vmfs storage and vmdk files so you can get a nice overview of virtual machine storage. The new billback features allow you to calculate costs for virtual machines more easily to charge back for their use.

vizioncore also has a product called esxReplicator. Support for VI3 is supposedly coming Q1 2007. esxReplicator is interesting in scenarios where you want to provide something like a standby ESX server and you don't want to use features like SAN storage, HA etc... For example, a customer of ours is looking to use such a solution using two ESX Starter editions. ESX Starter only allows local storage so the virtual machines running on the primary ESX server could be replicated with esxReplicator to the backup ESX.

Of the new products, esxRanger 3.0 looks very promising because of the integration with VCB. You should compare the product with esXpress 3.0 before you make a decision. Both products work differently and both are still in beta.

Lots of things are moving in the ESX backup products space. We can only applaud that because backup is one the biggest headaches in a virtualization project, especially when you start virtualizing large workloads that handle lots of data.