Just another good one from Veeam’s Anton!

Functionality wise, top 3 differences between host based replication Veeam v5 and SRM v5 are:

1. Multiple replica restore points vs. single restore point
In other words, if you don’t spot the corruption immediately, your replica will have absolutely no use. Consider virus infection, or application data corruption – both are very hard to spot immediately.

2. Application-aware image processing vs. basic file-level consistency
We perform application-specific VSS backup step when grabbing the image, as well as application-specific VSS restore steps upon failover (when replica VM is first started) as per Microsoft requirements. vSphere replication just picks up the image without looking inside or trying to meet any Microsoft requirements on how application should be backed up and restored. Exchange webinar goes into specific details using Exchange as example.

3. File level restores from replica
You decide how this is important for you, I know many customers love it.

v6 adds much more stuff to this list (big focus on replication there), but since v6 not generally available yet, it is not fair to use its features as differentiators (even though we are so close!)

SRM is great for storage-level replication and whole site failover orchestration, and our replication is great for smaller scope outages and better protection of individual most critical workloads due to multiple restore points. My take is that vSphere 5 replication is way to basic to provide replacement for our replication (especially with v6 functionality), but neither our v6 removes the need for SRM v5 in scenarios where storage-level replication and site failover orchestration are required to meet RTO and RPO in case of large scale site-wide disaster.

Of course, there is also huge price difference, but that does not matter for you since you already own SRM anyway.