Veeam just published an interesting paper describing how its product, Veeam Backup, uses the Microsoft Volume Shadow Service (VSS) feature to perform a live backup and restore of Windows guest operating systems.
The paper also compare the Veeam implementation of VSS with the ones from Vizioncore and VMware (both the new VSS-friendly snapshot and the Consolidated Backup approach).
Of course this is not an independent comparison so it should be carefully verified before accepting the matrix above, but it’s an interesting aspect to evaluate and discuss with your pre-sales representatives.
Update: Veeam promptly answered forwarding the video testimonial that supports this paper. It’s available at their corporate blog here.