There are some key differences between backups and replicas, and those need to be taken into consideration when deciding which way you want to protect your important tier 1 VMs. In many cases, the answer will be to use both since backups and replicas serve fundamentally different purposes.

Simply put, Veeam replicas do not provide sufficient long-term protection for a VM since it is limited to a maximum of 28 restore points, and you can not use copy jobs to put a replica on a secondary storage or tape. It does, however, offer the best recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) in case of a disaster. This is accomplished by the fact that a replica is a ready-to-run copy, available without the need to actually restore the VM from a backup repository. This means that the VM is stored uncompressed on a VMFS or NFS datastore and ready to be activated at any given time. Remember, backups in a Veeam backup repository are stored in a compressed...