VVEngine is not worth the time, money and hassle

[bhouck@fkp.com]

I was excited when I first read about VVEngine. I bought the license based on the performance of Vice Versa. The ability to pre-run the compare and running the software as a service were two big items on my wish list.

I set VVEngine to run as a service but was immediately regretting it because once running as a service, you have no access to any of the logs or reporting tools. What the heck??? I ended up keep the profile loaded but disabled in Vice Versa just so I could view the log.

Then there was the five-job limit. What the heck part two? I run about 12 nightly jobs so regardless of any of my plans to completely "retire" Vice Versa, I could not fully commit to VVEngine. So I broke up my jobs to those that are lower resource intense in VV and the bigger jobs on VVEngine.

At first it ran great. I did not have a lot of those errors that others talked about with the changes not being detected etc. Unfortunately, that did not last long. Inexplicably, all but one of my five jobs started not detecting. Since these were large jobs I was a bit concerned. I restarted the service without affect. Then I removed and re-added the jobs and all but one job came back online. Unfortunately I did not set the schedule correctly (one wonders about the logic behind checking boxes to exclude days-to-run in VVEngine and then having to check boxes to include them in Vice Versa). When I fixed the jobs, it decided not to check for changes again. At this point, I decided to simply move my most problematic jobs back to Vice Versa.

What a waste of time.

[TGRMN Software]

Hi, sorry to heat about these issues.

Regarding running VVEngine as a service, what do you mean by "you have no access to any of the logs or reporting tools"? Can you send a screenshot to support@tgrmn.com? Under which account did you setup the service to run?

Also about VVEngine not detecting the changes, if you could contact support we can try to see why that is happening? Are you monitoring for changes only local folders or network folders too?

thanks
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TGRMN Software Support
http://www.tgrmn.com
http://www.compareandmerge.com

[Steviebone]

I manage many machines with vvengine from a centralized source. Works great for me. The ability to break up and organize all the tasks into groups is great. And though the myriad of options available has a learning curve, with careful thought and planning it's well worth the effort.

File monitoring across a network is problematic at best. Especially if there are a lot of changes. This isn't a fault of vvengine. Try doing this with any other utility. There are latency/bandwidth issues inherent to networking and the way operating systems functions across the network.

Depending on each situation there are workarounds. For instance, you could deploy local instances on each machine to the monitoring, save changes to an archive and then use that archive to update across the network. A little messy but doable.

An admin here also suggested the possibility of using vss shares, something I didn't even know existed (and haven't tried yet).