PeerSpot user
President & CEO at a tech services company
Consultant
One of the most important features is the self-restart feature which we use to provide remote backups.

What is most valuable?

One of the most important features of Veeam is the excellent self-restart feature. We use Veeam to provide remote backups for us as well as our customers. Many times a communications glitch will occur that will disrupt the backup process during the offsite backup procedure. The product will automatically restart the process and continue self-monitoring and restarting until the backup is complete and also notify our support staff of its status. This self-restart feature also works very well on the local backups should a rare error situation occur.

Another feature that is important to us is Veeams virtual server restart feature. This allows us to quickly restart a virtual sever. This feature provides an almost immediate server restart should a calamity occur.

Another great feature is the ability to backup only the changed files/blocks. This results in very fast backups once the initial backup is done. Compression is also excellent with the Veeam product. This saves space on the target drive and as well as time on the data transmission process. This is very important during offsite backups. Lastly, a great feature is the encryption protection on the backups that protects data during the offsite backup process.

How has it helped my organization?

It has greatly reduced the man power required to monitor the backup process. Coupled with the email notification feature, the BDR services that we offer can be managed by one person and subject matter knowledge can easily be transferred to another technician without extensive training.

What needs improvement?

We would like to see a product that supports Linux, however, we believe that this support is already in the works.

For how long have I used the solution?

We have used Veeam for about two years at our facility as well as at our customers facilities.

Buyer's Guide
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What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

We have had no issues with the deployment so far as multi-site WAN acceleration works out of the box, and so far we've been very happy with our experience

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

There have been no performance issues.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

We currently backup many TBs of data without any problem.

How are customer service and support?

Customer Service:

The level of customer support is excellent.

Technical Support:

The support personnel are very articulate, knowledgeable, easy to understand, and provide a quick turn around on our questions.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We have tried several other products and none were as good as Veeam. One competing product caught fire. Another product was not reliable on local or remote backups, and the other was extremely overpriced with low quality hardware, buggy software, low quality support, and low reliability.

How was the initial setup?

It should be installed by a IT professional who understands security, backups and bandwidth. However, this applies to any company that wants to establish a rock sold BDR process. Before the implementation is started be sure to map out the data that is to be backed up, calculate the bandwidth, disk space, and time required to do the initial backup. Next, set up the local backup first and get it running properly. Then, set up the first initial offsite backup remembering that the first offsite backup may take several days. After that, the offsite backups will run very quickly.

What about the implementation team?

We provide BDR services so we learned Veeam and installed it ourselves.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Pricing of Veeam is excellent and is an excellent value proposition for both partners and customers.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

I have used and evaluated many backup and recovery solutions. Veeam came out on top for ease of use, reliability of job execution, backup validation, and speed of recovery in virtual environments.

What other advice do I have?

Veeam has been the best BDR product that we have ever used. Although it does require some expertise to set it up correctly, once it is set up it runs perfectly. Use an experienced Veeam company or consultant or spend time learning the product. It is very worthwhile

Spend time to plan resources, bandwidth, etc. before installing the Veeam. Watch the Veeam process carefully in the first few weeks in order to learn what it does. It has a wide array of features so make sure you learn how to perform the various types of restores (e.g. virtual server restore, single file restore, etc.). Take advantage of the ability to provide local and remote backups and configure both for the target environment. What is very important, as in all BDR environments, is to regularly do a test restore of a few files to make sure that the backups and restores are working properly.

Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: We are a Veeam partner and very happy to be working with them. They have been and continue to be a very valuable partner.
PeerSpot user
PeerSpot user
Network Manager at a logistics company with 501-1,000 employees
Vendor
The ability to backup servers without an agent installed is valuable.

What is most valuable?

The ability to backup servers without an agent installed is very valuable. Many of our applications are customized by us, and may break with constant changes and updates to third party software and operating system changes. So the ability to integrate the backup solution into VMware for seamless backups is fantastic. Our users don’t know backups are happening, and it really becomes invisible.

Another feature we value is the ease of individual file restoration. Someone will submit a ticket for a file restoration, and we can have it finished within five to 15 minutes depending on the size of the file. Before, we would be figuring out which backup disk or tape had the server on it for that amount of time prior to even starting the restore.

How has it helped my organization?

Our company now has nightly backups, whereas before we only had weekly backups. It’s also allowed us to retire our cloud backup solution (HP Autonomy LiveVault), saving us about $40,000/year in storage costs. Since we completely control the backup environment, we’re able to have onsite backups, offsite backup copies, an archive, and even replication all through one interface. It’s made our infrastructure much more flexible, and in a disaster recovery situation allows us to resume business within hours instead of days or weeks.

What needs improvement?

Moving backup repositories and merging backup chains is either difficult or not possible as far as I know in the current release of Veeam Backup and Replication. This has made it inefficient to retire backup storage repositories, causing us to keep more backup files than we might otherwise do. This means we are wasting space simply to keep a backup for archive purposes, and I can see this being addressed with scale-out repositories in the future.

For how long have I used the solution?

Veeam has been in place for at least three years at my company, and I’ve used it here for almost two years. This has been across multiple rebuilds of the backup system to go from not useful to confident we can restore anything quickly.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

We did run into a few issues of certain applications not being entirely compatible with Veeam, or requiring a bit of customization to our backup jobs to ensure they work correctly. This is mostly due to SQL express databases not allowing truncation during backup jobs, which isn’t necessary a fault with the Veeam software, but our implementation of other products in our environment

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Stability has not been an issue when Veeam is installed on a physical server outside the virtual environment, but I would avoid installing Veeam on a virtual machine if you think you’ll be changing the CPU or Memory limits of the VM that Veeam is running. We found this created a very unstable installation for some reason, forcing us to move the Veeam installation back to a physical server. In some environments, a physical server is desired for direct SAN access or for limiting the impact of a backup server on the virtual environment, so a VM instance of Veeam may not be a consideration for many anyway. For those of you without the extra hardware to set up a dedicated Veeam installation, I’d recommend a set it and forget it mindset for the VM to avoid the possibility of performance issues.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

It's been able to scale for our needs.

How are customer service and technical support?

Veeam customer service and technical support have been fantastic. They’ve been very responsive, very professional, and have resolved every issue we’ve thrown at them quickly. One example is in the previous versions, there was an issue with rotating drives, and support provided a fix for us to use rotating drives for offsite backups within about an hour of us calling. Several other issues relating to database backups and log truncation have been resolved within at most a day or two.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

The company previously used Symantec Backup Exec, and Veeam was already in place (although poorly configured) when I arrived. We also used HP LiveVault online backup, which was a very poor solution and required constant baby-sitting to be sure it worked properly. We chose to discontinue using HP LiveVault because restores took a very long time, especially Exchange restores, for example, we had to restore a mailbox of a terminated user that was never exported to a PST. With LiveVault, we had to download a 200GB .EDB file, mount it, and export the mailbox as .PST to get the 5 or so mail messages we needed. When we switched everything to Veeam and properly configured it, we were provided the ability to mount a backup and restore a mailbox directly from the backup, even if it's offsite. This proved to decrease restore times to at most an hour, and along with file-level restorations, SQL backup and restores, and the ease of ensuring proper backups for our entire environment, pushed us well over the edge in choosing Veeam as the product we trust for our backups.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup is very straightforward for a seasoned system/network administrator. You must create login credentials for Veeam in your VMware environment, and you cannot use Veeam without vSphere, so for someone new to VMware or Veeam, make sure to read the installation documents to ensure it goes smoothly. I didn’t have any major issues with setup.

What about the implementation team?

I implemented our Veeam installation myself with minimal help from Veeam support. I definitely recommend a vendor team that will work closely with you throughout the entire process if you will be supporting the Veeam product on your own instead of Backup as a Service. The advice I have about implementation is to make sure you have appropriately sized backup storage and a dedicated WAN if using offsite replication or backup copy/offsite archive.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

I believe it’s possible to work directly with Veeam, but we had our VAR handle it, which made the process fairly hands-off and easy. I recommend handling this the same way for almost any licensing, not just Veeam.

What other advice do I have?

Veeam is the first backup solution I’ve used that’s designed for Virtual environments. With that disclaimer, I’d give the product 8/10 for out of the box functionality and ease of use. However, this is assuming there are no issues for Veeam in your environment, but we did have a few. This required several support calls with Veeam, which did somewhat quickly offer us a properly working backup system. Including Veeam support’s assistance, my rating would go up to 9/10, but this depends if you have a perpetual license with no support, or a subscription with ongoing support. The support increases satisfaction in this product, at least initially.

I’d highly recommend considering an offsite storage provider that supports Veeam Cloud Connect. We use SingleHop, which costs about $900/month for 7TB of online storage. This is expensive, but allows us to have our backups hosted offsite, secure and fully supported by Veeam. Also, make sure your local backup target is fast enough to support simultaneous writes and reads at a high enough rate not to eat into your production day, or at least minimize backup windows. It’s obvious to me, but maybe not obvious to others—don’t skimp on your backup storage, and don’t put your backups on your production storage device (SAN, NAS, etc.) It makes backups pointless in the case of a storage device failure.

Below is a screenshot of our Archive settings, which pull from production backups and keep weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly backups up to our retention policy automatically. It's very hands-off, which I love and it's great for auditors, as we just send them this screenshot and they check off the box about records retention and backups.

This is a list of our backups and backup copy jobs to show how we’ve set it up. Note our “Production Servers” backup says it last failed, due to an issue with our backup storage location not being fast enough and getting bogged down. I was working on this as I wrote this review.


Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Veeam Backup & Replication
March 2024
Learn what your peers think about Veeam Backup & Replication. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2024.
768,857 professionals have used our research since 2012.
it_user295755 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Infrastructure Engineer at a financial services firm with 10,001+ employees
Real User
We can now perform replications for migrating data and infrastructure upgrades.

Valuable Features

Its replication piece allows us to migrate over to different servers and data centers.

Veeam lets me move machines from older platforms. I could have used the replication tools from VMware, but not for the older platform. Veeam allows the upgrade of infrastructure as well. It's easy to use once you get to know the tool.

Improvements to My Organization

We can now perform replication for migrating data.

Room for Improvement

  • Compression rates could be improved for moving thousands of machines at a time.
  • There was a small glitch that was resolved with a call to tech support.
  • Can't perform replication without creating snapshots, which takes up all the space in VM, so I must do so with physical machines.

Customer Service and Technical Support

Technical support is excellent.

Initial Setup

Depending on the infrastructure, if it's large, it should just find the physical box with lots of storage, and processors for moving lots of machines at a time.

You should consider the bandwidth, numbers of machines, and then determine whether to use physical machine or VM.

Disclosure: PeerSpot contacted the reviewer to collect the review and to validate authenticity. The reviewer was referred by the vendor, but the review is not subject to editing or approval by the vendor.
PeerSpot user
it_user159084 - PeerSpot reviewer
Senior Systems Engineer at a tech services company with 51-200 employees
Consultant
We used Netvault, but Veeam is far more flexible.

What is most valuable?

-Reliable consistent Backups/Restores

-Ease of use despite doing complex work

-Replication

How has it helped my organization?

a. Other than it has saved us from hours of work not having to rebuild servers and the many times it has helped us recover data that was valuable, I don't know how to translate that into money, but it's no small thing.

b. This one is HUGE: We moved our entire data center, from one physical location to another, mind you we are 24 hour operation with sites across the state relying on the systems being up, and we never lost one hour of downtime. We used Veeam Backup and Recovery to migrate our entire Vmware Farm from old location to the new. It was awesome.

What needs improvement?

Tape support is there, but needs improvement. Netvault beats in that area. But most of our backups are to disk then to tape; but also copy to disk DR (in development). Reporting is lacking unless you get additional product. Very basic reporting. This would an easy area to improve upon.

For how long have I used the solution?

6 to 7 years.

What was my experience with deployment of the solution?

We have had some hiccups with it once in a great while. Nothing major, and nothing that would stop me from recommending it.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

No.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

No.

How are customer service and technical support?

Customer Service:

Good to Excellent.

Technical Support:

Good.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Yes. We used Netvault (still use it in limited way). Veeam is far more flexible.

How was the initial setup?

Straightforward. We did not have to read volumes and volumes of tech docs. Interface was intuitive.

What about the implementation team?

In-house team.

What was our ROI?

No sure I have numbers - how about millions?

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

It is priced per Socket. We have licensed 24 servers, 2 Sockets per server. Enterprise Edition.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

Yes. Netvault, Vranger, commvault, and some others. I chose Veeam Backup after evaluating others because of it's reliability, ease of use and features.

What other advice do I have?

Do a test. Have good hardware to run on and to backup to. Best to have SAN aware backups which require you give access to the storage cards to LUNS that you are backing up. Either iSCSI or Fiber. Network backups work, but much faster with SAN aware.

Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
Raju Koirala - PeerSpot reviewer
System Engineer at Leads Innovation
Real User
User-friendly interface, multiple licensing options available, and the support is good
Pros and Cons
  • "The interface is very user-friendly."
  • "In the future, Veeam should release a hardware backup appliance that can be integrated with their software."

What is our primary use case?

We are a solution provider and we deal with different backup solutions including Veeam Backup & Replication. This is something that we do on a project basis and have been doing for a long time.

We primarily use this solution for backup and replication; we buy the software and map it to our customer's requirements.

What is most valuable?

The interface is very user-friendly. The customers in my region are happy with it.

What needs improvement?

No product is 100% and there is always room for improvement. One of the downsides to Veeam is that it's just software-based. In the future, Veeam should release a hardware backup appliance that can be integrated with their software.

Better integration with other products would be an improvement.

For how long have I used the solution?

Veeam Backup & Replication

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

This is a stable product.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Scalability is not an issue with this solution. There are multiple licensing options available to handle different environments. For example, there is a 10-pack of VM licenses available as an option.

How are customer service and support?

Based on the communication that I have had with my peers, my understanding is that the support we have had from Veeam has been great.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

We deal with Commvault, depending on the project, and we are also a distributor of Arcserve.

How was the initial setup?

As a presales engineer, I have not been part of the installation.

What about the implementation team?

If needed, we do the installation for our clients. Our technical process team is responsible for that.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

There are multiple licensing options available to handle environments of varying sizes. The price is quite competitive compared to other products in my region.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

The customer is the one that chooses the backup solution. For example, they will come to us and say "We want Veeam Backup and Replication", and then we provide the licenses to them.

What other advice do I have?

This is a product that I definitely recommend for small businesses.

Overall, this is a good product but there is always room for improvement. If Veeam released a hardware appliance to work with their software, then I would rate them a ten out of ten.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Private Cloud
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: reseller
PeerSpot user
Technical asst. at a educational organization with 501-1,000 employees
Real User
Has good snapshotting and cloning features
Pros and Cons
  • "Veeam Backup Replication's snapshotting and cloning are the most valuable features."
  • "The cost needs to be considered."

What is our primary use case?

We have scheduled the backup to be done on our side. At certain intervals, depending on the capability of Veeam, we are doing the replication at a remote site on the same cluster that we use Nutanix as a backup. Basically, we have a Nutanix cluster taking backup of another Nutanix cluster. Outside of this, we are also using Veeam, which is on another machine, or basically another storage.

We have 19 Veeam running on a four-node cluster. Currently, we are using 80% of our RAM capacity and have more CPU and storage available, we still have capacity.

How has it helped my organization?

Before using Veeam and HCI, we were performing the functions physically. We used physical machines to run our services. Hardware failure leads to the pillar of our services. Now we have high organization and we can sustain any failure. 

We have found the Veeam function very useful because it saves us a lot of storage.

What is most valuable?

Veeam Backup Replication's snapshotting and cloning are the most valuable features.

For how long have I used the solution?

I have been using Veeam Backup for a year and a half.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

Veeam is a stable solution.

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Veeam is scalable. We can add nodes to scale up, it's a scale of architecture.

How are customer service and support?

We receive very good support from Nutanix.

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

Prior to Veeam we had physical machines that required manual backup.

How was the initial setup?

The initial setup of Veeam is very straightforward. It took one month to get the production. After the initial deployment, we had to migrate our Veeam from physical to virtual so that took another two months.

What about the implementation team?

We received help from the OEM. After set up it is easy to manage ourselves without help from OEM or any system user.

What was our ROI?

We have seen a return on our investment within two years. Prior to Veeam, we were doing the work physically, which is costly. We had to buy hardware every time we needed a new service to go to production. Now we have the cluster and can immediately deploy a new Veeam and be up and running immediately.

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Veeam Backup Replication is a one time subscription for five years.

Which other solutions did I evaluate?

We evaluated other options from VMware, Cisco Hyper-V and Nutanix. 

What other advice do I have?

The cost needs to be considered.

I would rate Veeam Backup Replication an 8 out of 10.

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: I am a real user, and this review is based on my own experience and opinions.
PeerSpot user
CIO at a tech services company with 11-50 employees
Real User
In one scenario, we started with 2,000 users and scaled up to 24,000
Pros and Cons
  • "Veeam is highly scalable. In one scenario, we started with 2,000 users and scaled up to 24,000."
  • "All our customers would like a cheaper license and more flexible deployment."

What is our primary use case?

The use cases vary because we work for several clients and deploy different solutions for each. Some of our customers have upwards of 5,000 users. But generally speaking, we use Veeam for copying databases and storage. 

We use Veeam, Veritas, or Commvault for simple security and second-level storage. We might use Oracle and different kinds of databases for replication and database storage with built-in replication. 

What needs improvement?

All our customers would like a cheaper license and more flexible deployment

For how long have I used the solution?

We've been using Veeam for four or five years. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

Veeam is highly scalable. In one scenario, we started with 2,000 users and scaled up to 24,000.

How are customer service and support?

I have a team of consultants who provide support, and we are Veeam-certified too, but we sometimes need help with certain customers and deployments. It's very complex, and we need more time than we expect, but it's working. 

How was the initial setup?

The optimized installation takes two and a half hours, and then the total deployment takes more than a month and a half. 

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

Customers would rather have a standard license than a subscription because they prefer an OPEX solution over a CAPEX. They prefer to buy the solution with the solution and support for five or 10 years. 

What other advice do I have?

I rate Veeam nine out of 10. Veeam is one of the best solutions. We are using it with customers that have 13 seats and 1,500 servers with varying technologies, including Windows and Linux databases, different interfaces, Citrix solutions, etc. We've been recommending it to our customers for the last two years. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

On-premises
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: Partner
PeerSpot user
Alliance Manager at Berca Hardaya Perkasa
Real User
Affordable, easy to set up and has a simple UI
Pros and Cons
  • "It's scalable."
  • "They need to improve their technical side."

What is our primary use case?

We primarily use the solution for backups in the virtualization area. They are experts in virtualization. For a lot of use cases, the customer doesn't have a backup in their virtualization for VMware HyperV or Nutanix. We are using Veeam to back up their virtualization. 

What is most valuable?

They are the second-best backup after Veritas. 

Veeam is easy to set up and they have a simple UI for users to set up and administer the Veeam console.  

Veeam has low pricing. They are great for a smaller market or smaller business all the way through to enterprise-sized companies. It's scalable. In Indonesia, maybe two of our telco companies use Veeam and they have a lot of the market in Indonesia.

The solution's initial setup is easy.

It's a stable solution.

What needs improvement?

They need to improve their technical side. They don't have a lot of compatibility with Solar HP-UX, IX, or SAP. They still need to have a lot of improvement in that area.

They need to make their Office 365 backup is included in one console with the backup replication. It will be easier that way and place it in line with the Veritas NetBackup offering.

What do I think about the stability of the solution?

We have found the product to be quite stable. It's not buggy. There aren't glitches. It's reliable. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

What do I think about the scalability of the solution?

The product can scale well. It's great for small businesses to larger enterprises. 

How are customer service and support?

Since Veeam is easy to use and easy to set up, we don't have a lot of problems. Therefore, we don't have a lot of experience with their support. We've never had a reason to contact them. Due to this, I can's speak to how helpful or responsive they are. 

Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?

I am familiar with Veritas as well.

How was the initial setup?

The solution is straightforward and simple to set up. It's not a complex or difficult process. A company shouldn't have any issues implementing it. 

What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?

The pricing is very good. They are very affordable, even for smaller businesses.

What other advice do I have?

We are a Veeam partner. We're partners with a variety of organizations.

We use various deployment models, including public and private cloud, on-premises, and hybrid setups. 

I would rate the solution at an eight out of ten. We are quite pleased with its capabilities. 

Which deployment model are you using for this solution?

Public Cloud

If public cloud, private cloud, or hybrid cloud, which cloud provider do you use?

Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Disclosure: My company has a business relationship with this vendor other than being a customer: partner
PeerSpot user
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Veeam Backup & Replication Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.
Updated: March 2024
Buyer's Guide
Download our free Veeam Backup & Replication Report and get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions.