Veeam Backup & Replication Reviews

For most clients I look after, the most often used feature is a simple restore. Once the backup is on disk, most restores can kick in within 15 minutes and be restored within 30 minutes for files, emails and SQL databases etc. It doesn’t matter if it’s from last night or last year, the restore timeframe is often the same.

After a simple backup, the next most used feature I see is restoring a full VM due to doing a DR test to validate systems, VM corruption, testing new software, testing windows updates, ransomware/virus corruption or human error in managing the VM. A VM of say 40GB can, in most cases, be restored within an hour from the get go. Naturally, the faster the infrastructure (10GB, fibre), the faster the restores. Restoring to different locations naturally takes more time as often one needs to prep the environment.

As for the most valuable feature I suppose it’s bringing in the disaster revovery functions (SureBackup, Replication, offsite jobs) to sites that just wouldn’t normally have the budget or be bothered due to the complexity of the more traditional solutions.

Veeam B&R saved many files that had accidentally been deleted. By using file level recovery, all of them got restored easily and in a timely manner.

From a business point of view the recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) can now be realized and improved.

Cross job deduplication and dedupe across full backups would be interesting. This would help the backup footprint for long term backups. Saying that, Server 2016 dedup (when it's released shortly) should cover some of this for small to medium sites, and larger sites can pick a number of appliances to do the job (Dell DR4300, ExaGrid Storage, EMC Data Domain etc.).

I've been working with many clients over the years, and I have been using Veeam since v4, which I think was around 2011.

Patch release and support are both very efficient and it doesn't take ages for most issues to be resolved.

As with any product things can break down. Backup to disk is very intensive and all the parts need to be reliable. Poorly configured NAS devices as Veeam repository can cause all sorts of issues. Lack of free space or resources will be a burden.

It's been able to scale for our needs. Simply add more Veeam proxies if compute is needed or more cheep storage for backup as needed.

Excellent is the word I'd use.

The support from Veeam is very good and most issues I’ve logged with them over the years turned out be non Veeam related. One such call related to failed backups on a number of VM’s. After some investigation it turned out to be Symantec AV device control on servers blocking a VSS snapshot from within the guest (from MS Shadow copy or Veeam). Another issue where backups which were taking over 10hours failed and turned out to be a Linux/NAS time out. I’m always very satisfied with their support levels, more so than any other backup vender I’ve used over than last 10 years.

I’ve worked with agent based backup solution and other virtual backup solutions over the years. PHDVirtual for XenServer has very good dedup but wasn’t compatible with Hyper-V or VMware (superseded now by Unitrends). Agent based backups usually rely on a bare metal restore which can be time consuming. Veeam just makes the whole restore process very simple. Veeam upgrades take a fraction of the time that most other products take.

Veeam backups in its simplest form is very straightforward. Install on a clean VM, point to Hyper Visor and repository, create backup jobs and go. Saying that it’s a very powerful product with many options and one would be advised to seek professional advice on the backup solution as a whole before jumping straight in and buying hardware/software.

I’ve being installing Veeam for our customer base for many years and gained a lot of experience and my advice to anyone is to seek professional advice on the backup solution as a whole. Buy more backup to disk pace than you think you need and play with the Surebackup function.

It wasn’t too long ago that one paid a high price for something that would cover DR and was usually out of the reach for most small customers. Veeam fills that gap with very keen pricing, reliable backups, reliable restores and ofsite VM replication. For me its a small investment for peace of mind.

Over the years we have seen more Hyper-Visor backup products hitting the market, and those I have tested still fall behind Veeam, but to be honest I don’t bother testing them much these days as Veeam ticks most, if not all, of the boxes that my clients require.

Try it out, Veeam B@R give a free 30 day trial key. Seek professional advice.

All of the explorers, bitlooker, scale out backup repository, and backup appliance integration.

Veeam drastically lowered the strain on our hosted environment during backup windows all while decreasing the amount of time the backups require for completion. Upgrades to the backup environment take considerably less time to complete.

The endpoint(agent) backup to be fully included/supported as part of the licensed product.

Update: this functionality should be included sometime between Q4 2016 - Q1 2017

2+ years.

No.

No.

No.

The customer service staff are always willing to provide any information or support that they can.

They have the best backup support in the industry our time to resolution regarding any issue has been resolved in an expedited manner.

Yes, we used EMC Avamar before and switched primarily due to cost however the Veeam/DataDomain offering is more robust.

Update: We are now looking to move off of DataDomain due to restore speeds.

Setup is simple however to achieve best performance and results there are added design considerations.

We implemented the solution in house. We are a Veeam service provider but went to VeeamOn for additional training, not that the software is complicated but there is so much functionality that meeting the engineers provided great insight.

We were seeing ROI within a year.

Go for the availability suite which includes Veeam One. It can be had for an incremental cost and it provides very actionable alerts.

Arcserve, Symantec, Unitrends, and VMware.

Ease of VM and File Restores. The ability to restore an entire VM and guest OS files is invaluable.

We have been able to move away from file-based backups, and now have total VMs protected.

I'd like to see more vendors added for the new array-based backup platform. More IT shops will be able to take advantage of this new backup technology. Using the native VADP snapshot functionality can stress out the VMware kernel.

I've been using it for four years.

It was mostly a smooth transition, but I would caution against using Veeam to back up a SQL 2000 database though, if anyone still has SQL 2000 databases in production. SQL 2000 databases do not acquiesce when snapshots are taken, and the entire SQL database can become corrupted. The SQL 2000 VM must be powered off before the VM backup. I learned that the hard way.

There have been no performance issues.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

We were using Symantec Backup Exec 2010. We moved away from it in favor of being able to perform total VM backups.

It was very straightforward, no issues.

It was done in-house with assistance from our network engineer. It is important to have use a SQL database version for Veeam that matches your production SQL database version.

I would advise you to buy the service contract, as you will get all the version updates for free, which can save money in the long run.

We have not implemented the array-based functionality as of yet. We elected to install a 10 Gb NIC for the main back up pipeline. The new 10 Gb connection has increased backup performance by 20%, and I believe the array-based platform has seen 40% performance increases. We are backing up to SATA drives, so we are trying the 10 Gb route first. If we decide to backup to an all flash array, then maybe the array-based platform will be considered.

The main feature we're currently using is the replication function that allows us to provide high availability in all of our company's retail sites throughout Europe & Asia. Backup is also a good tool, but we mainly use it in our HQ.

First of all, it has provided us with much needed HA for our retail sites. Until Veeam, the servers from stores were backed up, and in case of disaster with the production hypervisor, we would have faced a far too long restore time that would seriously impact the business.

Second, it allowed us to replace the older, slower, and much pricier backup solution in our virtual environment.

It still doesn't feel like a fully mature solution because it's not exactly ready for very large scale and complex environments with more than 1000 VMs.

Personally I've been using it for almost a year-and-a-half, but I'm part of a team that started implementing it in our infrastructure three years ago. Currently, the product is providing availability to almost 80% of our company's Windows & Linux virtual infrastructure and we're looking forward to the day when it will be doing this 100%. I've been using it since v6. Currently, our environment is fully updated to v8 with the latest patches, and we're looking forward to trying out v9 when it's released and confirmed by the community as a stable version.

The only issues we encountered until v8 was the fact that we couldn't automate the patching and upgrading of our environment. Starting with v8, Veeam optimized their silent install procedure, and now we're working on automating the whole process of keeping the product up to date with major releases and patches.

Besides this we've only experienced minor setbacks, such as proxy servers not being able to upgrade or uninstall properly due to the older local installer/uninstaller kits being overwritten in time by constant updates.

Anyone who's used Veeam in large or very large environments knows you can get a lot of errors from it. In time, you learn how to mitigate most of them fast or even optimize the environment to not get some of them at all.

Some design flaws, such as the fact that it automatically deletes replica's if it finds that the VM's disk sizes have been changed, can be pretty frustrating sometimes

But overall, I think "It just works!"

The main issue we're still facing with scalability is the fact that the EM (Enterprise Manager) is not designed to handle a very big number of Backup & Replication servers (some of which having hundreds of jobs). As so, we've been recently forced to deploy an EM in each of our HQ locations so that the Veeam infrastructure in the country is managed by it and not by a single unique EM server like we had until now. Automatic upgrades and patches were also an issues, but, as stated above, we seem to have found a solution thanks to the guys from Veeam.

Opening an incident to them is quite easy and fast, and their initial response times are pretty decent.

Previously, we used IBM Tivoli Storage Manager. Besides costing a lot more, it was also outdated, having very high upgrade costs. Also, it was a lot more complex (especially for the needs of a virtual environment). Besides this, it didn't provide us with the much needed Replication function for VMs. Currently, Tivoli Storage Manager is still being used in some of physical environment but since a year ago, we've slowly started to replace it with another backup product.

It definitely doesn't get more straightforward than Veeam when it comes to setup (and operating it, too). GUI is user-friendly and well designed. Installation process is simple and very fast. The Backup & Replication architecture itself is easy to understand and implement.

The entire implementation was done in-house by the team of which I'm a part.

For what it's capable of providing, I think pricing for this product is pretty decent both in functional and support licensing. Regarding licensing, all I can advise is that you either get the Standard version or the Enterprise Plus for the advanced features. There aren't that many reasons to get the Enterprise version.

For what it's designed to do, providing high availability and backup for virtual environments, it's definitely a jewel. I still think there's room for improvement on things like stability & scalability; it doesn't quite feel like a fully mature product yet that's capable of being implemented on very big and complex enterprise environments. And of course, I don't even want to think about the ripples it will send if they decide to implement support for physical environments in the same product.

Before contacting the support team, remember that the Veeam Community forum is a small treasure chest, spend a little time getting to know it, and it will get you out of the majority of issues or setbacks you encounter.

• Capacity to start a VM directly from the backup repository (Instant VM Recovery)
• The explorer for restoring items (Active Directory, Exchange, SharePoint, MS-SQL and Oracle (soon)).

I am a specialist in Veeam, and my clients optimized their recovery procedure, and it now requires less time to restore services. They love how easy it is to operate.

• Tape support - more options for retention
• Backup for physical servers (Microsoft at least)

I've used it for two and a half years.

No, but is important to read all the requirements for the explorer to avoid problems before finishing the implementation.

No, in fact the stability is great. No halts are present, even when it has low memory.

No issues have been encountered so far.

In Latin America (my area) it could be better.

Great service. I only use the web support and it is accurate.

We previously used HP Data Protector. It was very complex to work with, and susceptible to fails, so we switched.

It is very easy to configure, and start up.

We are a vendor.

It offers a good cost-benefits balance.

We are partners of HP and Symantec, but we prefer to offer Veeam to our virtual environment customers.

Watch the demos online, watch the YouTube channel, and use the trial version to learn about the product. It is the way to get to know the product.

Ease of use, ease of setup, and ease of recovery.

• As long as you are good with your grouping of servers, the dedupe process is wonderful.
• Once installed and configured, it just works. The management dashboard is pretty easy to use and very easy to read.
• On top of the easy to configure and manage, it is also lightning fast during recovery. It took just 20 minutes to recover a 500GB Windows Server.
• Since the product connects directly to your vcenter, most of the traffic stays within your virtual switching environment, making backups run that much faster.

This product is for virtual environments only. Which means it cannot backup physical servers. Most, but not all, software support VMWare and VMWare environments but on the rare occasion (like with us) when a vendor requires a physical machine to operate, it means we have to have a different backup process.

I have used this product for 4 years as my primary backup solution for my VMWare environment.

No. The deployment was very easy and self-explanatory.

One of the great things with this software is that it is designed to do one job: backup virtual machines. It isn’t trying to manage anti-virus, or deploy images, it is strictly a backup process. I have no issues with stability.

As we grew, it handled the workload marvelously. As long as it has enough space to store the backups, it will work without any issues.

Very friendly and very responsive.

I am going to say great, but the truth is, I have never had to use them. They sold me the product 4 years ago, I installed the software, and haven’t had any issues.

Yes. I used the Symantec suite of products. I switched because it became bloated with different items and it tried to manage more things than what I wanted it for.

Very straightforward. You put in your ESX or vCenter information and you are connected and ready to go.

In-house.

The software itself was less expensive than Symantec. But it is kind of hard to put an actual number on it because when you recover a document or a server for someone and it makes you look like a hero, it is priceless.

Management of Veeam is easy. It notifies me everyday of the progress of the backups. The setup costs were normal. Cost of OS, Veeam Software, and shared hardware (virtual environment).

Yes. We also evaluated Barracuda’s cloud product.

I cannot speak highly enough of this product. It has made backup and recovery so much easier. Veeam’s motto of “it just works”, is 100% accurate. It is quite literally a point and click product that doesn’t require special client installs to servers.

The most valuable features of this product are "explorer for exchange" and "instant vm recovery."

One of our managers lost his mail box completely and using my product's explorer for exchange function I installed only that user's mail box without turning back to all exchange back up folder.

"Veeam Vpower Technology" is the area of this product that is open for improvement.

I have been using this solution for 3 years.

I haven't encountered any issues with deployment for 3 years.

The product has a flexible and improvable structure.

As I said before the product has a versatile conformation.

I rate the level of customer service 9 out of 10.

The level of technical support is a 10 out of 10.

I have previously used many different solutions and choose Veeam for its quick and correct solutions for my problems.

The initial setup of "Veeam Backup & Replication" is straightforward and easy.

I implemented the product myself on my own. I am the responsible system engineer supervising all back up systems and Veeam Products.

Our original setup cost for this product was a fair price and we don't have any extra costs.

Before choosing this product, I evaluated products of Symantec and Acronis.

I advise this product to all system managers who need to use back up systems.

Veeam Backup & Replication is useful for disaster recovery. Apart from that, it happens now and again that you make a mistake somewhere, and you have to go back to a previous state of a machine. 

I work with both on-premise and a mixed environment. 

One of the most valuable features is the incremental backup. It is, of course, perfect because you have a lot of restore points, but you don't need all the space. The stability is also perfect. 

The only improvement I could think of is it could be cheaper—cheaper is always good. Sometimes the product is just finished. Cheaper is always nice for the customer, but the company needs to benefit so that they can keep maintaining the product. New Windows versions, etc., always take some work. At the moment, I wouldn't switch to another solution because of the money. 

I have been using this solution for about four years now. 

The stability is perfect. 

I've never had a problem with scalability. I've got very big environments, but the biggest problem with Backup could be that you need a lot of space and you don't have that with Veeam. 

We have contacted technical support a few times and they reacted fine. 

We switched to Veeam a long time ago because it just works better. We get more consistent backups of our backup software. The previous backups gave us problems and Veeam just doesn't—it just works. 

The initial setup is really easy. I don't remember the timeframe because it was too long ago, but with a new product, you always have to do a bit of reading. If I were to implement Veeam in a new network, I would guess I'd be done in the morning, no more than that. 

There are two or three people in our organization using this solution. As far as a technical team, you need to be aware of the systems youʻre backing up. If you're backing up SQL service or exchange service, then you need to know about your SQL server, but basic Windows knowledge and knowledge of the applications youʻre backing up are all you need to know. 

With this one, we had one side set up by an integrator and the other, I did myself. If you are going to implement it, do a bit of reading yourself or let somebody who knows what they're doing do it for you, or do it together. 

I rate Veeam Backup & Replication a nine and a half out of ten. I absolutely recommend Veeam Backup & Replication. I have been looking at a competitor lately and they seem to do the same thing as the vendors, however they were a lot cheaper, but we just couldn't get it to work.