Veeam Data Platform Reviews

There’s not much a backup software can do to the organization but its features enable us to have an inexpensive data recovery solution that ultimately plays a factor when choosing to move applications and services to the cloud.

The greatest benefit of this software is its reliability. The ability to offload backup snapshots to the SAN helps with reducing the backup durations. The ability to turn on each VM for verification that the backup is reliable is another great feature. Recovery of a VM often takes longer for the tech to respond than the software to complete its recovery and power on speaks to the recover speed. The changed block tracking feature is one that enables us to choose which systems need a frequent (i.e., 5 min) incremental.

They need to address the confusing recovery dialogue. When you go through the recovery of just a single file within a VM you select the file recovery type and then after selecting a point in time you are presented with a “Finish” button. It’s not clear that no existing files would be overwritten nor affected which can be especially stressful when the VM is live. A change to this dialogue would be welcomed.

In earlier versions, there were some stability issues, but nothing in recent years that I can recall.

We have not had scalability issues and I don’t see how this couldn’t scale to a much larger environment than the one I’m responsible for.

The support staff are very knowledgeable to what I remember. We don’t really utilize them much, but a couple years back when we had storage issues, Veeam was very helpful.

I’ve used traditional backup software that was based on tape and their move to VM backups still used this model. I always tried to pigeon hole backups to disk into tape containers which too frequently resulted in problems. Other VM backups earlier on didn’t improve at the same rate as Veeam.

Setup has always been simple. You add your host, a connection to a backup location and in a few clicks you’ve initiated your first backup. I’m simplifying it but if you compare it to most others, the setup takes a fraction of the time.

If you have Exchange, Oracle, SQL, or a supported SAN, then I suggest getting at least an Enterprise edition. It’ll pay for itself in no time.

We looked at Veritas NetBackup, ArcServe, Veritas Backup Exec, CommVault, and one other that has since gone out of business. The name eludes me.

I suggest that you have another set of backups than just a deduping appliance that replicates offsite. This ‘second’ backup should be stored in a secure manner considering the news of backups being taken hostage by ransomware.

It’s very simple to implement and use. It is agentless. It is integrated with HPE storage solutions (SAN and a deduplicated repository) and it supports instant VM recovery.

We have significantly improved the restore process of single items, like an Exchange Mailbox with a very simple wizard-driven process.

It requires a Windows Server, but it would be a good idea to have an appliance with no Microsoft license required. As of now, there’s no chance to backup NAS shares (CIFS/NFS).

I have known and used Veeam Backup and Replication from v6 in 2011.

There were no stability issues in my experience.

There were some issues with repository scalability in legacy versions.

The technical support team is professional and competent. I would give technical support a rating of 9/10.

We used Symantec Backup Exec and CA Arcserve. We changed because there was a lack of features specific for a virtualization environment. Arcserve has a complex way to backup Exchange.

The price is adequate for the quality of the product. There are several editions/licenses that start from basic functionality (Standard Edition) to the edition that includes maximum integration (Enterprise Plus). I would recommend considering at least the Enterprise Edition.

We try to use both Symantec Backup Exec and CA Arcserve.

Only consider the Availability Suite if you need to monitor your virtual environment within backup processes and you have nothing implemented on it.

Some of the valuable features, amongst other brilliant features, are:

• Veeam ONE Reporter: Reporter is the reporting server part of Veeam ONE. It is accessible via a web console, providing featured packed templates (workspace) and dashboard widgets.
• Close-to-accurate capacity planning of virtual and backup environments.
• Host failure modeling
• What-if analysis in case one host has to fail
• Determining if all production VMs will be continuously available on fewer hosts.
• VM optimization by identifying over/under-allocated CPU and memory resources, i.e., right-sizing.

Generating reports is based on your selection criterion and parameters, giving you presentable views for VMware and Hyper-V infrastructures for:

• Backup infrastructures with disk, replication, and tape jobs
• Backup repositories (capacity planning for forecasting)
• Virtual infrastructure trends and alarms
• Virtual infrastructure hosts, clusters, data stores, and VMs

Complete visibility into compute, storage, and backup resources.

It helps us to meet our client SLAs by optimizing resource usage with tremendous cost-savings (charge-back).

I would like to see more drill-down and granular coverage of the compute stack and virtual infrastructure elements for Hyper-V.

I am comparing this to more features already available for VMware environments. I read that more features have now been added in version 9.5 and that the current ones have been enhanced.

We have used this solution for four years, since version 6.5.

There have been no stability issues so far.

A lot of improvements are made with each new release, as long as you follow the proper and guided upgrade steps.

You also have to take into account the initial best practice deployment with optimal configurations that meet our clients' virtual and backup estates.

There have been no scalability issues so far. Our Veeam ONE servers are implemented as hosted VMs, as opposed to physical machines. These are easily scalable in terms of resources.

We used other solutions previously. We are still using SolarWinds Virtualization Manager, version 6.3, in conjunction with Veeam ONE.

One of our large clients decided to acquire Veeam ONE based on their own research. This decision was seconded by us.

We found the reporting and capacity planning tools were really what they needed. That helped us support them better. The cost savings was the driving force.

The initial setup was fairly easy and straightforward with guided wizard-driven configurations. The single-server is used for small to medium size enterprises.

Much larger virtual and backup environments with separate dedicated servers require advanced deployment.

Depending on the edition (Standard, Enterprise, Enterprise Plus), all license costs are calculated per number of physical CPU-Sockets, in each hosted, server hardware.

I evaluated Turbonomic 5 (formerly VMTurbo) before. It is a master and “monster” of capacity planning for virtual environments of any size. It is feature-packed and fast.

However, I first started working with SolarWinds Virtualization Manager and still use it in the workplace. I use it extensively for VM sprawl and storage monitoring which is easier for me with this product. It also gives us recommendations on resource sizing/tuning. Veeam ONE and Turbonomic do this as well in their own efficient ways.

If you are looking for complete visibility into your VMware and/or Hyper-V infrastructure with seamless integration of Veeam backup & replication environments at no additional cost, then look no further. It just works.

Just “picture it”:

• Great cost-savings with linked SLAs
• Boosts ROI across the board
• Slices down on Capex and Opex

The reverse incremental feature is most valuable to us.

It is intuitive to use. It was easy to train IT guys how to use it.

I would like to see any backup process other than the snapshot backup.

We have used the solution for four years.

Sometimes if a backup failed, it meant the snapshot was not removed. This could cause the VM to crash when it ran out of snapshot space.

I didn't need it for our environment which had three ESX hosts and 50-60 VMs.

I didn't use the technical support directly, but the guys reporting to me did. I believe they were fairly straightforward.

I used a product called vRanger by Quest. They are very similar, but I decided to switch to Veeam after going to a VMware event and seeing that Veeam had become a partner of VMware. This gave me more confidence in their product.

The setup was very simple as it's pretty much a default install.

I see nothing different than what other vendors are doing, which is to price it at "per physical CPU". Just factor that in when looking at cost.

I did not evaluate other options.

This is a good solution for a small to medium size company. The backup speed isn't lightening quick. However, a lot depends on your environment and what you're backing up to i.e., NAS or SAN.

• Live monitoring and reporting on the health and performance of the virtual environment.

Identifies issues in real time, does capacity planning, and performs environmental monitoring that allows us to justify the need for additional resources in real time.

I would like to see improvements in the GUI and in navigation.

I have used this solution for four years.

I didn’t encounter any issues with stability.

I didn’t encounter any issues with scalability.

Technical support is excellent.

The installation was straightforward.

We bundle it with Veeam Backup & Replication and Veeam Availability Suite under the cloud license model. It is very affordable.

I don’t have any negative feedback. It provides a real-time, holistic view of the performance of our environment. It has allowed us to capture resource utilization issues for virtual machines. It allows us to capture information about snapshots, configuration, and performance issues in real-time. It has excellent reporting for capacity planning and management or reporting for customers.

• The quality of compression and deduplication is better than other products.
• The WAN acceleration allows us to send less data through our WAN lines.
• The easiness of the suite.
• The reporting tool, Veeam One, is very powerful and helps obtain a clear view of the infrastructure situation.

Let me start by mentioning that, before Veeam, my company used to backup data with Microsoft Robocopy. Backup times now are more than ten times faster and the data to be moved is only a fraction.

This behaviour has been improved with the new version, 9.5.

Determining the space for the WAN acceleration server sometimes is hard, especially if you have many source sites for the data. I would like to have a kind of storage space calculator that gives me an estimate for the size of the WAN accelerator server we are creating; give it a list of VMs to be backed up.

I am requesting this because the standard rules in the Veeam End User Guide often resulted in us making a wrong calculation, especially for the target WAN acceleration machine. The result was many failed backups due to "no more space" errors! And creating a VM that is "too big” wastes precious space (the opposite of what we want to achieve).

I have used Veeam Backup & Replication and Endpoint Backup for three years and the full suite for six months.

Usually the program works well and it's stable.

I think the resource request (storage space) for the whole suite (usually on a complex environment) is slightly high, especially the WAN accelerators. In any case, it is pretty scalable.

Technical support is 7/10. Sometimes, it asks for logs and keeps asking for information that sometimes is unnecessary. This causes it to take a long time to understand the real problem and to obtain the solution.

I previously used Backup Exec, the Acronis suite and many others, but Veeam was clearly better; that is the reason why I switched.

We needed more than a month to set up a stable and working installation: first, because I did not know well some of the deep functions of the suite; and second, because to get the best results from Veeam, you need to build a complex network of machines.

Pricing is a bit high from my experience and licensing can be improved; my company is a holding company and we had problems using licenses for sites around the world in the HQ server. (It's not allowed; we had to merge all the licenses into one big one.)

We saw more than a 10% compression ratio compared to Acronis Backup 11.5 tested earlier. I did it in March 2016 with a sample of 20 virtual machines and helped me complete a thorough test between various candidates (Veeam and Acronis were the finalists).

Based on my experiences with other backup software, we headed straight for this option.

Do some (at least) high-level training for the suite: If you don't want to waste time with many attempts during the installation, the best option is to understand the fundamentals of the Veeam suite.

My impression is that this suite is usually reliable and very powerful.

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.

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.

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

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

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

There have been no performance issues.

We currently backup many TBs of data without any problem.

The level of customer support is excellent.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.