Veeam Data Platform Reviews

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.

Instant recovery of VMs, reliability of backup process are valuable as this is used as a failover migration tool.

We had a vendor screw up a financial accounting program at tax season, a critical time for one of our customers. We were able to roll the VM back in under five minutes, and users were back on the software in under 10 minutes from restore.

The software really needs to expand into physical machines backups. Endpoint Protection is a good start, but physical backups are the missing component to crush the competition.

I've been using it for three years.

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.

Scalability is all about bandwidth, so the only issue we had was trying to guess how much bandwidth we would need.

It can take a while to get a recovery engineer on the phone, but once you get one the support is excellent. Follow up on issues has been exemplary.

It is simple to setup and the documentation covers just about everything you need to know.

This was all setup in house.

The pricing is reasonable, but tracking and purchase levels are unnecessarily complicated.

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.

By far it is the best virtualization protection product, but lacking in the physical protection space. It does physical backups, but it fells like an after thought.

The ease of use of the product and overall confidence in the product and Veeam support are valuable.

We can now perform restores as file level instead of the whole VM.

A better reporting function where we can see all the job statistics as standard rather than buying this feature with Veeam One.

I've been using it for six to eight months.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

Using Synthetic Full Backup caused issues with storage, but since switching to True Full Backup everything seams to be fine.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

It's 10/10.

We used an in house script, which did not address a file level restore.

It was fine, but the current setup process could do with some tweaking. It would be nice to have more advice on domain controller restores.

We performed it in-house.

Try it first and see if it does what you want.

Sure Backup is valuable because of its capability to test every backup of virtual machines. Instant VM Recovery is also valuable as it provides us with rapid recovery of failed/lost VMs with a low recovery time objective (RTO).

Using Veeam as a primary backup tool for the virtual environment we were able to reduce drastically the backup windows and offer better services for provisioning VMs for both the testing and development environments.

We would like the ability to backup physical servers. Most organizations still have some of their applications and services running on physical hardware and do not want to deal with multiple backup solutions.

I've been using it for four years.

Main issues were related to sizing the correct infrastructure as Veeam solution needs many components (such as Proxy Servers, Repositories, WAN Accelerators, etc.) for a complete Backup & Replication solution. For medium/large environments, initial configuration may take some time.

We have had no issues with the performance.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

I've not yet had to use their tech support.

Veeam is very easy to setup. The installation is wizard-driven and will install any dependencies you might be missing.

We did it in-house after receiving training from the vendor. In case your company does not have sufficient technical resources, the best option is to contract Professional Services from Veeam Partners.

The price is very attractive and probably the lowest on the market for an enterprise backup tool.

For only virtual backups I have evaluated TSM and CommVault. Veeam is by far the solution that delivers a complete set of features for a small price. And the administration is much more easy.

Do a PoC and compare cost x benefits with other solutions.

Veeam is a solid performer for backing up VMware. By leveraging VMware’s changed block tracking (CBT) the incremental backups are very efficient and small. Veeam also has a rather intuitive interface that is easy to understand and is easy to get up and running in short order. It has several other solid features, such as storage snapshot integration (new feature), Exchange/SQL/file granularity, and some very useful recovery options as well.

Reliable backups are so critical and my Veeam backups (disk-to-disk) have never failed to be restorable. I can’t say that about other products I’ve used.

I have asked Veeam to consider backing up physical devices for years and each time the response was “that’s not what we do”. As a result, they missed many opportunities to sell their products to customers who have a mixture of virtual and physical devices but don’t want to support multiple backup products. Veeam finally started down that path but they are taking their time to get the Endpoint Protection fully developed and rolled into the main product. They need to ramp this up and then I believe they would see even better adoption.

I've been using it for six to seven years.

Deploying Veeam is as easy as you get. The installation is wizard-driven and will install any dependencies you may need that aren’t already installed. On the other hand, I have had some issues with scalability. Specifically, backing up large virtual file servers for me goes very slowly. Veeam has a concept of a backup proxy, which moves the resource load to whatever is designated as the proxy. This can be the local Veeam server or another physical or virtual server.

For me, I have trouble with large VMDK files (multi TB) regardless of where I place the proxy and while there are several others who have similar results, Veeam hasn’t seemed to find a solution for this yet. Note that this is only on the initial full backup and subsequent incrementals are fine. Also note that I have not opened a case myself on this but have tracked the cases of others reporting the same issue.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

Veeam support is pretty good but has degraded somewhat as they have grown. Not surprising as this happens to every company as they ramp up but overall support is as it should be. What is solid though is that their technical people comb through the forums so many of the posts have expert feedback and advice right there, which is very nice. I find it nice to know that they at least care enough to do that and actually listen to the issues.

I’ve used several other products and pound-for-pound in a virtual environment Veeam seems to work the best.

Veeam is very easy to setup. The installation is wizard-driven and will install any dependencies you might be missing.

I work for a Veeam partner so we implement all Veeam deployments ourselves. My best advice for Veeam goes for all other products that support it: use a dedicated backup target such as Data Domain, StoreOnce, FalconStor, etc. Not only are these devices designed for this type of workload (improves performance) but you will get a secondary benefit of the hardware deduplication that makes your backup jobs incredibly small and efficient. You can run Veeam and a server and backup to the local storage to save money but the long-term solution is not as good and problem-free.

Licensing is based on CPU socket of the host servers and if you get the enterprise versions you also get support for file, SQL and Exchange granularity so there is nothing else left to buy. Most other products either require individual licenses for these advanced features or are licensed for the amount of data you have so in either of those cases your costs will rise as your data grows. With Veeam, provided you don’t add more servers, the license cost remains flat.

If you have a VMware or Hyper-V environment, then Veeam is the most mature and solid product in its class today. If you have a mixed environment, well then you may have some thinking to do. Personally I would still consider Veeam knowing they are working on their physical backup solution, which you can use today (although it’s very basic right now) or go with something else on the physical side for the time being.

The usability in general, support and knowledge documentation. I also find the training, and webinars useful. Apart from this, it also has specific features that are useful such as easy restore functionalities, instant file-level recovery, integration with multiple storage vendors, and explorer for Exchange amongst others. Also, its replication is very simple and reliable, as well as the synthetic full backup.

Lastly, Veeam Cloud Connect is another valuable feature. This allows you to backup and restore securely to and from the cloud. All you need to do is choose your cloud provider and it integrates into your systems.

It's affordability, ease of use, and reliability has allowed us to save both man-hours and money.

It needs to be able to integrate with more storage vendors, especially IBM and Dell.

I've been using it for almost four years.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

There have been no performance issues.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

7 to 8/10

Very straightforward but knowledge is a must, especially if you have complex scenarios and if you want correct responses and performance.

In-house implementation, we have a lot of skilled personel. Knowledge about the product and about backup theory in general is a must.

Try it! You can test it before buy it, almost without effort and you probably will forget a lot of other vendor solutions.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's very simple to implement and very fast to learn. One backup can be done and many restorations are possible from that backup. It's mature integrity within a virtualized environment has always been important.

Veeam B&R saved our many files that accidentally had been deleted. By using File Level Recovery, all of them got restored easily and in a time manner.

Not covering the physical environment is both a pro and con of the product. Many organizations still have to consider other enterprise class solutions because of their physical servers. The other thing that they need to consider is the integration between Veeam and other storage vendors to use all the array level features to make backups even faster and more efficient. I guess Veeam needs to have a look at the enterprise market and not get stuck with small or mid-range forever.

I've been using and proposing this product to many customers for more than five years.

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

There have been no performance issues.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

I would rate it very highly.

It's been easy to deploy, and I've never had any complaints from a customer.

I did it myself and used my team in projects. I found the SureBackup implementation quite tricky, especially the health check mechanism which can be a bit confusing.

It's not cheap for sure but in comparison with rivals it's not very pricey as well. Disaster recovery and backup solutions are not cheap and investing in them is worth much as it helps you to protect valuable data.

Veeam clearly stands in the middle, somewhere between simplicity and richness. I have proposed and designed backup solution based on many other products such as EMC Networker or Netbackup, but Veeam suits many customers' needs.

The best approach would be to implement a trial in a test environment to test it and run all the features to help you decide which edition and features you need and understand the architecture needed to run it.