Veeam Data Platform Reviews

U-AIR (Universal Application Item recovery) – This is an important feature as it saves lot of time and offers flexibility to recover anything without wasting too much time on complete image recovery.

Instant VM recovery – This feature miraculously reduces the time to recover an entire virtual machine to just a few minutes.

Sure Backup - This feature helps ensure backups are recoverable when required. Backup Drills need not be complex and time-consuming activities.

We are less of an end user than provider. But, yes, I’d like to mention a scenario where we have been able to churn out lost VMs in just minutes for our cloud customers.

This makes life easier for all IT professionals by ensuring a reliable and hassle-free backup and replication solution, and thus it is reliable business IT.

With each new release, this product breaks barriers. We expect to see this completely replace the entire backup solution landscape (supports virtual/non-virtual backup and DR solutions) for heterogeneous environment.

It’s always difficult, complex and expensive to keep different data protection solutions for different systems (physical servers, virtual servers, Windows/non-Windows environments, disaster recovery solution, end-point backup solution, media manager, dedupe box, etc.).

We have been proposing and deploying this solution for the past 5-6 years. We have found this has helped improve data backup and recovery for customers, with predictable and scalable performance. At the same time, it has reduced overall cost for backup infrastructure.

No issues as such with stability and scalability, but from the deployment perspective, we expect it to support a hybrid environment - multiple-edition deployment within one single Veeam Backup Server instance. It should not require having the same edition.

Customer service and technical support is good and prompt.

Veeam deployment and configuration is quite simple. The user interface is designed for ease of use and is intuitive.

We deploy for others and for our own use in a cloud environment.

Being a system integration organization, we work with other backup & replication solutions, but after evaluation, we found Veeam to be a better solution for x86 virtualized environments.

I am rating it as excellent, due to its advance features and functionality for virtual environment backup and replication. But I have left a little room for improvement by including non-virtual environment B&R, to avoid having IT silos in a customer’s environment.

This product can certainly bring value and lot of visibility and control to virtualized IT environments. It fits very well with the virtualization and consolidation story.

Instant Recovery – Instantly recover a virtual machine from the backup file on backup storage, then migrate it back into production. RTO’s can be measured in minutes.

Virtual Lab – Spin up an environment (web app, middleware, and a database) from the backup files in a virtual network bubble and tinker around with it – maybe apply and test patches (not that they ever go wonky).

SureBackup – Ever restored something only to find out you didn’t configure the backup job correctly. This feature tests the backups, without impacting the production systems. What a brilliant idea! To actually test the validity of restoring from backups.

Ability to attract customers with a simple product to protect their data and lead them into conversations about how to enable business outcomes that are positive as opposed to catastrophic. With the multiple facets of potential data compromise (ie: Virus, Ransomware, employee mistake, etc., etc.) and or destruction, educating our customers on the inexpensive options that can provide quick remediation to inevitable outages that could be extremely detrimental to business continuity.

The product is really awesome for the virtualized environment – hands down. It really lives up to its motto – it just works. One caveat – those physical servers that are still outliers. We are constantly hearing that our customers would be “SOLD” if there was a solid physical server solution. To their credit – I know they are working hard to provide a solution that meets these needs. And candidly, I want them to take their time and develop, test and deploy a solution that works as reliably as the current product.

I’ve used it for year through Cloud Connect, and the base platform for five years.

We did have some small discoveries as we rolled out the product to our customers. WAN acceleration is extremely robust and a valuable feature built into the Enterprise version of the product.

We found that due to faster than typical internet speeds available (i.e. 1 GB) – we were not seeing the benefits that we had expected. Turning it off increased the speeds and reduced the bottleneck.

One feature that was missing, but introduced in v9, is the ability to manage multiple repositories across disparate storage arrays or sources. Now the new feature can present them as one repository, allowing robust expansion without having to move and balance datasets as the increase in size, and we know how backup sets grow exponentially as time marches on.

The initial setup requires some thought as to sizing and future growth. But it is also very forgiving and adaptable as growth and complexity changes. Don’t let that statement fool you though. To take advantage of the more advanced feature – which are incredible (Virtual Labs for instance) do require some more advance investigation and for me – deep dives into the forums.

We leveraged talent in-house. Implementation of simple (but robust) functions can be really straight forward for most small to medium environments. To get basic services up running we suggest that customers download the free version and get started with it. This will introduce them to how Veeam approaches backup and recovery. Sometimes Backup Admins are a little shocked at how easy it is to admin, even though they have used and are very familiar with legacy products.

Regarding pricing, most of our customer who have been used to buying, supporting and maintaining other well know products are shocked at how economical Veeam is and sometime question “how good can it be?” They are quickly convinced that it is a very robust product and start designing ways to “leverage” their backup data in ways they hadn’t imagined.

We have evaluated and currently offer other products to meet specific needs. But as a general offering for our customers who have mostly virtualized environments, and want an economical way to protect and leverage their backups, Veeam has the most robust and forward thinking feature set.

Start simple. Get it up and running. Then start investigating the many, many “cool” features that are available. Definitely take a look at future proofing technologies such as Virtual Lab, Cloud Connect for an offsite copy and SureBackup.

The fact that it comes with backup and replication is a must. The integration with EMC Data Domain and similar products is also a very good feature. The same can be said about the backups from storage snapshots.

We use Veeam with EMC Data Domain. This allowed us to simplify our backup processes and enable us to have faster and more streamlined backup jobs. It's also easier to manage than our previous solution with huge space savings. Since Veeam also allows us to replicate machines we use that feature in a way that provide us more flexibility when we need to test some updates or changes without risking our production environment.

The downside is when you need to backup physical servers as usually most organizations aren't running a 100% virtualized environment so that can be an issue. Another issue is when clients have file level data on storage and need or want to backup using NDMP as I believe that this isn't supported yet.

We had no issues deploying it.

There have been no performance issues.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

It's simple to install and configure.

If most, or all, of your environment is based on virtual machines and you want something that is simple to install, configure and manage but above all else, something that backups and restores your data successfully then Veeam is your product.

It is installed and configured in 15 minutes. It is reliable and you can really count on its restore jobs. It also provides very good deduplication alongside fast backup/restore on tape and instant VM recovery and allowing you to restore a VM onto an NFS mount point anywhere you want on a Windows 2012 Server. Veeam's 3-2-1 backup rule is also good where it has three copies of data, two different medias, with one off-site copy. Lastly, we're able to sandbox VMs without impacting the production environment.

In a fully virtualized environment, the ability to perform instant or quick restore full VM is invaluable, and because this product is reliable, I often forget the backup appliance for weeks or months.
Veeam Backup makes me more confident and agile in managing and maintaining my IT infrastructure.

Since this is a pure 95 % virtualized solution for Hyper-V or vSphere, this product could do more to backup individual files, databases, and or complete guest OS. For now, I have to backup NAS, and doing this for individual files is a pain in the neck and I have to play with two different backup solutions. Also, Veeam will not backup a physical server.

I've been using it since v6.0 in 2013. It was used in parallel with VMware VDR, and then VDP but it was quickly abandoned for a full Veeam solution.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

There have been no performance issues.

I have ordered more socket CPU licenses but I do not know if this will be easy or painful. There is nothing to do when adding clusters/hosts except checking the number of CPUs allowed.

I have, 99 % of time, found an answer to my questions or issues through customer services or via forums.

On-line help is also complete and often come with interactive videos showing how and where to click, and this is amazing.

Prior to Veeam, I used VMware VDR, and then VDP (> vSphere 5.x).

It's complete in 15 minutes. It's so easy that even a child could schedule bakcups. It was the same when upgrading from v8.0 to 9.0. It was simply a click and wait job and completed within 10 minutes.

I’m responsible for choosing and implementing this product. I discovered Veeam through my previous jobs. In this one, it was already implemented by local IT engineers.

Licensing costs are OK, they are a good average when compared to their competitors. The only issue I have is having three NetApp filers and not being able to backup/restore from snapshots, SnapMirror, or SnapVault. So if I had more money, I’d head directly to the Enterprise “Plus” Edition. The Standard Edition is not supposed to manage tapes or deduplication and is limited to small infrastructure environments.

I’m not a specialist of EMC Avamar, but I think that Avamar is more universal (backup of NAS for example), but it is way more expensive and complex than Veeam. I didn’t evaluate any other commercial solution.

There's no need to buy direct attached disks, as you can just build from scratch a “Veeam appliance” with a a big 2U 8 core Xeon server with 16 GB RAM and lot of SAS disks (at least 2 RAID). You then add Windows Server OS and the Veeam software. With this setup, you won’t need extra space, separate SANs, or network switches, except maybe for your LTO drives.

Otherwise, use some VMs for Veeams and separate the proxy so you can make your big physical server a repository. Do not allow your physical server to backup your ESXi hosts with VMFS datastores, as you might not find your VMs in the VMDK virtual disks.

Most important though is to always test your real recovery abilities and try to simulate total failures of a SAN direct attached volume for example, or even from your backup system.

Instant Veeam Recovery is invaluable as it has eliminated the need for High Availability as you can bring back up applications within five minutes if needed.

In term of cost saving, it does reflect the justification made to the management to invest on Veeam B&R rather than build a redundant high availability in either Virtualize or physical environment which is costly to manage and maintain. With IVR, you can also improve your recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) by bringing up the VM within a short period of time, thus minimizing the troubleshooting duration.

I'm not sure if others has the same issue as mine but the full recovery file (.VBK) growth is really causing our customer a headache as they have to perform a full backup, and when the disk capacity is getting low, you have to clear the backup disk and then perform the backup. The previous version seemed to have better integration as it removed blocks from the full VBK file during the backup.

I've been working with it for around four to five years.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

You have to plan for a higher disk throughput rate since the Veeam restore target is to disk, and the full recovery time can be a nightmare especially if you're recovering to thin disk which is super slow.

I have noticed in the new version has some issues with VBK growth which I didn't experience in the previous version. The VBK file will keep on growing, and although some features are added to contain the growth such as compaction & BitLocker, I've not seen any improvement yet.

So far they've been excellent except for one case. It was a Sev One incident, and an engineer only called me back eight hours after I logged it.

It's really straightforward and very user friendly.

We're a systems integrator and we deploy it to different environments. Veeam has great documentation for deployment and planning on their website. My only advice to is to include a scenario base during recovery for example, whenever you do IVR, expect throughput to be slow as it will be mounted from backup repository.

For most customers who don't have budget issues, we usually recommend Commvault. One of the reasons that we recommend Commvault is the ability for the corporate division to use it globally. I find Commvault has a better R&D team and can accommodate most hypervisors currently on the market. The latest one that Commvault supports is Nutanix AHV which has added value to its product portfolio. With the growing popularity of hyper converged systems, this decision is timely. However, Commvault price is high, and can be very expensive if you're going with their Capacity license. I just hope Veeam product team will include AHV compatibility in the next release.

Backup is not much of a concern, but for recovery you do have to plan for additional capacity especially when you want to redirect your restore. Veeam's planning recommendation should include for customers to assign a VM as a thick disk for recovery purposes.

The overall backup tools, as we use this to prevent data loss.

Coming from tape backup environment to using Veeam and cloud upload dramatically changed and improved our backup process. The increase in backup speed was truly amazing, backup windows shrunk, we can also perform more frequent backups if more protection is required. There is obviously also the integration with VMware (which we utilize) and administration via PowerShell. All this, together with CloudBerry allowed us to fully automate our backup and offsite upload process. Reporting via PowerShell is extremely useful too i.e. for our daily checks.

Below, you’ll find various suggestions from both my admins and myself that would improve Veeam Backup

• Built in upload to external storage. Using apps like Cloudberry, even though it can be automated, just adds unnecessarily complexity and one more point to break
• Integrated and intuitive orphaned snapshot management. When things go wrong during backups, you can be left with orphaned snapshots consuming more space on your storage than is immediately visible. This can be very problematic under certain conditions. Integrated visibility into this would be very helpful in these cases.
• Ability to shrink VRB files as servers are removed from jobs
• Ability to reconnect VRB’s in the chain
• Ability to attach and backup physical servers
• Better visibility of deduplication percentages

Only issues were with licensing. Mixed versions across sites made licensing a bit difficult. Also, having to use Cloudberry to upload to AWS S3 is not ideal, although it does work OK.

The product is very stable.

It is highly scalable.

I haven’t dealt with Veeam support, but my team say that tech support is decent and the skill varies significantly from tech to tech. We've discovered more solutions from the user forums than through tech support.

Setup is very straightforward. Creating backup jobs and remote storage learning curve is not intuitive, but a quick scan of the documentation allows for quick study. Difficulty level is low.

However, having to use a separate application (Cloudberry) to upload to AWS S3 is very cumbersome and seems like something that should be integrated into the core product.

We performed it in-house and did not use a vendor team or a consultant.

I wasn’t part of that project, but I believe at the time we also looked at AppAssure and Veeam was more flexible for us and more economical too.

This is perfect backup solution for small to medium businesses that have an onsite VM environment. If you’re using AWS S3 for off-site then look elsewhere. This does not support it natively despite what their marketing might lead one to believe.

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.