Veeam Data Platform Reviews

The highly granular yet simple restoration capabilities for critical applications such as Active Directory, Exchange, SQL, SharePoint and Oracle, via an agentless single-pass backup. The deep integration with NetApp Integrated Data Protection capabilities, including controlling and managing Snapshots, SnapMirror and SnapVault, as well as the ability to provide granular, automated restoration from these protection sources. Lastly, the ability to leverage backup data copies directly for disaster recovery, test & development and/or data mining activities.

Veeam Backup allows FLEXdata Solutions to offer a more complete data protection strategy to our client-base, and one that delivers greater business value than the majority of legacy backup solutions in-place today.

Each organisation we work with has different data protection products and processes in place, so we are exposed to many different products and approaches. We specifically chose to partner with Veeam for a number of technical and commercial reasons. These include its rich feature set coupled with ease-of-use, strong roadmap, roadmap delivery history, simple and predictable licensing model, channel model, and deep integration with NetApp Integrated Data Protection features.

• Scheduling functionality is not as intuitive or as flexible as it could be.
• Some terminology can also be confusing or misleading.
• For service providers, multi-tenancy capabilities could be enhanced.
• Greater capabilities to protect physical hosts and applications would expand the use cases.
• Continuous data protection (CDP) capabilities would be well received.

I've been using it for 18 months.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

The product is very stable.

It is highly scalable.

They’re great from a partner point of view, but I can’t comment from an end-user point of view.

The initial set-up and configuration is straightforward, and the product can be installed and configured to protect data very quickly. However, like all data availability products, you must understand the data flow and the “plumbing” required to support data movement for backup, replication, and restoration activities. Most importantly, the data protection strategy must align to business requirements and expectations, so upfront design and planning is important to ensure a successful outcome.

FLEXdata implement Veeam B&R for our clients, working in partnership with their in-house teams. Putting in design and planning effort upfront ensures we deliver successful outcomes to our clients.

The Veeam B&R licensing model is very straightforward – it is licensed per-CPU socket of virtualisation host system. This provides a predictable cost model, and avoids the often crippling “virtual machine tax” that capacity–based or agent/system-based licensing structures can impose. It is also recommended to consider Veeam's bundled offers, such as the Availability Suite or procuring additional maintenance/support upfront.

Firstly understand the business requirements and expectations, then design and architect the deployment in line with these requirements. Ensure you get the “plumbing” right, never forgetting that the reason you backup is that one day you may have to restore. Plan and prepare for that day.

Application data recovery works great in our environment especially restoring MS Exchange mailbox items. There are cases where emails or attachments which can back date to more than 12 months old are needed by users.

Backup and recovery windows have been significantly improved. By using an adequate number of backup proxies, more jobs can be executed simultaneously. Image replication for DRP and Sure backup to verify data consistency have also met our audit criteria for data protection objectives.

We expect to see more integrations from the software company with storage vendors. Especially on dedupe appliances and non unified storage arrays. This will help us to cut down the storage investment cost and have more flexibility on hardware choices. Also, there are demands to protect data on end user computers and devices. Hope to see more update in this area in near future.

I've been using it for five years.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

We have experienced slow backup performance, however it was been rectified in the latest release, and they have added a feature for processing parallel jobs.

With limited storage space available, we have to use reverse incremental backup to keep only one set of full backup on the latest date. This helps us to manage the free space and make sure fast recovery always available.

The tech support is always there to help out but you need to take note of the time difference. They don't seems to have dedicated resource to cover the APAC time zone from what I have experienced.

Setup is straightforward, so just follow the wizard, but make sure you've got a plan for your storage sizing and backup retention policy. The challenging part will always be the sizing and how you place your backup proxy to make sure backup performance is top.

We performed an in-house setup. You need to make sure there is a proper planning especially if snapshot backup is needed on storage array. This feature makes sure that no VM snapshot committed to a virtual server can cause a ping drop, and this is crucial on sensitive servers. The requirement to make it happen is likely to have the Veeam server running on a physical box with direct connectivity to storage array.

Worth the money especially if you have high consolidation ratio per physical host.

I have tried a few other products, some of them are meant for multi-platform (virtual and physical), or as a native backup solution. We ended up with Veeam as we are a fully virtualized environment and the features and product capabilities have met our requirements.

It suits all the needs for a fully virtualized environment, just make sure you have proper planning on the storage sizing.

It has very strong and useful features for a virtualized environment such as those based on VMware or Microsoft Hyper-V. The backup software management is user friendly.

Backing up a virtual environment is quicker than our previous solution.

I am expecting better support for physical tape copy. Support for backing up physical servers from the open area such as Windows and Linux servers with bare-metal restore functionality needs improvement. Support for the NDMP protocol for the several NAS devices.

I've been using it for years.

I had some issues at the start of the project with the performance. The problem was solved after analyzing and setting changes. I have not solved an issue with MS SQL Always-on servers with transaction lag backup. The case has so far been opened for half-year.

There have been no performance issues.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

They are very useful.

I am currently also using using HPE Data Protector and Unitrends UEB.

It was very simple, but after deploying the software it needed improvements in the settings to reach the goal.

We did it in-house.

Look at the price for the support. It is very high. Close the deal with -5 years support from the beginning.

The ability to restore both the VMs and single files is very flexible in Veeam 9. We can restore from disk, tape or from our NetApp appliance snapshots. It has a myriad of effective ways to backup and recover.

By allowing us to restore from our NetApp appliance directly, we have realized a tremendous time and resource savings in our virtual environment.

The only real issues that I’ve had have been navigating the user interface particularly with restores. I feel that more attention could be paid attention to the restore interface. It’s just not as intuitive or fluid as it could be.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

There have been no performance issues.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

I would definitely recommend Veeam 9 for its quick and effective backups to disk, tape and even the cloud. Having said that, the restores have been reliable once completed.

The Backup Enterprise Manager is great as it allows me to see and manage all backup jobs from multiple Backup servers. The ability to create separate backup and replication jobs and also create failover plans. The Direct NFS Access is also a great feature for backing up VMs on our Tintri storage.

Previously we had been using a CDP based backup solution where an agent was installed on the guest OS. Besides taking longer to configure backups, performing a BMR was much more complicated and required creating a new VM and using a boot disk. Using Veeam has made the entire process much easier and I can quickly restore an entire VM even in a test environment.

By default, I use “Enable parallel processing” which is great to have multiple jobs run at the same time. I would like the option to disable this within the Backup Job so certain jobs run sequentially instead. Reason being, I may have an application that runs on several different VMs that I would like to keep in a single Backup Job, but if they backup at the same time such as the app server and SQL server, it causes spikes in the application. The only way around this is to create separate backup jobs scheduled to run at different times.

We've been using it for two years.

We had no issues with the deployment.

With Veeam v7 in conjunction with vSphere 5.5 using vSphere Flash Read Cache (vFRC), I started seeing issues with Veeam backups either failing or VM Snapshots constantly needing consolidation. This was directly related to vFRC which a stopped using in favor of a better solution.

Scaling out is very easy, especially with the newly added feature “Scale-out Backup Repository”.

Customer service has always been excellent.

Technically support has always been excellent, although rarely needed.

Setup was not too complicated, but I do recommend deciding how you are going to use the Backup Proxies and design around that. There are a few options for backups such are Direct Storage Access, Virtual Appliance, and Network. The Network backup is great with a 10Gb network, but I recently switched to take advantage of the Direct NFS Access. I have also used the Direct Storage Access with NetApp when it was added to version 8, but this has since been replaced with Tintri storage. There is also a matter of the Guest interaction proxy that does application-aware processing for Exchange, SQL, Domain Controllers, etc. I tend to set this up with more restrictions so not all proxies can access all subnets. Veeam does automatically select the correct proxy based on subnet which makes it easy once you have completed your initial setup.

I designed and implemented it myself.

I am using the Veeam Service Provider solution where you pay per VM that is being backed up. So, the ROI is basically from the day you deploy it.

If you are an Enterprise and you think the price tag may be high, contact a Veeam Service Provider and see how they can help.

Make sure you do your research before deciding to purchase a different product other than Veeam even if that include reaching out to someone like myself that has used the product. You will see other products that don’t use snapshots and claim to be better, or don’t cause VM stun because their product is different. The fact is a lot of this depends on your underlying infrastructure especially storage. If your infrastructure is old or using slow storage, then any product may not be easy to implement without issues.

Here theyare features that I appreciated:

• Immediate alerting
• Scheduled historical reporting
• Unique enterprise backup console view
• One settings point location
• Infrastructure view
• Business view
• Data protection View
• VM

This product gave us the ability to have a single notification point about global infrastructure.

Veeam console is well integrated with Veeam Backup & Replication so, we can view, at the same time, backup health and disaster recovery replication between different sites. The historical reporting feature, gave us the ability to understand any weakness and possible strange behavior to be investigated.

In any case, we utilized Veeam One and B&R in conjunction with other monitoring software to have a complete and real time situation of our infrastructure (network devices, applicative problems etc).

It would be really appreciated if Veeam One could provide an OS and program monitoring solution for the VM ( exchange monitoring and queue, event viewer, Active Directory, DHCP, DNS etc) and improve grant processes to apply in case of any infrastructure problems.

I started using it since 3 years ago in conjunction with other monitoring solutions (SCOM 2012, OpManager, VirtuaWin, Netwrix, Nagios

I had problems getting Veeam One and Veeam Backup & Replication to coexist on the same server.

Sometimes, I needed to reboot the server if it was on for a long time. I also had some performance problems if it was implemented on an old server.

Scalability wasn't an issue, but I had problems with the license files when we bought new licenses.

It was good.

They were great and well prepared.

About virtual host, I utilized (and I am still using), Nagios, Netwrix, OpManager but I am preferring them only for OS, network devices, bandwidth utilization and application server monitoring.

I liked Veeam One about VMware and HyperV server monitoring

Initial setup was quite straightforward and easy.

I implemented it on my own.

An excellent disaster recovery plan, backup replication, and real time monitoring.

Initial setup was €10,000 in conjunction with Veeam Backup & Replication Enterprise Edition with different sites/hosts to monitor. The day to day cost, is meanly relative licensing and minimal time to maintaining it.

• SCOM 2012
• OpManager
• Nagios
• Netwrix

If you already utilize Veeam Backup & Replication, it would be very important that you utilize this product to manage them together. (Other than essential licenses, the enterprise version gives you a single monitoring/backup console that sounds great).

The functionality available with Veeam enterprise licenses, allow a VMware vSphere snapshot to be integrated and transferred to HP 3PAR storage snapshots; this effectively off-loads all backup traffic to the storage network. The Original VMware snapshot is then released (this process takes less then a minute), and Veeam continues the backup operation directly form the 3PAR storage. This operation ensures minimal impact on the VM, VM network and Host hypervisor, while ensuring backups are performed at storage network speeds (8Gb fibre).

Reverse incremental backups with block level changes - Following the initial seed backup, only block level changes are captured in the following daily backups. This ensures backup times are kept to a minimum and reduces the amount of data that is replicated to additional disk off-site.

50x WAN optimisation - With the enterprise licence option you get WAN optimisation. this reduces the amount of bandwidth required to replicate VMs or backup copies off-site. I use this to transfer all VM backups to a co-location storage device at a dedicated DR site.

Instant recovery - this allows a Veeam protected VM to be instantly booted direct from the backup image. Veeam creates an NFS Datastore and presents this to the selected Esxi host. This can be used to test backups are being taken correctly, to recover a live VM or as a low cost DR solution. Once a VM is booted, this can be migrated live using vMotion back to production storage.

By using Veeam, backups times for the entire virtual environment have been reduced, and backup windows now have no impact on production VMs.

Instant recovery has revolutionised client DR plans, reducing recovery time objectives (RTO) and improving available recovery point objectives (RPO).

Also as Veeam "just works" less time is spent troubleshooting backup technologies and failed backups.

The amount of disk space required for the long term storage of backups (archiving Weekly / Monthly / yearly backups) can be higher then expected if you have a large daily change rate in your VM. This needs to be planned for when considereing long term arciving of backup files.

I have been working with Veeam for 18 months since the initial pilot.

If using off-site replication with WAN optimization, the initial Seed backups of VMs need to be taken locally and then transferred to off-site. Attempting to transfer these over the WAN can cause bandwidth saturation.

No issues.

No issues, additional physical or backup servers can be added using existing hardware or VMs to distribute the backup load as the envirnmnet grows.

Very good support from account manager and on-line portal.

Very good support, however as Veeam is simple to deploy only limited technical support was required during deployment.

Backups of VMs were previously taken using i365 data vault this added additional load to ESXi hosts and VMs during backup windows, switching to Veeam removed this load and enhanced recovery options for all VMs; i365 also provides block level incremental forever backups and replicates to our DR site, we continue to use this for the remaining physical machines.