Veeam Data Platform Reviews

My company uses the solution as a backup for Veeam images and databases.

The tool is a stable backup solution.

The product’s stability has certain issues and needs to be improved. The solution’s pricing could be also cheaper.

I have been using the product for more than five to six years. I use the tool’s latest version.

I would rate the solution’s stability an eight out of ten.

I would rate the solution’s scalability an eight out of ten. We haven’t encountered any issues with respect to scalability. There are around 22 users for the solution in our company.

Veeam’s support is good and fast.

Positive

We used Commvault and Microsoft solutions. We switched to Veeam because of better licensing and pricing.

The solution’s setup was easy and straightforward. The deployment took one to two weeks to complete. We deployed the backup solution and integrated it with the Veeam infrastructure, and took the backup.

The tool’s deployment was done in-house.

The tool’s licensing is yearly and flexible. I would rate the solution’s pricing a seven out of ten.

I would rate the overall solution an eight out of ten. The tool only requires one engineer for its maintenance. Veeam is a cost-effective solution for your virtualized environment.

We're still in a phase of the learning curve. Our learning curve is growing exponentially, and we are trying to get the best benefits from it as it's used for reporting and creating templates for reporting based on the business scope. 

It's very reliable. We can generate many reports related to the backup across the sites, not only for the servers but for the workstations also.

The dashboard is great. It shows us the sizing, the backup, and the encrypted data (or what is not encrypted). It's helpful to see especially the sizing, as it can tell us a lot. We can calculate the data storage based on our needs. We can make sure there is an availability of resources for the nodes. It's giving us full visibility in our environment.

It is easy to set up initially.

The solution is scalable.

It is stable. 

As a reporting tool, it's doing good. It's only used for reporting and to gain all the data across our Veeam and Backup Replication that we need. The areas of expansion are limited in our use case since it's only used for reporting.

We'd like to see them add more custom templates. 

I've been using the solution for four years. 

The product is stable. It's reliable. We haven't had issues with bugs or glitches, and it doesn't crash or freeze. 

The solution is scalable and easy to expand. 

We have six people using the product right now. 

At this point, we do not have plans to increase usage. 

Technical support has been good overall. 

Positive

I do have an experience in Veeam One, Veeam Enterprise, and Veeam Backup and Replication. I did not previously use a different solution that was not Veeam.

The initial setup is very straightforward. It's not overly complex at all. 

We only need one person to handle deployment and maintenance tasks. 

I can't speak to the exact licensing costs. 

We did take a look at Commvault and Veeam and ultimately chose to go with Veeam. 

I'm not sure which version of the solution I'm using. It's likely the latest version. 

I'd advise potential new users to carefully review the steps and documentation. Users implementing the solution need to have an action plan in place. They need to have a roll-back plan in place as well in case anything goes wrong. Use the custom templates and use them to help manage everything. 

Overall, I would rate the solution nine out of ten. 

We use it to back up and restore our virtual machine in a live environment without restoring the complete virtual machine. It just mounts its storage to the NFS and makes the machine live in seconds. That is our favourite feature in Veeam ONE.

In the past, we used NAKIVO for our backup replication, and the main problem was that their backups were unverified and, most of the time, were corrupted. But the backup in Veeam ONE is good, and we are satisfied that the backups are also accurate and stable.

When we install an application, we have backups available in another drive and have to import those backups into the machine. Sometimes, rarely, there is a bug that prevents enabling the restore button, which is hectic. We then have to go into the folder and double-click to fix the issue. However, improvements can be made to prevent the bugs and improve restoration and importing of previous backups into the new one.

I don't think any additional features are required as it is already packed with many features.

We have been using this solution for approximately five years and are using the latest version. We always keep our versions updated. It is deployed on-premises.

I rate the stability a nine out of ten. So we like the solution, but I can't rate it a ten because there is room for improvement.

I rate the scalability a ten out of ten because it is scalable even using Google Cloud or Amazon Web Services. It is also scalable on-premises. Only our organization's manager and deputy manager have the right to operate this solution. We have plans to expand use as the data center keeps expanding.

The initial setup was straightforward, and Veeam ONE requests prerequisites and installs them without the internet. That is a big bonus, with those prerequisites packaged in each setup. It is also pretty straightforward for someone unfamiliar with the solution.

Deployment was done in-house. Our data center does not have a big workload, so we use the Veeam ONE backend application and community edition. It is free, and if any issue arises, it can be solved with a Google search. It took three people and around 40 minutes to complete the deployment. One person can complete the rack installation of physical hardware.

It's free of cost for up to ten workloads, which is a big benefit for a small data center.

I rate this solution a nine out of ten. My advice to a new user is to go for the community edition. It is more than sufficient compared to Acronis or NAKIVO. Veeam ONE is the best and the most mature solution for hypervisors and physical machines.

I am a system administrator. My role is to oversee the support of the company's network. I also take care of the deployment and maintenance. We use Veeam ONE to optimize hypervisors or my virtual machines.

The solution includes reporting on the virtual machines and the sources. It centralizes well. 

Veeam ONE is integrated with Veeam backup, so it includes reporting on both. I don't have to go back and forth between different applications to get the report I need.

Veeam ONE does the basic job of reporting, but it does not meet my requirements of automated resolution. 

In future releases, I would like to see the solution provide auto resolution and auto relocation of resources.

I have been using Veeam ONE for three years.

Veeam ONE performs as required. It is stable.

This solution is scalable. It depends on the kind of functions you require and what you want to get out of the product.

I would rate Veeam ONE's technical support a four out of five.

Positive

The initial setup of Veeam ONE is simple and straightforward.

The deployment was done in-house. It takes less than one day to deploy Veeam ONE. To implement, I created a virtual machine and installed Veeam ONE on it. I just had to attach it to the Hyper-V service.

Veeam ONE saves me a lot of time, so I don't have to look and monitor each service on its own.

We have a three-year license with Veeam billed annually. The cost is based on the number of core servers. 

I would rate the pricing of the solution a three out of five.

I am looking into Turbonomic to see if it can do more than Veeam ONE.

Veeam ONE is a good product if you are looking for monitoring and reporting. If you are looking for automated solutions, you will have to look somewhere else.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten overall.

We primarily back up VMware and Hyper-V, and we have some physical boxes as well, both physical Windows and Linux boxes. We also use the scale-out capability going out to the public cloud. We don't have any NAS devices. So, there's no taking advantage of that. We're not using the instant recovery engine. I believe we use the Veeam ONE software as well. 

We have customers all over the place. They are using the current version and the earlier versions. 

In terms of deployment, it is a combination. In a lot of places, it is deployed in a private cloud environment with more than one site for replication, but we do have other customers that go out to the public cloud for an off-site copy. The cloud providers primarily are AWS and Microsoft Azure.

The normal backup and replication features are valuable. 

It is cost-effective. A lot of times, people pick Veeam because of its price.

Its native capability for talking to the public cloud needs improvement. Connecting to a public cloud is a little bit more of a challenge when it comes to Veeam than it is with Rubrik or Commvault. There are still some hoops that you got to jump through in order to send Veeam backups out to public cloud repositories. It is not as simple as it is with other products.

I have been using this product for three to four years.

It is very stable.

It scales out easily. The only challenge is that as compared to some of the other products, it is a little bit more difficult to do things when you're dealing with the public cloud. Other products integrate a little easier. Veeam has not gotten there a hundred percent. You've got to deploy additional infrastructure out in the public cloud. So, on a one to five, it is a three. It is a little bit more difficult, but it is scalable.

We have hundreds of customers who are utilizing Veeam. They are any type or range of engineers, IT directors, and IT managers. There is a whole different range of individuals who are supporting backup environments running Veeam.

There are probably plans for increased usage. A lot of it comes down to the requirements of our customers.

Their support is good. We never had a problem. They are always reachable and able to answer. The engineers we deal with are able to answer all the questions that we have.

We've got customers all over the spectrum. Some customers do switch to Veeam because of its ease of use and its price point.

We sell and support Commvault, Veeam, and Rubrik. If I had my preference, Veeam might not be the first choice, but a lot of people do pick Veeam depending upon their requirements and their price point because it is more affordable than some of the other products.

It is pretty straightforward. On a scale of one to five where one means incredibly difficult and five mean just effortless, I would rate it a four out of five.

I don't do a lot of deployments. It is mostly handled by a different group of people in my company.

We do offer professional services for implementation. Very often, we will take care of that, but it isn't really required.

The number of people required for its deployment and implementation depends upon the size of the environment. A small environment could be basically installed, maintained, and managed by one person. A much larger environment, depending upon how frequently you're doing restores and how complex your retention policies are, could require more people.

It is hard to give that because everything depends upon the size of the environment. Smaller environments are going to have a much faster return on their investment than larger ones. It depends upon what they're doing.

It is more cost-effective than some of the other solutions, but a lot of that comes down to the fact that we're a reseller. So, depending upon the deal, we do negotiate different price points for different customers. The price varies depending upon the size of the customer, the size of the deal, and the discounts we can negotiate.

Price does come into play during the evaluation. We have dealt with customers who evaluated products like Backup Exec, Commvault, Rubrik, Veeam, and Simplivity. There are quite a few that are in the mix. More often than not, depending upon the size of the customer, people pick Veeam a lot of times because of its price.

The biggest thing is to do the research. Do a comparison of each industry-leading product and see which feature set you're looking for. There is the price point as well, but I usually recommend that the feature set is more important than the price. If you're looking for specific features and capabilities and they're not available in a product, picking that product because it is the cheapest could be a mistake. So, make sure that you're comparing feature sets and purchasing the one that has the features that you're looking for.

I would rate this solution a seven out of ten. There are other products that have more advanced features. They would be rated a little higher.

The features that I have found most valuable are its ease of management, it is not complicated, it is very reliable, has good support and a lot of knowledge on the market for integrators.

Ease of management was actually one of the main points for me. The second one is the SureBackup. SureBackup is the feature that allows you to automatically restore and check that the backups are consistent. 

Those are the two main points for our decision to choose Veeam. We made some POCs with some vendors and they took a lot of time and were really too complicated and required way more resources to invest.

I would want them to improve some technical features that are still missing because we are working with NetApp NVMe and they're not fully supporting it yet. But both NetApp and Veeam know about it and they're working on it. 

I'd like some improvements in ransom protection capabilities for Windows because they have some features with the Linux repositories but not with Windows.

There is no support for backing up snapshots from NVMe namespaces on NetApp.

For the cloud solution we need the Sophos backup solution, but I think that they are close to releasing this.

I have been using Veeam Backup & Replication for half a year.

Veeam Backup & Replication is stable. I think we have maybe one ticket open in Veeam support about something that's related to not being a stable system.

I'm not ready to answer that because we didn't scale it out or scale it up because we just started working with Veeam Backup & Replication. But our topology will be really easy to scale up. It actually doesn't depend on Veeam itself. It depends more on the storage systems where we're storing their backups or network capacity and not on Veeam.

There were two guys from my system IT teams and one from the integrator side managing the Veeam infrastructure, but anybody in the system IT team can use it. We use it for the user restoration process or adding systems to the backup. We automated the whole process of adding the system to the backup so we don't need to do that manually, but anybody can access the system and do what it can do according to their permissions.

I think we're using only about 50% of the features. There is a lot of functionality we've still not used so we are planning to increase our usage.

The technical support is really good. We don't spend any time waiting for them and they start working in an hour. But we also have a good local integrator so mostly we don't need the vendor support.

I will divide the initial setup into two separate answers. Veeam has the most speedy setup that I have ever seen, but because we make our backup architecture really complicated and really secured, it takes some time for the fine tunings. It is not directly Veeam's problem but it is my network or security perimeter's problem. There was a really funny story with that because it takes a lot of time to configure and to fine tune and so on. After your set up the EXE of Veeam in the next two hours you can start the back up, but if you want to make it really secure and immutable for attacks that we face, you need some time to build it.

in general it is pretty simple, but if you want to do something specific it can take a long time. Setup also depends on the facilities and resources inside the companies that they can use for that. But overall, it is really simple.

Our license is about 200K for three years. It includes everything. It includes support and it includes the Office 365 Backup as well for the whole environment. We have about 6,000 mailboxes to back up.

For Veeam it's a pretty standard license. We made a tender because we are a kind of public organization so I have to make it on the tender, but that's the reason there is no cost for the hardware that I need to power the Veeam infrastructure.

Veeam is the only software that is a real comparison with Commvault or NetBackup. It's not really good to compare because NetBackup and other solutions are providing hardware also. So here I have software on one side from Veeam and I have some storage systems or disk systems from other vendors. For now, I have NetApp, but tomorrow it could be EMC, HPE or whatever. That's maybe one of the disadvantages of these vendors, but for me it's not a disadvantage, I'm okay with that.

Most of the time it is more flexible to not be dependent on any one vendor. We have used previous systems for about 15 years and most of problems are coming from the hardware, but NetBackup does not produce hardware.

My advice to anyone considering Veeam Backup & Replication is to check what you need and then decide what you're going to buy. Don't think if you have X money and then go to the market you will get it for that money. You need to understand what the organization's needs are and then to check what our vendors are advising and proposing, because we have almost 100% VxRail and it's 100% VMware. I think Veeam is the most valuable vendor for backup and application systems for VMware. For virtualization no, but VMware yes. And we know that they're working very hard with the NetApp systems and most of their integrations are first coming with NetApp. That was also a point of decision.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Veeam Backup & Replication a nine.

Our primary use cases for Veeam Backup & Replication are backing up to the cloud, backing up to a couple of deduplication appliances, and backing up to local disk - compressed to disk.

Veeam Backup & Replication is far more dynamic as far as being able to generate backup jobs. We used to use a product called NetWorker, and at the time the version of NetWorker we had would not back up to the cloud. I think it does now, but we're not using it anymore. But at the time, NetWorker was fairly new and it was just a tape backing up the disc. So Veeam is far better dealing with virtual environments and the cloud as targets. The capability with Veeam is just there.

Veeam Backup & Replication works. It integrates very well with VMware, but not so well with Nutanix, but that's common, I understand. I have both VMware and Nutanix virtual environments and I'm backing up through the same Veeam services. I have proxies running on both environments. Like I said, integration with VMware is excellent with very granular recovery while with the Nutanix environment it is not as intuitive, not as readily available.

In terms of what could be improved, when creating a backup job with Veeam, you can create a daily backup, but it doesn't do it within that job. It does not give you the ability to also set the terms for monthly and/or weekly backups. It has to be a separate job. It gets clunky to manage the timeframes where you don't want a daily to run on this day and creating weeklies. And you don't want a daily to run on this day doing monthlies. That is hard to deal with. It would be really nice if you could do it through a single command line or a single interface.

It is called a father son, or grandfather, type backup structure. The retention periods are not consistent or not available for different retention periods within that job. Retention periods being daily, weekly, monthly.

As for what I would like to see in future releases, just the integration to other virtual environments. In our case, the Nutanix environment is incomplete with the enterprise manager recovery tools part of it. That's where it is incomplete on the Nutanix side as well on the ESX. On the VMware side, the ability to set your retention policy within a job over multiple periods would be really nice if that was doable.

I have been using Veeam Backup & Replication for well over a year, probably 18 months, maybe even close to two years.

The product relies fairly greatly on the implementations of the storage vendors. For example, we were using large storage in AWS and it was using Microsoft. It's the format - ReFS, the recovery, the storage, the dis format, the volume formatting. We had a serious failure and lost six 30 terabyte ReFS volumes in AWS and lost nine 15 terabyte ReFS volumes on our local storage. I was able to recover the local storage in a little over two months. To recover the AWS storage of our volumes we calculated would have taken between six months to a year and probably cost us several tens of thousands of dollars.

So our volumes are still sitting in recoverable AWS in the case where if we actually have to recover something it's doable at significant cost. But we don't use ReFS storage anymore.

I'm not big. We have 200 employees and maybe 50 or 60 or 70 VM's, something like that. We have a data domain appliance that we rent space on that is offsite. We have an extra grade appliance and I have a bunch of CADA disks on a net app for just local storage. If that's scalable, I don't know. My understanding is that I can create more, but everything is local. So I don't have to have remote backup servers. But I understand that with my license I can create remote backup servers, as well.

That sounds like it's pretty straightforward. You link it and you can move backups from one site to another and then recover them off that other site. From what I've read, it sounds amazing, but from what I've done, I've never had to go into any great remote control, remote access or remote sites. So I don't know as far as the scalability goes. It sounds like it can scale up the ying yang. The one thing that I'm aware of though, is that when you're doing the backup, when you're scaling, you wind up with tears, because you have one server backing up a set of VM's, or an environment. And you have another server backing up another environment or another set of VM's.

If you lose one backup server it is able to catalog those backups from another server. I know you can catalog those backups to another server to recover. So it's dynamic. I've had to do that. I've had to build a new server and then recover the catalogs and recover data. It is powerful, it is capable. I like it.

In terms of direct users, it is me and three others that have gotten their fingers into it a little bit by the documentation that I've written on how to do something step by step. But there is really only me managing the system.

We are using this product extensively now. 

From the time that we installed it until now, we had to switch from CPU licenses to what they call UL, Universal Licensing. Because CPU licensing was only available on a VMware infrastructure and when we entered do our Nutanix infrastructure, we had to change the licensing model. There was a small cost to doing that because of the way it's licensed. We have not had to increase our license count yet. I will be shortly implementing another version of the Veeam. I think it's a very simple license, it's the five user license. It's in the VLU, but it's not the enterprise version of it, for our computer science department. They will be managing their backups with Veeam and a technician who I will be training.

That ReFS issue was one of the things that I had with technical support. For the most part they have been very responsive. They have been helpful when it's actually a Veeam issue. With the ReFS thing, they couldn't do anything about that and they referred me to Microsoft, which was a fricking waste of time. I'm so ticked with Microsoft.

We used to use NetWorker for 10 or 12 years.

We made the switch because of the virtualization and cloud access as well as disc storage on the version of NetWorker that we were running. NetWorker requires a physical appliance and the upgrades to NetWorker were cumbersome. The next generation of NetWorker, if we had stayed, would have required a rebuild of our hardware, which we've done once and was a pain in the backside. At that point, I don't think we could have run NetWorker because it wants to go to talk directly to devices and manage devices at a hardware level. So you can't virtualize the connections. So our NetWorker product had to reside on a physical machine.

I don't know if that has changed since we haven't used NetWorker for probably three - four years. We haven't done any upgrades in four years. So the move to Veeam or Commvault, which was the two that we were looking at, was primarily because we had local vendor support for both products. The move to Veeam was well priced, Commvault was out to lunch as far as dollars and cents. We are a fairly small shop and the pricing was just outrageous for Commvault 300 virtual machines. 

Veeam natively lives in a virtual environment. NetWorker couldn't. We also used to use a Norton product. I have forgotten the name of it - it starts with an S.

Those were retired when we started using Veeam. It has been four years since any of those were active, but those were for our remote sites. They only backed up the tape. We didn't explore Backup Exec in a virtual situation. Just didn't even look at it. I don't know if that was a mistake. I don't think so. Like I said Veeam, works really well. I am very pleased.

The documentation to set it up was great. I think we were up and running in about 30 minutes. That was to set up the backup server. Then there is building other services - the proxies, the repository manager, the enterprise manager for managing backups and recoveries. But to set up the backup server itself was super easy.

We just did it in house.

My advice to anyone considering Veeam Backup & Replication, is, like anything, to build a test site - do it on a test environment. Don't mess with your live system right off the bat, play with it, get familiar with it. It took me about about four, five or six weeks before I felt reasonably comfortable and built up in our production environment and the various servers. I started backing up and playing with a couple of Veeams that were smaller, and not backed up to the NetWorker, but I was backing them up and looking at how I could do recoveries. Eventually, I could do a full Veeam recovery and I could move it to another site and recover it, and all that sort of thing. I watched over time how retention worked. During that time I was asking questions of the Veeam technical support, too. They were very responsive.

So do it in a test environment if you don't have any training. I read online documents and went through a free Veeam school online, a bunch of documents, and there were a couple of YouTube type tutorials. I did a lot of that sort of thing as well. But it was all done ad hoc from work, I didn't go and do any formal train. So build the test environment and play.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Veeam Backup & Replication an eight. It's got room for improvement.

We're using Veeam for our on-prem backup of VMware vSphere environment and a couple of physical Microsoft servers. We're using version 10 of Backup & Replication.

It has an intuitive interface, and it provides us with successful backups without needing to tweak or do any adjusting. We just set it up and like their ad says, "It Just Works."

The one downside to Veeam is that they don't have a cloud product of their own. They partner with people and they support vSphere 7 and our cloud backup doesn't, and neither do many of the cloud backups that they partner with. I've looked at a couple of them. We partner with iland and they don't support version 7. They only support version 6.7.

Iland is our cloud backup and it utilizes Veeam. Veeam supports version 7 of vSphere, so they stay pretty up to date. They lag behind, but everyone lags behind a little bit. Once vSphere VMware does an upgrade, it takes a little while for places to support that upgrade. Of course, we always wait until our backup product supports it. But Veeam does a pretty decent job of keeping a short window, and they're able to support a fairly current version of VMware.

We've been using this solution for two years.

They don't have a dedicated support person for you, like ExaGrid, but their support is decent.

We've used Symantec, Veritas, and Arcserve years ago, and those interfaces were awful. Veeam is hands down the best interface that I've dealt with for a backup solution.

The setup was very straightforward.

I wish Veeam had their own cloud product. We are looking at a company called Infrascale, and I've seen that they have a lot of benefits over the other solutions we've looked at. I also want to look at Unitrends again because it was a pretty good solution when we were using it, but it had some drive failures. Plus, their GUI was all over the place.

With Infrascale, you can boot up your VM in their DR site, just like I can in vSphere, and log into it and look at it. A majority of our VMs are Microsoft Server products, so we could log into it and test that the data is there. That would make it great for testing our backups, which is something we need to do because our New York state auditors require that. It would make it so easy to test the environment, and it's not so easy with Veeam. You need a VMware and a vSphere environment in place to bring those VMs up, but here you don't.

I would rate them a 10 out of 10. They probably have the best product I've ever dealt with.