Veeam Data Platform Reviews

The solution is based on the IAF solutions that are specific for moving the data centers that we have to the cloud. This is the main tension for us right now. We are investing in some past solutions, however, we're not using them yet. There are some tests, some small tests, however, we are moving IAF solutions in order to move our data centers.

We like Veeam as it is the kind of backup that has basic snapshots. It's very useful for us as we have a lot of virtual servers. This is the most impressive thing that we see. 

There are some special features from Veeam. They have the replication and the kind of backup that we can use. We have a very strong solution in the network. Due to the fact that we have several internal DMS's, we needed to make a special design. Veeam adapted to that. That's why we choose it. With all the solutions, it was not possible to use the actual network structure that we had. Veeam made it possible.

The solution is stable and the performance is good.

The product can scale. 

For us, it's important that the products can be adapted to different network scenarios. This is the biggest problem. The issues that we had when we selected the products were due to the specifics on the network from a security point of view. Security for us is the most important feature that we need to work with. THey need to ensure that it's possible to secure the network.

The initial setup is complex. 

We use several proxies, reverse proxies, due to our needs. It's not so common. There's not too much information and it's not so useful. They could develop it more and they could market it better. Not many users have this scenario. The reverse proxy, for us, was an important piece to implement. If a user has a good view of the reverse proxying during the implementation, it's better.

The solution has been implemented in the company for about one year at this point. 

The solution is very stable. We needed to buy the biggest server to accommodate it. The requirements were very high. That's why we started late when they decided to use it. However, after we followed the recommendations and followed the certification of equipment servers and storage that we needed, it's okay. Now we find it's very stable.

The scalability is very good. Everybody uses it. In general, we have about 125,000 people using it.

We likely will increase usage in the future. 

We needed some technical support at the start. It was good. Here in Brazil, they are from Brazil and they have helped us too in the design phase. That said, the product is very good. We don't need exactly support for any issue that we found. We've only needed some help for the implementation, the start of the design.

In terms of the implementation, it's still being rolled out. It's very big and there is a very sparse structure that we have. It's global. It will take about two years for it to be completely implemented, due to the places and locations we need to implement it. We need to make and design for each place as it is not standard. That's why it takes a long time. We prefer to take it in parts to be careful with the implementation, in order to see if it's really what we want. Therefore, for us, the setup is quite complex.

The results have been good so far. People are liking it very much. That said, we still have some designs to do for other places that we have implemented.

Due to the implementation, we are doing, there are about 50 people working on the deployment. This is just an estimation. It's quite a large project.

We pay the licensing fees on a yearly basis. There may be a few additional costs, however, I cannot speak to those exactly. Our technical team might have a better idea of what is involved in terms of licensing arrangements. 

We tried the base license, however, it's my understanding that it wasn't enough and we needed a bit more. 

We are a Veeam partner.

In terms of types of deployments used, at this time it's been working more on-premises, however, we have intentions to use the cloud. We are moving several loads to the cloud. 

I would advise new users that the design is the most important piece. There are several options in the ways that you can implement it. My recommendation is to look at the strategy. Networking becomes very important. Having a good design at the outset makes things easier. 

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten.

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.

The solution is primarily used for disaster recovery, replication, and stacking up all the endpoints using the product's endpoint component.

Setting up the replication is very simple.

The solution just works consistently. I never have issues with it.

The product is stable.

The scalability is excellent.

I have issues with the licensing. 

The solution isn't ideal for small companies or systems. It's much more geared towards larger entities. 

I've been dealing with the solution for eight years. 

The stability is excellent. The solution just runs. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze It's extremely reliable. 

The scalability has been great. I can pretty much do whatever I need to. The problem is the licensing. Scalability equals licensing and that costs quite a bit.

The solution is best for businesses that are larger - those that have got multiple systems, and by that I mean about 20-plus systems, that need to be protected. 

I have no issues with technical support. They have been helpful and responsive and I am satisfied with the level of service I get.

The initial setup of it has a learning curve that is a little bit steep, however, you quickly get a hang of it.

The solution is quite expensive, and that becomes an issue if you need to scale. Costs add up quite quickly. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter how good your product is, if it's not affordable, you're not going to get people behind it.

I'm an end-user.

My company uses both private cloud and on-premise deployment models. 

The solution is a very good product for what it does. 

I'd rate the product at a nine out of ten.

If this is a good solution or not for a company depends on the company size and what it wants to achieve. If your company is about 15 to 20 people and you just need to have backup and recovery and not have to worry about 24/7 uptime, then I wouldn't recommend Veeam for you. However, if you need something that is up 24/7 and you can quickly recover, then I would say go with Veeam. For big systems, I'd say you'd go with Veeam, and that it works best as an onsite system. When you start moving to the cloud, and when you need to back up the data for the company, you've got other systems that also can handle it.

We use this solution to back up our two VMware sites, and some physical boxes.

Mainly, it is used for our two VM sites at either campus.

It works with the client. We have it on a clustered SQL which works well.

We have local backups at either site, as well as some backups going to an external storage appliance. It gives us information about what is going on.

We are also using replication.

It has improved the way that our organizations function.

It's fairly easy to manage and set up. 

Once you get it working, it's fairly reliable and fixes itself. It's pretty good at keeping the backups running.

It works well with SharePoint.

The initial setup could be simplified. It takes a bit to find the documentation. 

It takes some time to get through the knowledge base and the changes in the versions over time.

Trying to find everything on how to configure it and set it up can get frustrating in trying to sort it out.

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

I am using version 10.

This solution is stable. Once we have all of the backups working, it never has any issues, except for the server going off, but that is a network issue or during the time that it's self-healing.

It keeps going and keeps running.

It's a scalable solution. I added one. We have a couple of proxies at either campus with one backup server with an enterprise manager on it. It works well.

I am the only person in our organization who is using this solution.

I have used technical support in three or four cases. They were able to help me. They are pretty good. I would rate them a nine out of ten.

We were using Microsoft Data Protection Manager and NetBackup. We decided to go with Veeam after testing it out, as it seemed to work better than the other products we were using.

The initial setup is okay. 

It just took a while to try to sort out what is going on with it.

Review the documentation and their knowledge base on how to set it up and configure it. 

It takes a bit to get it sorted out and to figure it out, but once you get it working it just keeps working.

I would rate Veeam Backup Replication a nine out of ten.

The main use case is performing a backup of a virtualized environment.

The most valuable feature is adaptability, where it automatically adapts to the environment that it's being installed on. It can auto-configure backup transport, whether it be a direct-attach or network-based.

It has one-click restores and instant recovery, which is important because if a product doesn't have a good restore and recovery capability, then the backup is pretty much useless.

They need full cloud integration such that an on-premises backup can be offloaded to the cloud for storage. It is my understanding that they are focusing on solidifying that now. Everybody wants to be able to integrate with the cloud.

I have been using the Veeam Backup & Replication solution for 12 years.

Around the first quarter of this year, they rolled out release 10. The last stable version was 9.5 Update 4, and since the release of version 10, they just rolled out the first update, which is 10 Alpha.

Version 10a has a lot of fixes. For the most part, it's a very fluent software, and very stable. However, some of the new features, when they're trying to roll them out, they seem to have to do the updates just to stabilize those.

Over the years they've had some minor bugs, but nothing that stands out in the crowd compared to anything else because everybody else has the same issues.

This is a scalable product.

I've been very, very pleased with the Veeam software tech support. When you call in, you actually get a live person and they are typically able to assist you or direct you to second-tier support if it's above their typical area of expertise.

The complexity of the initial setup depends on the environment and whether it is an all-in-one or distributed. For an all-in-one situation, it can be very straightforward. You just install it and press next, next, next. You will get everything you need and a fully functional product.

In a distributed setup, you have a couple of components that are external to the server that you're loading the main software on. This is a database server and reporting server, as well as an enterprise managing component. With these additional components, you have just a little bit more configuration. They're not that complex and I've actually done some other backups in the past that were more complex.

Overall, it is pretty straightforward.

In the company that I work for, we have a managed services group. So, our backup and engineering team for managing other environments are also are skilled at doing Veeam.

We have a lot of customers that use Veeam, and I'm the installer implementer. I implement these solutions and do upgrades to them. There are a couple of us who are field engineers, and either of us can maintain and deploy updates.

My understanding is that it is a fairly small price point. They have two different models, where one is based on the sockets that you're protecting, and the other is based on instances, or servers. You can choose whichever model works best for you.

I think that this is a good product across any environment. I've installed it for schools, in the financial industry, for lawyers, and places that vary in size from small to large. I've never had any issues and I recommend it.

I know that there are always new features being released but at this point, there is nothing to say that I need anything more. That said, there is always room for improvement.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

Primary backup and long-term retention to protect our client data across our datacenters. Allows for incremental RPOs for VM and file-level recovery across multiple datacenters to our IT staff of more than 200 technicians. Enable fast restores and long term archival.

As our datacenters continue to grow, we had a challenge of reducing backup windows while being able to scale our total protected VMs. Before Veeam, we had backup infrastructure sprawl. Veeam was able to reduce our overall backup windows while reducing our dedicated backup infrastructure.

Granular permissions through Veeam Enterprise Manager have allowed for us to pass control down to our support staff instead of having it with senior datacenter resources.

Vendor integration for many of the enterprise features have allowed for us to have greater performance from our storage vendors further improving on our commitments to protect our clients' data. 

Multithreading of health check process: This can take too much time to process on large jobs and/or large VMs. Better to have built-in deduplication for long-term retention. Storage efficiency is a weakness.

Additional executive summary reports for the entire infrastructure would be a nice to have.

Three to five years.

No, we have not experienced any stability issues.

One challenge that we have encountered was on the long-term retention of data. Be sure to look into a dedicated deduplication appliance. 

Also, know where the bottleneck is within your environment. If you are repurposing older equipment, it likely won't be up to the task. Storage performance is crucial to your backup times.

Support has been great; no complaints.

We used PHD Virtual and what is now Unitrends UVB. Backup infrastructure was becoming a significant cost and scaling this solution meant more sprawl. Backup windows were increasing outside our comfort levels. At the time, we as acquired a company with additional datacenter services. Consolidating to one solution with a single interface was key. This, in turn, ensured that we had complete visibility of our backup environments across multiple datacenters.

Veeam helped us solve all of these areas of concern.

It was pretty straightforward.

In-house.

We have increased our scalability while being able to free up senior resources from recovery activities. I estimate our overall savings to about $20,000 per year.

Plan your long-term backup strategy for growth and size the solution appropriately. Veeam has a number of setup options to choose from so make sure you understand them to make the right decision.

I would always suggest a multi-year agreement as this will allow for the best possible ROI of licensing.

We looked at vRanger, Unitrends, and Datto.

Since everyone's data is different, I would recommend a proof of concept project to understand how your data will be used within this solution. If you are intending to keep data for long-term retention, look at a dedicated deduplication appliance.

It is very easy to recover from crashes or create testing environments.

By using the “Instant VM Recovery”, we test new patches or features on a VM, which is the same as our production environment.

Our VMware License is the Enterprise Plus with Operations Management. For this reason, we only rely on Veeam for backups and a few tests.

Most of our activities are done using VMware itself.

Veeam has more features than we actually use, for example, the virtual labs.

They could integrate Veeam with the storage centers, in order not to use the Veeam Backup Repository Servers anymore.

I have used the solution for three years.

Our organization has always used the latest stable version of the Enterprise Edition.

No.

No. If we need to scale, we just create more proxy VMs to help with the extra load.

We rarely use Veeam's tech support. When we needed it, they were very helpful.

We had other backup solutions, but Veeam has proved to be better than VMware.

The initial setup was made by a consultant from Veeam. It took less than one week to have everything configured and ready for production.

The price for Veeam is better than other backup solutions that we have found out there.

Yes. We also use Bacula, but Veeam proved to be faster and more reliable.

First of all, find out what your backup needs are. After that, try an evaluation (or free) version.

-Reliable consistent Backups/Restores

-Ease of use despite doing complex work

-Replication

a. Other than it has saved us from hours of work not having to rebuild servers and the many times it has helped us recover data that was valuable, I don't know how to translate that into money, but it's no small thing.

b. This one is HUGE: We moved our entire data center, from one physical location to another, mind you we are 24 hour operation with sites across the state relying on the systems being up, and we never lost one hour of downtime. We used Veeam Backup and Recovery to migrate our entire Vmware Farm from old location to the new. It was awesome.

Tape support is there, but needs improvement. Netvault beats in that area. But most of our backups are to disk then to tape; but also copy to disk DR (in development). Reporting is lacking unless you get additional product. Very basic reporting. This would an easy area to improve upon.

6 to 7 years.

We have had some hiccups with it once in a great while. Nothing major, and nothing that would stop me from recommending it.

No.

No.

Good to Excellent.

Good.

Yes. We used Netvault (still use it in limited way). Veeam is far more flexible.

Straightforward. We did not have to read volumes and volumes of tech docs. Interface was intuitive.

In-house team.

No sure I have numbers - how about millions?

It is priced per Socket. We have licensed 24 servers, 2 Sockets per server. Enterprise Edition.

Yes. Netvault, Vranger, commvault, and some others. I chose Veeam Backup after evaluating others because of it's reliability, ease of use and features.

Do a test. Have good hardware to run on and to backup to. Best to have SAN aware backups which require you give access to the storage cards to LUNS that you are backing up. Either iSCSI or Fiber. Network backups work, but much faster with SAN aware.