Veeam Data Platform Reviews

We use Veeam Backup and Replication for image backups.

We use Veeam Explorer for Exchange for single item restores and to restore mailboxes, which is good. With SQL Explorer, you can access SQL, and it's got some good tools that are integrated into the product. 

The Veeam physical backups for Windows is good, but I'm not sure about other operating systems. If you have a lot of central sites and remote sites, you can easily set up the replication and make it easier.

Veeam Backup and Replication is a very good product, but there's room for improvement. For example, if you have to set up multiple servers, there's a lot of work to configure and set up projects. But once it's set up, it's very easy to manage. I think you have to resize it in the data center, and then it's pretty simple. We can integrate the storage, and you can use data resizing and do a lot more.

The reporting feature can also be improved. Version 10 has come up with a better report, but version 9.4 isn't so good. I mean, it doesn't show whether we can allow customization of reports and more.

I have used Veeam Backup and Replication for one year. 

Veeam Backup and Replication is very stable. I haven't faced any problems with it so far.

Their technical support is excellent. Whenever I have contacted Veeam support, they were very good, very helpful, and supportive. Their website is a very good support site as well.

The initial setup is straightforward, and it took us about an hour to deploy.

I'm told that Veeam Backup and Replication is a cost-effective solution, and it's very competitive in terms of pricing. It's cheaper, and it's going to be up ahead of the competitors in terms of pricing by sockets. Compared to other vendors, they're much cheaper, and Veeam is almost everywhere now.

Veeam is very good. 

On a scale from one to ten, I would give Veeam Backup and Replication an eight.

We primarily use the solution for backup and replication.

The whole replication aspect of the solution is excellent because it compresses the data so well. 

The way you get everything on one pane and see the whole environment because you're top is one of the reasons I really like Nutanix.

It would be ideal if users could know that their data is backed up and have some security functionality where you can actually use the backup to spin up a new cluster and take it from there. 

If they can create a virtual environment with the traffic environment that would be beneficial.

The solution is very stable once it's up and running.

The solution is easily scalable if you have to move to a larger site.

Nutanix technical support is excellent. You can't get better. You won't get better.

I used HP, the normal three-tier environment, and I wanted to go to upper coverage, so I switched.

The initial setup is easy.

We handled the implementation ourselves.

We're using the on-premises deployment model.

The solution has some really nice features, but there is a lot of competition in the open-source market. I'd truthfully also prefer an open-source solution as well.

I would rate the solution nine out of ten.

This product has improved the entire RTO and allows us to restore applications and services to customers within a few minutes.

• The object level restore from the Active Directory
• Microsoft Exchange
• Microsoft SQL
• Backup and restore of vCloud Director Objects
• Direct SAN integration with 3PAR

I like these features because they are helpful in offering additional and detailed disaster recovery services for managed services customers. The direct SAN backup feature perfectly integrates with our 3PAR storage infrastructure. It has significantly reduced the time it takes to backup virtual machines.

The direct SAN backup integration can be perfected by improving the snapshot removal mechanism and process from the storage volumes. This will prevent stale snapshots from accumulating on the data stores, which in turn consumes precious space.

There were no stability issues that I can think of. When the best practices for deploying Veeam Backup and Replication are strictly followed, the system can be stable without any issues.

We didn’t have any problems with scalability at all. It all comes down to how to deploy the Veeam infrastructure. If it is well designed, scaling is no problem.

The technical support is fairly good.

I have used other solutions in the past, but I switched because Veeam just works. It is pretty easy to set up, use, and it has fewer limitations.

The setup is straightforward, depending on how you want to deploy it. The installer can configure everything for you on the same server with all the relevant databases. It will also automatically install any required external software needed for Veeam to operate.

The licensing is based on the number of cores you have in your ESX or Hyper-V environment. That should be taken into consideration when purchasing the Veeam Backup and Replication solution.

I have used TSM, Backup Exec, and Retrospect.

I would recommend IT professionals who run their infrastructure in a predominantly virtual environment to go for the Veeam Backup and Replication solution. It does the job and it is relatively easy to set up.

One of the most important features of Veeam is the excellent self-restart feature. We use Veeam to provide remote backups for us as well as our customers. Many times a communications glitch will occur that will disrupt the backup process during the offsite backup procedure. The product will automatically restart the process and continue self-monitoring and restarting until the backup is complete and also notify our support staff of its status. This self-restart feature also works very well on the local backups should a rare error situation occur.

Another feature that is important to us is Veeams virtual server restart feature. This allows us to quickly restart a virtual sever. This feature provides an almost immediate server restart should a calamity occur.

Another great feature is the ability to backup only the changed files/blocks. This results in very fast backups once the initial backup is done. Compression is also excellent with the Veeam product. This saves space on the target drive and as well as time on the data transmission process. This is very important during offsite backups. Lastly, a great feature is the encryption protection on the backups that protects data during the offsite backup process.

It has greatly reduced the man power required to monitor the backup process. Coupled with the email notification feature, the BDR services that we offer can be managed by one person and subject matter knowledge can easily be transferred to another technician without extensive training.

We would like to see a product that supports Linux, however, we believe that this support is already in the works.

We have used Veeam for about two years at our facility as well as at our customers facilities.

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.

We currently backup many TBs of data without any problem.

The level of customer support is excellent.

The support personnel are very articulate, knowledgeable, easy to understand, and provide a quick turn around on our questions.

We have tried several other products and none were as good as Veeam. One competing product caught fire. Another product was not reliable on local or remote backups, and the other was extremely overpriced with low quality hardware, buggy software, low quality support, and low reliability.

It should be installed by a IT professional who understands security, backups and bandwidth. However, this applies to any company that wants to establish a rock sold BDR process. Before the implementation is started be sure to map out the data that is to be backed up, calculate the bandwidth, disk space, and time required to do the initial backup. Next, set up the local backup first and get it running properly. Then, set up the first initial offsite backup remembering that the first offsite backup may take several days. After that, the offsite backups will run very quickly.

We provide BDR services so we learned Veeam and installed it ourselves.

Pricing of Veeam is excellent and is an excellent value proposition for both partners and customers.

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.

Veeam has been the best BDR product that we have ever used. Although it does require some expertise to set it up correctly, once it is set up it runs perfectly. Use an experienced Veeam company or consultant or spend time learning the product. It is very worthwhile

Spend time to plan resources, bandwidth, etc. before installing the Veeam. Watch the Veeam process carefully in the first few weeks in order to learn what it does. It has a wide array of features so make sure you learn how to perform the various types of restores (e.g. virtual server restore, single file restore, etc.). Take advantage of the ability to provide local and remote backups and configure both for the target environment. What is very important, as in all BDR environments, is to regularly do a test restore of a few files to make sure that the backups and restores are working properly.

The ability to backup servers without an agent installed is very valuable. Many of our applications are customized by us, and may break with constant changes and updates to third party software and operating system changes. So the ability to integrate the backup solution into VMware for seamless backups is fantastic. Our users don’t know backups are happening, and it really becomes invisible.

Another feature we value is the ease of individual file restoration. Someone will submit a ticket for a file restoration, and we can have it finished within five to 15 minutes depending on the size of the file. Before, we would be figuring out which backup disk or tape had the server on it for that amount of time prior to even starting the restore.

Our company now has nightly backups, whereas before we only had weekly backups. It’s also allowed us to retire our cloud backup solution (HP Autonomy LiveVault), saving us about $40,000/year in storage costs. Since we completely control the backup environment, we’re able to have onsite backups, offsite backup copies, an archive, and even replication all through one interface. It’s made our infrastructure much more flexible, and in a disaster recovery situation allows us to resume business within hours instead of days or weeks.

Moving backup repositories and merging backup chains is either difficult or not possible as far as I know in the current release of Veeam Backup and Replication. This has made it inefficient to retire backup storage repositories, causing us to keep more backup files than we might otherwise do. This means we are wasting space simply to keep a backup for archive purposes, and I can see this being addressed with scale-out repositories in the future.

Veeam has been in place for at least three years at my company, and I’ve used it here for almost two years. This has been across multiple rebuilds of the backup system to go from not useful to confident we can restore anything quickly.

We did run into a few issues of certain applications not being entirely compatible with Veeam, or requiring a bit of customization to our backup jobs to ensure they work correctly. This is mostly due to SQL express databases not allowing truncation during backup jobs, which isn’t necessary a fault with the Veeam software, but our implementation of other products in our environment

Stability has not been an issue when Veeam is installed on a physical server outside the virtual environment, but I would avoid installing Veeam on a virtual machine if you think you’ll be changing the CPU or Memory limits of the VM that Veeam is running. We found this created a very unstable installation for some reason, forcing us to move the Veeam installation back to a physical server. In some environments, a physical server is desired for direct SAN access or for limiting the impact of a backup server on the virtual environment, so a VM instance of Veeam may not be a consideration for many anyway. For those of you without the extra hardware to set up a dedicated Veeam installation, I’d recommend a set it and forget it mindset for the VM to avoid the possibility of performance issues.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

Veeam customer service and technical support have been fantastic. They’ve been very responsive, very professional, and have resolved every issue we’ve thrown at them quickly. One example is in the previous versions, there was an issue with rotating drives, and support provided a fix for us to use rotating drives for offsite backups within about an hour of us calling. Several other issues relating to database backups and log truncation have been resolved within at most a day or two.

The company previously used Symantec Backup Exec, and Veeam was already in place (although poorly configured) when I arrived. We also used HP LiveVault online backup, which was a very poor solution and required constant baby-sitting to be sure it worked properly. We chose to discontinue using HP LiveVault because restores took a very long time, especially Exchange restores, for example, we had to restore a mailbox of a terminated user that was never exported to a PST. With LiveVault, we had to download a 200GB .EDB file, mount it, and export the mailbox as .PST to get the 5 or so mail messages we needed. When we switched everything to Veeam and properly configured it, we were provided the ability to mount a backup and restore a mailbox directly from the backup, even if it's offsite. This proved to decrease restore times to at most an hour, and along with file-level restorations, SQL backup and restores, and the ease of ensuring proper backups for our entire environment, pushed us well over the edge in choosing Veeam as the product we trust for our backups.

The initial setup is very straightforward for a seasoned system/network administrator. You must create login credentials for Veeam in your VMware environment, and you cannot use Veeam without vSphere, so for someone new to VMware or Veeam, make sure to read the installation documents to ensure it goes smoothly. I didn’t have any major issues with setup.

I implemented our Veeam installation myself with minimal help from Veeam support. I definitely recommend a vendor team that will work closely with you throughout the entire process if you will be supporting the Veeam product on your own instead of Backup as a Service. The advice I have about implementation is to make sure you have appropriately sized backup storage and a dedicated WAN if using offsite replication or backup copy/offsite archive.

I believe it’s possible to work directly with Veeam, but we had our VAR handle it, which made the process fairly hands-off and easy. I recommend handling this the same way for almost any licensing, not just Veeam.

Veeam is the first backup solution I’ve used that’s designed for Virtual environments. With that disclaimer, I’d give the product 8/10 for out of the box functionality and ease of use. However, this is assuming there are no issues for Veeam in your environment, but we did have a few. This required several support calls with Veeam, which did somewhat quickly offer us a properly working backup system. Including Veeam support’s assistance, my rating would go up to 9/10, but this depends if you have a perpetual license with no support, or a subscription with ongoing support. The support increases satisfaction in this product, at least initially.

I’d highly recommend considering an offsite storage provider that supports Veeam Cloud Connect. We use SingleHop, which costs about $900/month for 7TB of online storage. This is expensive, but allows us to have our backups hosted offsite, secure and fully supported by Veeam. Also, make sure your local backup target is fast enough to support simultaneous writes and reads at a high enough rate not to eat into your production day, or at least minimize backup windows. It’s obvious to me, but maybe not obvious to others—don’t skimp on your backup storage, and don’t put your backups on your production storage device (SAN, NAS, etc.) It makes backups pointless in the case of a storage device failure.

Below is a screenshot of our Archive settings, which pull from production backups and keep weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly backups up to our retention policy automatically. It's very hands-off, which I love and it's great for auditors, as we just send them this screenshot and they check off the box about records retention and backups.

This is a list of our backups and backup copy jobs to show how we’ve set it up. Note our “Production Servers” backup says it last failed, due to an issue with our backup storage location not being fast enough and getting bogged down. I was working on this as I wrote this review.

Its replication piece allows us to migrate over to different servers and data centers.

Veeam lets me move machines from older platforms. I could have used the replication tools from VMware, but not for the older platform. Veeam allows the upgrade of infrastructure as well. It's easy to use once you get to know the tool.

We can now perform replication for migrating data.

• Compression rates could be improved for moving thousands of machines at a time.
• There was a small glitch that was resolved with a call to tech support.
• Can't perform replication without creating snapshots, which takes up all the space in VM, so I must do so with physical machines.

Technical support is excellent.

Depending on the infrastructure, if it's large, it should just find the physical box with lots of storage, and processors for moving lots of machines at a time.

You should consider the bandwidth, numbers of machines, and then determine whether to use physical machine or VM.

• ESXi & vCenter comparability
• Veeam Backup support
• Fully customization

It has made it easier to monitor our virtual environments.

I've used it for one year.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

10/10.

10 but we haven't really used it.

No previous solution used.

It was moderate.

In-house implementation.

We also looked at SCOM.

If you say no to Veeam One, at least implement it in your Lab environment, it will change your mind.

We are a solution provider and we deal with different backup solutions including Veeam Backup & Replication. This is something that we do on a project basis and have been doing for a long time.

We primarily use this solution for backup and replication; we buy the software and map it to our customer's requirements.

The interface is very user-friendly. The customers in my region are happy with it.

No product is 100% and there is always room for improvement. One of the downsides to Veeam is that it's just software-based. In the future, Veeam should release a hardware backup appliance that can be integrated with their software.

Better integration with other products would be an improvement.

Veeam Backup & Replication

This is a stable product.

Scalability is not an issue with this solution. There are multiple licensing options available to handle different environments. For example, there is a 10-pack of VM licenses available as an option.

Based on the communication that I have had with my peers, my understanding is that the support we have had from Veeam has been great.

We deal with Commvault, depending on the project, and we are also a distributor of Arcserve.

As a presales engineer, I have not been part of the installation.

If needed, we do the installation for our clients. Our technical process team is responsible for that.

There are multiple licensing options available to handle environments of varying sizes. The price is quite competitive compared to other products in my region.

The customer is the one that chooses the backup solution. For example, they will come to us and say "We want Veeam Backup and Replication", and then we provide the licenses to them.

This is a product that I definitely recommend for small businesses.

Overall, this is a good product but there is always room for improvement. If Veeam released a hardware appliance to work with their software, then I would rate them a ten out of ten.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten.