Veeam Data Platform Reviews

There’s not much a backup software can do to the organization but its features enable us to have an inexpensive data recovery solution that ultimately plays a factor when choosing to move applications and services to the cloud.

The greatest benefit of this software is its reliability. The ability to offload backup snapshots to the SAN helps with reducing the backup durations. The ability to turn on each VM for verification that the backup is reliable is another great feature. Recovery of a VM often takes longer for the tech to respond than the software to complete its recovery and power on speaks to the recover speed. The changed block tracking feature is one that enables us to choose which systems need a frequent (i.e., 5 min) incremental.

They need to address the confusing recovery dialogue. When you go through the recovery of just a single file within a VM you select the file recovery type and then after selecting a point in time you are presented with a “Finish” button. It’s not clear that no existing files would be overwritten nor affected which can be especially stressful when the VM is live. A change to this dialogue would be welcomed.

In earlier versions, there were some stability issues, but nothing in recent years that I can recall.

We have not had scalability issues and I don’t see how this couldn’t scale to a much larger environment than the one I’m responsible for.

The support staff are very knowledgeable to what I remember. We don’t really utilize them much, but a couple years back when we had storage issues, Veeam was very helpful.

I’ve used traditional backup software that was based on tape and their move to VM backups still used this model. I always tried to pigeon hole backups to disk into tape containers which too frequently resulted in problems. Other VM backups earlier on didn’t improve at the same rate as Veeam.

Setup has always been simple. You add your host, a connection to a backup location and in a few clicks you’ve initiated your first backup. I’m simplifying it but if you compare it to most others, the setup takes a fraction of the time.

If you have Exchange, Oracle, SQL, or a supported SAN, then I suggest getting at least an Enterprise edition. It’ll pay for itself in no time.

We looked at Veritas NetBackup, ArcServe, Veritas Backup Exec, CommVault, and one other that has since gone out of business. The name eludes me.

I suggest that you have another set of backups than just a deduping appliance that replicates offsite. This ‘second’ backup should be stored in a secure manner considering the news of backups being taken hostage by ransomware.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Veeam is a solid performer for backing up VMware. By leveraging VMware’s changed block tracking (CBT) the incremental backups are very efficient and small. Veeam also has a rather intuitive interface that is easy to understand and is easy to get up and running in short order. It has several other solid features, such as storage snapshot integration (new feature), Exchange/SQL/file granularity, and some very useful recovery options as well.

Reliable backups are so critical and my Veeam backups (disk-to-disk) have never failed to be restorable. I can’t say that about other products I’ve used.

I have asked Veeam to consider backing up physical devices for years and each time the response was “that’s not what we do”. As a result, they missed many opportunities to sell their products to customers who have a mixture of virtual and physical devices but don’t want to support multiple backup products. Veeam finally started down that path but they are taking their time to get the Endpoint Protection fully developed and rolled into the main product. They need to ramp this up and then I believe they would see even better adoption.

I've been using it for six to seven years.

Deploying Veeam is as easy as you get. The installation is wizard-driven and will install any dependencies you may need that aren’t already installed. On the other hand, I have had some issues with scalability. Specifically, backing up large virtual file servers for me goes very slowly. Veeam has a concept of a backup proxy, which moves the resource load to whatever is designated as the proxy. This can be the local Veeam server or another physical or virtual server.

For me, I have trouble with large VMDK files (multi TB) regardless of where I place the proxy and while there are several others who have similar results, Veeam hasn’t seemed to find a solution for this yet. Note that this is only on the initial full backup and subsequent incrementals are fine. Also note that I have not opened a case myself on this but have tracked the cases of others reporting the same issue.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

Veeam support is pretty good but has degraded somewhat as they have grown. Not surprising as this happens to every company as they ramp up but overall support is as it should be. What is solid though is that their technical people comb through the forums so many of the posts have expert feedback and advice right there, which is very nice. I find it nice to know that they at least care enough to do that and actually listen to the issues.

I’ve used several other products and pound-for-pound in a virtual environment Veeam seems to work the best.

Veeam is very easy to setup. The installation is wizard-driven and will install any dependencies you might be missing.

I work for a Veeam partner so we implement all Veeam deployments ourselves. My best advice for Veeam goes for all other products that support it: use a dedicated backup target such as Data Domain, StoreOnce, FalconStor, etc. Not only are these devices designed for this type of workload (improves performance) but you will get a secondary benefit of the hardware deduplication that makes your backup jobs incredibly small and efficient. You can run Veeam and a server and backup to the local storage to save money but the long-term solution is not as good and problem-free.

Licensing is based on CPU socket of the host servers and if you get the enterprise versions you also get support for file, SQL and Exchange granularity so there is nothing else left to buy. Most other products either require individual licenses for these advanced features or are licensed for the amount of data you have so in either of those cases your costs will rise as your data grows. With Veeam, provided you don’t add more servers, the license cost remains flat.

If you have a VMware or Hyper-V environment, then Veeam is the most mature and solid product in its class today. If you have a mixed environment, well then you may have some thinking to do. Personally I would still consider Veeam knowing they are working on their physical backup solution, which you can use today (although it’s very basic right now) or go with something else on the physical side for the time being.

Regular backup/recovery is the main feature, but I really like the Exchange mailbox recovery tool, and the ability to isolate test environments.

It is really easy to use as well, and it's a powerful backup/recovery solution.

Fortunately, we have not had to use the restore functionality (touch wood), but it does give us the reassurance that we can perform a restore if needed, in a real situation as well as performing regular testing in our virtual lab. The other functionality that has really had an impact is being able to granually restore Exchange mailboxes.

I really cannot think of any areas that stand out as needing improvement right now, to be honest.

We've used Veeam for two years. We started with the free version of Veeam ONE, then we paid for Backup Essentials because we were so pleased with it.

Not at all, we found it to be extremely intuitive to install, really clearly letting us know of any issues across network at each stage so could easily remedy.

Not at all, we've had no issue with stability.

Absolutely no problems with scaling.

Really highly, we did have an issue with type of license purchased (we accidentally ordered Hyper-V version instead of the one we needed) and the customer service team who resolved it was top notch. We were issued with a temporary full license to cover the period that they took to sort it out so we could continue to use the software. Brilliant.

We have not really needed technical support as we have found it to be really easy and intuitive to install and use. The documentation, when needed, has also been very comprehensive.

This is the first product that we have used to back up VMware ESXi. VM servers so do not have anything to compare against. Having said that, we have no reason to look for an alternative.

It's really easy, if there are any issues with things like firewall/ports that should be open, the software tells you exactly what the problem is and what's needed to fix it. Very impressed with this.

It was all done by our in-house IT team.

The ROI is difficult to calculate but the product has returned our original investment many times, in terms of insuring systems uptime across our business.

The original set-up cost was only the license fee (£636+vat), plus minimal internal IT costs to set up.

We did try Unitrends backup solution but really preferred Veeam’s offering.

My advice would be to go ahead with the implementation as I think it's the best product on market today for VMware ESXi disaster recovery. It really is straightforward to install and use, with some really nice features.

• Reliability: we need backups we can depend on
• Ease of use: when there's an issue and downtime, there's stress involved, and we should be able to restore things without reading 40 pages in a manual
• Reporting: we want to know what happened during the backup and what the results are
• Value for money (of course!)

It really just works, we don't have backup issues anymore. We're now implementing SureBackup so we can check the quality of the backups. Great feature.

The product has a great value for money and I'm happy to see they're still adding more features. I hope they can keep the setup as simple as possible as this is one of the strengths of the product.

I've used it for six months.

Some issues with backup proxies, but these issues were partly caused by the partner who installed Veeam. I just read the manual and took care of them myself. Can't blame Veeam for that.

They are very responsive, to the point and were able to help us. The forum is great and very active. They also help people using the free version, which is really nice of them.

Our previous solution was not transparent, hard to configure and fail short in the reporting. For us, the word of mouth was very important, we heard only positive things about it. The sales people are a bit "overenthusiastic". In the evaluation period I sometimes got phone calls twice a day. Also the access to local technical Veeam people was great.

We didn't set it up, a Veeam partner did. The updates/upgrades are very easy.

We did it with a vendor team to give us a head start. You really have to review the installation afterwards. Veeam is evolving very quickly, you could be missing out on interesting features.

It's hard to give ROI at this moment. IMHO the value of a backup is only truly appreciated when you have an issue.

The essentials bundle is great value for money if you have storage from NetApp or HP, but you really have to make sure you will not reach the limits in the near future. There are plans here to cooperate with other organizations and then the 3 hosts limit probably will give us trouble.

The instant recovery and quick boot of the replicas. Ability to boot replicas from a de-duplication storage device (degraded performance).

During a "zero day" virus outbreak that caused several critical systems to fail, the ability to boot and run a "replica" that hadn't been infected yet kept the business running and productive.

Performance of the replica when booting during an emergency. Only a few critical systems can be booted this way due to the loads on secondary storage appliances. This isn't really a problem, more of a limitation of the hardware devices we used for implementation.

I used this product for Virtual Machine replication to a D/R site and also as a secondary backup and recovery over two years.

Deployment went smoothly and without and major sticking points or issues.

Occasionally, we would experience slowness on our network that would cause Veeam to get "out-of-sync" with the replicas. This was easily corrected, but seemed to be overly sensitive to bandwidth and connection speed.

No issues.

Excellent. Very responsive, patient and professional when needed.

Excellent.

No, this was a new build-out where no previous solution had existed.

Very straightforward and intuitive.

We collaborated with a vendor but did 70% of the implementation with internal personal.

Excellent. The savings to lost work time during the virus outbreak alone saved the company work loss time for 150+ employees for two days.

Initial setup was under $3,000.00 including consultants and employee time. Day to day costs are very minimal with simply adding a new VM to one of the replication folders after deployment.

Yes. Backup Exec and Zerto were considered, but Veeam was chosen for better recoveries and easier administration.

Do your research and comparison studies that are specific for your business. Not all products are best for every business, no matter how good they are. Veeam is an excellent option and was ultimately the best choice for our environment.

Veeam ONE is a very good management product. With Veeam, you can control the underlying virtualization environment, along with VMware and Hyper-V. So, the product works with tools from other vendors.

The fact that it can make very good reports on Veeam Backup is a valuable feature. It offers very flexible reporting.

Improvement is required in infrastructure control because it generates reports on the infrastructure.

It would be good. It could be extended with, for example, collecting data from storage devices because you have the environment, which includes servers and storage devices. So, it would be good to have such integrations. It should have the ability to collect data from storage devices.

I have been using Veeam ONE for a year and a half. My company is a reseller and partner of the solution.

Stability-wise, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

Scalability-wise, I rate the solution an eight or nine out of ten. Only three or four system administrators are using it.

The technical support is very good, and I think it's one of the best. The response time is very quick.

There are other products for virtualization, but not for Veeam. I don't know any other product that covers Veeam, VMware, and Hyper V.

The solution's initial setup process is not very complex. The setup phase is not difficult. Creating reports is a bit difficult, and you have to spend some time on it.

The implementation was done with the help of our in-house team.

Veeam ONE is offered at a good price. Compared to its price, the functionality and features of the product are more important.

Regarding the complexity of the processes in the solution, I would say that it is complex even though it is easy to solve. For a complex environment, I would definitely recommend the use of Veeam ONE. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

The solution provides backup for my virtual infrastructure. We are customers of Veeam and I'm an IT manager. 

The interface is user-friendly and the solution works quickly. It's also quite helpful for restoring. If there's an instance where I don't need to restore, I can easily copy-paste and that is a useful feature. It's simple to schedule jobs on Veeam and get whatever details you need, it really fulfills all our requirements. 

It's sometimes difficult identifying the resources for backup and I think that could be improved. I'd also like to see more detailed reporting. 

I've been using this solution for almost four years. 

The solution is stable. 

The solution is scalable. 

We haven't really needed to contact customer service. 

We previously used a different solution and switched to Veeam because it works faster, the recovery process is very quick, and it's easily scalable. 

The initial setup wasn't too easy or too difficult. We had an integrator who helped us and it was a seamless process. Deployment took less than a day but integrating and customizing took some time, not only because of Veeam but as a result of the process involved in migrating from the previous solution. We have one person dealing with maintenance. We're using Veeam on 10 servers. 

We have been using this product for the past three to four years now, and we have well and truly recovered the cost of implementing it.

Licensing costs are reasonable.  

I rate this solution eight out of 10.