Veeam Data Platform Reviews

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 are a technology company running our own data center and we have been using Veeam Backup and Replication for the past six or seven years out of the 18 years that we've been in business. Our staff comprises six other employees other than myself and we manage the data center by ourselves with our development team.

We use Veeam Backup and Replication for performing VM replications and backups for our 20-30 servers in the data center. Specifically, we use it for our VMware and HyperV server hypervisors, and (partly) with our Oracle OEM server. We also use Veeam for AD backups, which has been a very successful experience.

In all, we have around 700 end users with Veeam, of which about 500 are branch users and 200 are customers.

Some time ago, we lost some of the groups within our AD Organizational Units, but through Veeam we were able to successfully recover all the data thanks to Veeam's AD backup functionality.

One of the best things about Veeam is that they have consistently improved on themselves since they started. Personally, I've been using Veeam since around 2013/2014 when it was only supporting certain hypervisors such as HyperV, and since then it has become truly mature enterprise-level software with a lot of versatility. Despite that it's now an enterprise product, it's still user-friendly and easy to approach.

If they could add more support for all of the modern hypervisors, that would make Veeam much better and more flexible to work with. For example, there is no solution for VM to VM replication when it comes to Oracle OEM servers. Instead, we have had to implement Oracle Data Guard and some other syncing procedures for our replication of VMs with Oracle OEM.

On a separate note, I also think that they could add more functionality when it comes to real-time replications. 

I've been using Veeam Backup and Replication for about seven years now.

Its scalability is good. I've been testing Veeam since around 2013 and they have constantly expanded their features, improving day by day. Our management particularly likes this about Veeam, and we are hoping Veeam will keep working to add more hypervisor support, such as for Oracle OEM. That would make it really easy for us to scale up our usage of Veeam even further.

Veeam's technical support is very good. I also like that we have public learning resources such as live session webinars. Their support staff are very well trained and we really appreciate their effort. The way they train and assist, even a layman can understand.

Setup is very simple. It's not a complex interface. A layman can understand it in two to three days if they have a good trainer.

I'm the senior architect and system admin managing all the servers (physical and virtual) in the data center. When it comes to implementations, I have another manager beside me, along with five other junior staff.

I implemented Veeam myself in one day, and added all the infrastructure with HyperV and VMware to our repository. We have almost 200 VMs for different applications and we implemented those in two days. Most implementations take just a few hours.

Although our license includes support, we have only really used the support when we were using Veeam for Active Directory. The rest of the time, we find Veeam easy enough to use without paying extra support fees. We are technology-aware people and experienced with this kind of technology, so we opted for the perpetual license. We mainly go with perpetual licensing with our various vendors (including hardware vendors) such as VMware, NetBackup, and so on.

Veeam Backup and Replication literally saved our business. We have already had two or three disasters over 50+ VM servers, and twice when we crashed the main servers, Veeam enabled a fully successful disaster recovery.

Overall, its ease of use largely depends on who is using it. If the user is a layman or non-technical person, we have to teach them from scratch. But if they are tech-savvy, there's not much to it. 

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

Our use case is about a hundred VMR servers and maybe a handful of agents.

It has improved our organization. I don't have to spend all day troubleshooting backups, so it has freed up a lot of time.

It is a rock-solid backup solution. That's all, and that's what we were asking for.

They fixed everything that I was hoping for. It is pretty good. There were a few things in 9.x that I was wishing for, and they came true in version 10. We were looking for retention without having to make a copy job.

We're getting ready to migrate m365 to the cloud. I haven't dived into it to make sure, but I wish the m365 backup would integrate into the current console so that we don't have to use two different consoles.

I have been using this solution for maybe two years. I use it daily.

It is rock solid. We didn't have any issues.

Its scalability is great. They have scale-out backup repositories where you can add more extents, so it'll grow with you. You just buy more space or another server and then add it into the scale-out backup repository.

Primarily, there are six users, and I'm the primary one. We're all in the operation center.

Their technical support is great. They're quick, very knowledgeable, and very proficient. I would give them a ten out of ten.

We used Unitrends before this, and it was constant babysitting. It worked great for that time period, but once we migrated to VMware, we decided to try one of the industry standards. It has really paid off for us. Unitrends was quite a bit more expensive.

Now that I understand it, it would probably be simple, but initially, it was a kind of interesting concept. It was a little bit complex, and we had a vendor who configured it for us, but we battled it until we got it all configured the way we wanted. The biggest issue was the space for making the backups. We didn't realize how much space we would use.

Don't waste your time. Go ahead and do it.

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

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.

The solution's interface, GUI (graphical user interface), and backup are good.

The solution’s scalability could be improved. Veeam Data Platform has limitations for features like Hyper-V and open-source hypervisors outside VMware.

I have been using Veeam Data Platform for five years.

Normally, the solution is not very stable when we back up big databases.

I rate the solution a seven out of ten for stability.

It’s not very easy to scale the solution.

I rate the solution’s scalability a six out of ten.

The troubleshooting provided by the technical support team needs to be improved.

Neutral

The solution’s initial setup is easy.

One person can deploy the solution in two to four hours.

We have seen a good return on investment with the solution. Veeam Data Platform has helped save 70% of our time.

Veeam Data Platform's pricing is affordable.

Veeam Data Platform is not a good solution for customers who do not use VMware. Veeam Data Platform doesn't have storage and needs to integrate with other vendors for storage. Customers using anything other than VMware should clarify all the requirements and limitations of Veeam Data Platform before using it. It is easy to integrate the solution with other systems like Lenovo and Dell.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We use the product as a backup solution during emergency scenarios. 

One thing we like about the product is that it's good and not as expensive as similar products. Right now, there are different ways to back up your information—you can back up directly to a disk or the cloud. It allows you to have various kinds of repositories.

It would be nice to see more affordable training options for individuals who want to enhance their skills. Some people I know have been interested in training courses, but they found them too expensive.

Veeam Backup & Replication is a stable product. 

I rate Veeam Backup & Replication's scalability as nine out of ten. 

The product is stable and takes care of everything we need. We've only had to ask for support a few times, but each time, they've been really helpful.

Positive

The main difference between the solution and its competitors is based on pricing. Other products are more expensive. 

Veeam Backup & Replication's installation is simple. 

Every backup solution is like car insurance. You'll see the return when you have a problem. If you don't have any problems, you won't see the value of a backup solution. You realize the value when something goes wrong. It helps you feel more confident that you can recover the information if something happens to your company.

The solution's pricing is cheap. 

I rate the overall tool a nine out of ten. 

For our clients, the optimal use case depends on their specific requirements. It excels in safeguarding commercial machines, physical servers, and diverse workloads, including those hosted on AWS EC2 instances. It proves highly effective in managing databases, catering to various platforms such as Cisco and Oracle, and addressing the unique needs of different clients.

The most valuable aspects are the latest features in version 12.1, which introduced enhanced security features.

Margins should not be distinct; instead, they should seamlessly integrate with the Veeam Backup and Replication tools, requiring minimal separation.

I have been working with it for more than five years.

I would rate it stability capabilities eight out of ten.

It offers excellent scalability. Our clientele typically consists of small, medium, and enterprise businesses. I would rate it nine out of ten.

I would rate its technical support services ten out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward. I would rate it ten out of ten.

The deployment process typically takes two to three hours.

It is highly cost-effective when compared to other solutions. With only one license needed, all features can be enjoyed, eliminating the need for separate licensing for individual components.

We recommend using it because of its simplicity. Overall, I would rate it nine out of ten.

Our common use case is to offer backup solutions and disaster recovery services to customers.

A key benefit is the constant security of data. It enables us to assure customers that their data is consistently accessible, even in the face of server issues or potential disruptions.

The most valuable aspect is its reliability in recovering any replaceable data in the event of server issues in a production environment. It proves to be a dependable solution for ensuring business continuity in case of a disaster occurring at the current production site.

It would be beneficial if it could expand its coverage to support Frostbox and provide greater flexibility for service providers to recommend backup solutions based on customer preferences in prospective environments.

I have been working with it for more than one year.

It provides good stability.

It offers high scalability capabilities.

So far, the support team has proven valuable in providing effective solutions and useful guidance.

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward.

In the initial stages of deployment, it's essential to understand the customer's backup infrastructure needs. This involves determining the specific requirements of the customer and assessing whether our existing environment is equipped to meet those needs. Maintenance is relatively straightforward for me.

Customers are experiencing a significant positive return on investment.

The pricing is reasonable. It provides good value for the money. Licensing costs can occasionally present a significant financial challenge.

It's particularly useful for those looking to offer backup services, complemented by optional additional recovery and replacement services with Veeam. Overall, I would rate it eight out of ten.