Veeam Data Platform Reviews

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.

Most of the features and capabilities we implemented for our clients using the Veeam backup solution revolve around enhancing their backup processes. These include functionalities such as backup encryption, immutable storage, integration with various object cloud storage platforms like AWS Cloud, and ensuring compatibility with multiple object cloud platforms.

The backup and disaster recovery process within the Data Platform is exceptionally user-friendly. Whether you're performing a backup or restoring data, the graphical user interface makes it straightforward. All capabilities can be accessed with ease, thanks to the intuitive design of the interface.

The reliability of the Veeam Data Platform has been consistently satisfactory in our deployments. We have encountered no issues, and all of our clients have expressed satisfaction with its performance.

We are particularly pleased with the DIP, especially given our focus on the Nutanix platform. DIP with Nutanix virtualization has been especially valuable to us.

The inclusion of important functions and capabilities, such as ransomware protection and scanning, was crucial. It's noteworthy that these features are already available in version twelve, which is a significant enhancement.

When utilizing Veeam to manage RTO and RPO objectives, the primary focus lies in minimizing recovery time (RTO) and ensuring effective project or object management. Branches, especially those with high IO and ITO demands, such as those in SANX deployments, prioritize data visibility before backup and archiving. Typically, lower RPOs are managed by the recovery features of the virtualization layer. Our primary aim is usually to achieve the shortest RPO feasible within the specified parameters. However, in our deployments, the shortest configured RPO is based on the specific requirements of our clients.

Managing multiple cloud environments with the Veeam Data Platform is highly effective. The platform offers robust support for major cloud providers like AWS. I've personally tested its integration with AWS and iOS and found it to be extremely straightforward and user-friendly.

Veeam Data Platform offers features specifically designed for ransomware defense. This includes the ability to integrate with immutable repositories, safeguarding your data against ransomware attacks. Additionally, the platform provides integrated anti-malware detection capabilities, and it allows seamless integration with third-party endpoint security solutions to further enhance data security.

I think there's an opportunity for improvement in terms of the supported operating systems for the Veeam Data Platform. Currently, it's limited to the Windows operating system, excluding Linux environments. Expanding its compatibility to include Linux would represent a significant advancement. 

I have been working with it for approximately six years.

I would rate its stability abilities eight out of ten.

Its scalability capabilities are eight out of ten. The maximum supported capacity of the current version of Windows determines the capacity limitations for the Veeam Data Platform, as it is dependent on the operating system. This serves as a constraint for the platform. It is suitable for businesses of varying sizes, including small, medium, and enterprise-level organizations.

I would rate its customer service and support nine out of ten.

Positive

Setting up the system initially is straightforward.

It's quite flexible—you can begin with a single license that supports ten instances and scale up based on your specific requirements. I would rate the pricing six out of ten when compared to other competitors.

Overall, I would rate it eight out of ten.

I find Veeam Data Platform to be an excellent solution with numerous features. It serves as a highly effective choice for backup, replication, and disaster recovery in my opinion.

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) is an excellent solution for ensuring user-side disaster recovery. It involves a platform on-premise, which can be replicated to another site. It's a very effective solution, and we prioritize both the FTO and the FTO.                

I recommended adding Azure for EBMI XPower backup and incorporating SolarWinds for end-of-month risk processes, which were not part of the initial solution.

I have been using Veeam Data Platform since 10 years.

I would rate the stability 9 out of 10.

I would rate the scalability 9 out of 10. Generally, our clients fall into the medium-sized category.

There are processes needed to enhance support. Technical support is an area that needs improvement.

Neutral

I find the solution to be easily understandable and trouble-free. Deployment is straightforward, and I've had a positive experience with it. Currently, I haven't deployed with Azure or Microsoft thirteen hundred fifty-five, but I may explore that in the future for a better understanding.

I acknowledge there are concerns about pricing, specifically in gaining more customers for VM. We've encountered difficulties in convincing them due to pricing issues. So, I rate it a six.

We strongly advocate using Veeam for specific cases, particularly for backup services and Disaster Recovery as a Service. These are the two primary cases we utilize to enhance our customer solutions.

On a scale of one to ten, with one being the worst and ten being the best, I would rate this product as an eight.

We use the solution for customers who want to back up their VMware environment.

The solution is really easy and straightforward to use. If we want to configure something using Veeam ONE, we don't need much time to study the management interface. Our customers appreciate the solution's ease of use.

Recovery is the most important thing when we create a backup, which works fine on Veeam ONE. We can also use the shared backup and run recovery tests when needed.

The solution is not very good at backing up the physical Linux systems. Backing up SAP HANA with the solution is not very convenient. The solution also does not support the backups of uncommon databases, which prevents it from spreading across the market.

I have been working with the solution for the past five years.

The stability is quite good. I would rate it a nine out of ten.

The scalability is very good. Ten of our customers use the solution. I rate the scalability a ten out of ten.

The support is quite responsive and fast. It depends on what kind of support package you have paid for, but generally, it's fine.

The initial setup is very easy.

It takes us half a day to install and configure the systems. The time taken for deployment depends on how big the environment is.

To deploy the solution, install it first on the virtual machine or the physical systems, then install it on the Windows physical machine. Then, set up the accounts in the physical or virtual servers. Finally, connect the repository for the pickups and configure the backup jobs.

We need one or two administrators and engineers to deploy the solution.

The licensing fee depends on the licensing model we choose. We can pay for on-premise licensing. We can also choose to pay a yearly fee for support, or we can pre-pay for support five years in advance. 

Now, the solution also provides a subscription model. Additional costs depend on the kind of product we purchase.

Veeam has an Essentials edition and an Enterprise edition for larger environments. People who want to use the solution should choose the on-premise licensing instead of the subscription model because it will be much cheaper. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

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

The tool is a stable backup solution.

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

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

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

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

Veeam’s support is good and fast.

Positive

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

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

The tool’s deployment was done in-house.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.