Veeam Data Platform Reviews

I am a system administrator. My role is to oversee the support of the company's network. I also take care of the deployment and maintenance. We use Veeam ONE to optimize hypervisors or my virtual machines.

The solution includes reporting on the virtual machines and the sources. It centralizes well. 

Veeam ONE is integrated with Veeam backup, so it includes reporting on both. I don't have to go back and forth between different applications to get the report I need.

Veeam ONE does the basic job of reporting, but it does not meet my requirements of automated resolution. 

In future releases, I would like to see the solution provide auto resolution and auto relocation of resources.

I have been using Veeam ONE for three years.

Veeam ONE performs as required. It is stable.

This solution is scalable. It depends on the kind of functions you require and what you want to get out of the product.

I would rate Veeam ONE's technical support a four out of five.

The initial setup of Veeam ONE is simple and straightforward.

The deployment was done in-house. It takes less than one day to deploy Veeam ONE. To implement, I created a virtual machine and installed Veeam ONE on it. I just had to attach it to the Hyper-V service.

Veeam ONE saves me a lot of time, so I don't have to look and monitor each service on its own.

We have a three-year license with Veeam billed annually. The cost is based on the number of core servers. 

I would rate the pricing of the solution a three out of five.

I am looking into Turbonomic to see if it can do more than Veeam ONE.

Veeam ONE is a good product if you are looking for monitoring and reporting. If you are looking for automated solutions, you will have to look somewhere else.

I would rate this solution an eight out of ten overall.

We use Veeam Backup Replication for the data center, desktop recovery, daily backups, and for storage offline.

The solution is a user-friendly interface.

The solution could improve by having a version to be compatible with the Linux system. They have improved the storage depository using the Linux proxy and Linux storage, but it can completely run on the Linux environment it would be much better.

I have been using Veeam Backup & Replication since version six which is approximately 10 years.

Veeam Backup Replication is highly reliable. One engineer can cover the entire backup solution for the whole organization.

I have found Veeam Backup Replication to be scalable.

We have between 500 - 1,000 users using this solution.

We have not needed to contact technical support.

We have previously used a Dell. However, Dell was difficult to restore backups and Veeam Backup Replication was a better fit for our needs.

We would like to have the Veeam Backup Replication from the VMware or Hyper-V direct to the tape library.

The installation is straightforward, it does not take long to do approximately 45 minutes.

We did the implementation in-house.

Veeam Backup Replication has a lot of free features. We have a mixture of the paid versions as well as the community version. They are really helpful to us.

We have approximately 200 instances of Veeam Backup Replication with paid licenses and we use the community edition for the small offices.

I rate Veeam Backup Replication a ten out of ten.

The features that I have found most valuable are its ease of management, it is not complicated, it is very reliable, has good support and a lot of knowledge on the market for integrators.

Ease of management was actually one of the main points for me. The second one is the SureBackup. SureBackup is the feature that allows you to automatically restore and check that the backups are consistent. 

Those are the two main points for our decision to choose Veeam. We made some POCs with some vendors and they took a lot of time and were really too complicated and required way more resources to invest.

I would want them to improve some technical features that are still missing because we are working with NetApp NVMe and they're not fully supporting it yet. But both NetApp and Veeam know about it and they're working on it. 

I'd like some improvements in ransom protection capabilities for Windows because they have some features with the Linux repositories but not with Windows.

There is no support for backing up snapshots from NVMe namespaces on NetApp.

For the cloud solution we need the Sophos backup solution, but I think that they are close to releasing this.

I have been using Veeam Backup & Replication for half a year.

Veeam Backup & Replication is stable. I think we have maybe one ticket open in Veeam support about something that's related to not being a stable system.

I'm not ready to answer that because we didn't scale it out or scale it up because we just started working with Veeam Backup & Replication. But our topology will be really easy to scale up. It actually doesn't depend on Veeam itself. It depends more on the storage systems where we're storing their backups or network capacity and not on Veeam.

There were two guys from my system IT teams and one from the integrator side managing the Veeam infrastructure, but anybody in the system IT team can use it. We use it for the user restoration process or adding systems to the backup. We automated the whole process of adding the system to the backup so we don't need to do that manually, but anybody can access the system and do what it can do according to their permissions.

I think we're using only about 50% of the features. There is a lot of functionality we've still not used so we are planning to increase our usage.

The technical support is really good. We don't spend any time waiting for them and they start working in an hour. But we also have a good local integrator so mostly we don't need the vendor support.

I will divide the initial setup into two separate answers. Veeam has the most speedy setup that I have ever seen, but because we make our backup architecture really complicated and really secured, it takes some time for the fine tunings. It is not directly Veeam's problem but it is my network or security perimeter's problem. There was a really funny story with that because it takes a lot of time to configure and to fine tune and so on. After your set up the EXE of Veeam in the next two hours you can start the back up, but if you want to make it really secure and immutable for attacks that we face, you need some time to build it.

in general it is pretty simple, but if you want to do something specific it can take a long time. Setup also depends on the facilities and resources inside the companies that they can use for that. But overall, it is really simple.

Our license is about 200K for three years. It includes everything. It includes support and it includes the Office 365 Backup as well for the whole environment. We have about 6,000 mailboxes to back up.

For Veeam it's a pretty standard license. We made a tender because we are a kind of public organization so I have to make it on the tender, but that's the reason there is no cost for the hardware that I need to power the Veeam infrastructure.

Veeam is the only software that is a real comparison with Commvault or NetBackup. It's not really good to compare because NetBackup and other solutions are providing hardware also. So here I have software on one side from Veeam and I have some storage systems or disk systems from other vendors. For now, I have NetApp, but tomorrow it could be EMC, HPE or whatever. That's maybe one of the disadvantages of these vendors, but for me it's not a disadvantage, I'm okay with that.

Most of the time it is more flexible to not be dependent on any one vendor. We have used previous systems for about 15 years and most of problems are coming from the hardware, but NetBackup does not produce hardware.

My advice to anyone considering Veeam Backup & Replication is to check what you need and then decide what you're going to buy. Don't think if you have X money and then go to the market you will get it for that money. You need to understand what the organization's needs are and then to check what our vendors are advising and proposing, because we have almost 100% VxRail and it's 100% VMware. I think Veeam is the most valuable vendor for backup and application systems for VMware. For virtualization no, but VMware yes. And we know that they're working very hard with the NetApp systems and most of their integrations are first coming with NetApp. That was also a point of decision.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Veeam Backup & Replication a nine.

We are a seller and an implementer.

We are implementing on premises as well as on cloud. Now most customers are trying to apply the 3-2-1 policy, and it requires having the process and integration available together.

The general use cases are that it can be used for any backup, for any data center, whatever it is, virtualized or physical or in the cloud. It is very useful and has a very user-friendly backup with a lot of options. It is very fast, as well. Nowadays, we are trying to be compatible with all the storage infrastructures.

veeam help us a lot to expand our business in the market and provide our customer with an advanced backup solution to protect their Data centers and increase the availability and performance of data recovery to match with target RPO and RTO

There are many valuable features, for example how Copy Job is controlling the band with accelerators. The Enterprise Manager has valuable add on feature. it has very useful features for centralize management ,Monitoring and controlling. We can push in the market, because we have an advantage over the other solutions. I was previously working with HP Data Protector for a long time, and it was very limited in features and it was no so user friendly.

In terms of what can be improved, we have already integrated with some Unix environments, which were not supported before. They have some limitations on integration with the advanced features as snapshotting and for some types of storage. We are almost compatible with around four vendors now - HPE , EMC, IBM and Dell. We could go further for this one. They could increase the compatibility for the advanced integrations. 

CDP also requires a lot of development, because there are a lot of restrictions now for CDP. There is a chance to improve CDP and make it much easier for the customers.

We can make CDP more flexible. Hypervisor on Linux are the first generation. So, till now a few customers are testing this. I think it will take some time to redevelop them and to integrate them properly. 

I have been using Veeam Backup & Replication personally for one year, but my company is a partner and have been using it for at least five years.

I am working with version 11, but I'm not using the features released now currently for the 11a because few customers are using CDP, continuous data protection, and Hypervisor, on Linux and these things. I have not applied the new functions till now, but I know that there are good things from them.

Veaam Backup & Replication is very good in terms of stablity. It is one of the best now. There is a high competition between Veeam and Commvault, but I think Veaam is getting more and more customers now.

Veeam Backup & Replication is so much easier now with the new license,. Now you can scale out without any problem, there is no limitation, by the license to scale out. This is a good thing on Veeam, so you can actually scale out according to the customer needs. There is no restriction on customer capacity, on sizes, etc... Nowadays, it is a good thing that they migrated to this type of license which is not depends on the NO core processor. So, if the customer has enough instances, he can backup for anything and he can expand without any limitation.

I already have some enterprise customer including one big global company. Most of the other customers are small-medium. , now we can expand to the number of enterprise customer because once you become compatible with IBM, Sun Solaris ,Linux and these High end OS, you will have a lot of new customers in the enterprise area.

Our company provides maintenance services for our customers, but most of the customers are required to get support from the vendor. So, even if we are acting as a service-level support, we are protected with backend support from the vendor.

They are very good. Very positive. Maybe they need to be faster in their response time to the customers. Sometimes the call is taking all day.

Positive

I was previously using HP Data Protector.

There are many differences between HP Data Protector and Veeam Backup & Replication. HPE stopped supporting their products more than five years ago. They sold it to another company ( Micro Focus ), . Since then, there is no investment in the product, and no new development.

The initial setup is very simple. It has all the things bundled. Even if there is something not available on the Windows platform they will make it and they will install it. It is very easy for integration.

The initial setup will not take more than one to two hours. The problem is after this, we need to configure it. You need to configure the storage to match with the customer requirements - to see what the customer needs. So the planning will take a lot of time, of course. After the initial setup, you will need to have good background about what the customer has to be integrated.

mainly we are doing the implementation through our certified team and in case we need any support form main vendor we can get it , Veaam technical support team and veeam technical consultant are Excellent and supportive . 

In terms of Return On Investment , Veeam backup and replication indicates a more productive investment in a long time compared with other solution .

Veeam Backup & Replication is not so cheap. Nothing is cheap now in the market. But, it is very good and reasonable considering the integrated features. You can give it an eight out of 10 on the price.

There are different licensing models. Nowadays, I think you want to focus on the number of instances. They stopped the previous license, Charisma. You want to go by the number of instances licensing .

We have many different types of licenses. COMMUNITY EDITION ,VEEAM BACKUP & REPLICATION and VEEAM AVAILABILITY SUITE which will include all the advanced option including VEEAM ONE 

You can get Veaam ONE embedded  which will be cheaper, but few customers are actually going for this because, Veaam ONE is a complete monitoring and reporting solution it is not dedicated for Veaam backup solution. You can use it for monitoring the data center virilization solitons including VMware , MS Hyper-V  , Veaam one has a very powerful monitoring and reporting engine .

Micro Focus Data Protector , Commvault backup , 

My advice to anyone considering Veeam Backup & Replication is that , this is an Excellent Backup solution ,so much user Fridley , easy to be integrate and very fast and powerful in virtualization and cloud Environments you can go for it ,I think it is one of the best solution. in case you have only on-premise physicals solution in DC you may think about anther solution .

I don't like to give 10 for any vendor. So on a scale of one to ten, I would say, Veaam Backup & Replication is a Nine/10.

I am now Veeam certified , so I am support Veeam. It took a lot of tough time for me to be certified in Veeam. Their exam is very, tough. So, they need to expand the bar. They should make it slightly easier, because the Veeam  exam is one of the hardest exams I have done. Most of the exam Questions is  depends on different  scenarios. The exam time is very short compared with the number of questions there. , so you will not have a time to read all the questions and give the answers. I believe they should make it easier.

We are system integrators, also known as SIs. 

We deploy on-premises as well as in the cloud.

Customers who use it in the cloud use it for email, file storage, and backup. When used on-premises, it is used for applications and databases.

Veeam Backup Replication is secure. They have covered almost every aspect, both in terms of security and backup, and management.

Integration with various applications, such as on-premises laptops and desktop backups, as well as applications and databases, is excellent. Also, they've added cloud integration, which is a plus. 

The combination with Nutanix is admirable. It is very good.

It is easy to use. 

It is simple to learn while performing POCs or demonstrations.

The automation could be better. 

Automation is also available, but one customer recently requested a few types of automation that were not yet available, but they are working on it.

It is not 100 percent successful. POCs are being developed by a travel agency in Mumbai, and they are currently being improved.

In terms of automation, I believe they are adequate but not flawless. You can rate it a 3, or 4.

The infrastructure required for installation is still quite expensive. Even the deduplication part, which they promise up to 50%, you get 60, 70, or even 80% somewhere, but they promise 50%. If you specifically compare them to the data domain or some application appliances, you can say deduplication is not that mature. But, in a normal scenario, it is fine.

The support could be improved.

I have been working with Veeam Backup & Replication for more than five years.

Veeam Backup Replication is a stable solution.

The scalability is good. We have a customer who started with 10 licenses and has since grown to more than 30, or 50 licenses. They are also looking into another three or four branches.

We have more than 10 customers.

Technical support is good, but I wouldn't rate it more than seven out of ten.

Support could be better, but it depends on what the issue is. We have some issues with the database and backup time or the backup window more specifically, sometimes there are backup failures.

Support could be improved, but that depends on the issue. We are having some issues with the database and backup time, or more specifically, the backup window; occasionally, we experience backup failure.

If you do the root analysis, you will find that these are the issues, and they will suggest ways to resolve the issue from the knowledge base.

Someone who has worked in that environment or understands backup replication technology can help, as can an L2 engineer. However, it will be more difficult for L1. He must escalate to support, and support will take three, four, or five days, depending on the severity of the issue and the nature of the call. 

If it is not a critical environment, and if only that option is enabled, I think this is a good solution. However, this is a very critical environment, and if you do not enable other things, such as instant recovery or something similar, and you don't have the expertise, it can be painful for the customer.

We are working with Nutanix and Dell products for disaster recovery.

The installation is simple and straightforward. Anyone who understands backup storage or product installation can understand this.

They have a sizing calculator and everything, once you enter that data and the retention period and everything, everything comes up with you.

The time it takes for installation and deployment is dependent on the recovery process. However, they have instant recovery, which will also take less than a minute. 

It's just adding up that specific storage. The research option for indexing is also good. If you know what you want to search you can search the catalog, and then copy/paste or download that image. If you want a proper file-level recovery, it will take some time. Specifically for virtual machines you want to completely revoke that machine, it only takes a minute or two, if that. 

Recovery is such an important part of any backup and recovery solution.

Because replication solutions include in-built licensing, you do not need to purchase a replication license separately, which is beneficial for Veeam.

We have completed approximately five large projects for enterprises with 1000 or more customers, 1000 or more end-users, or applications and databases. As a result, we needed seven to eight days to deploy and maintain everything with just one person.

What they have in place for the licensing, is really good, which makes it easy to convince customers. 

It is a subscription license, and that is where every software solution is heading. The software subscription model can be once a year, or every three years, or every five years.

Nutanix is capable of disaster recovery. Mine is a backup, but Veeam has the same capability, as does Mine, and is a hybrid of Veeam and Nutanix. Veeam is a different backup and replication software that we also used.

Definitely, I would recommend this solution. I have been working with Veeam for over five years. And I sold it to four or five customers in North India by myself. So, yes, we highly recommend Veeam.

I would rate Veeam Backup & Replication an eight out of ten.

In my organization, we use Veeam for both online and on-premises backups for around 200 sites across the globe. All our secondary cloud backups are performed using Amazon Web Services. We first started with version 8.4 which came out about six years ago and we're now currently using version 10.0, with plans to upgrade all our backup infrastructure to version 11.0 in the near future. 

For each site, we have independent and standalone VBRs and every one of them is managed through the Enterprise Manager's console. For our reporting needs, we use Veeam ONE and a SolarWinds integration.

With regard to our operational requirements, Veeam is very good because it's so user-friendly. Working with Veeam has been a most satisfactory experience. 

My biggest issue with Veeam at the moment is how the backup reports are displayed. We use the SolarWinds integration to generate consolidated reports for monitoring purposes, but we aren't getting all the available data shown to us in the way that we want. For our Apache site regions, we are not able to get all our site-to-site and server-to-server reports in one single PDF or Excel sheet.

Ideally, we would want the reporting mechanism to add everything into a single file automatically, because currently we have to do that manually. For example, when I'm looking at server backups for an entire region, I would like to be able to add all those server backup reports into a separate reporting group, which would then be added into its own separate status report for that region only.

We also have to perform large NAS backups up to 10TB of data, and we have found that it can be a bit slow. Along with improving the speed of these transfers, I would like to see Veeam add more support for block level backups and snapshots of NAS storage devices.

I have been using Veeam Backup and Replication for almost six years.

It's really stable. There are no errors, faults, or anything, and we've never had any negative impact to our business as a result of stability issues. Our backup operations are going smoothly, even though we do encounter some rare backup-related issues. However, these issues are typically human errors.

We have around 40 to 60 staff making use of Veeam software in our organization, and we are using it across 200+ sites all over the world, so I would label it sufficiently scalable.

Their support is really excellent. 

Our customer did not want to go with any type of legacy backup infrastructure, so they phoned my team in order to collaborate on an appropriate solution that ensures their backup infrastructure will be safe in terms of disaster recovery. That's when we decided to go with Veeam Backup and Replication instead of an older legacy type of backup solution.

The initial setup was simple. And, because we're partnering with Veeam, our deployments are all done by them. Our customer is fully satisfied with the setup environment so they're not looking to extend the deployments further, however we are planning to upgrade from version 10.0 to 11.0 soon. For this, we'll be getting a solution from Veeam's engineers and architects after sending them a request for upgrade and solution design form. Based on that, the upgrades and everything will be taken care of by Veeam, and we won't have to handle the migration ourselves.

Veeam itself implements our solutions, although when it comes to maintenance activities, that depends on the customer.

Our licensing runs for five years, and after that time we do the renewal. There haven't been any further costs beyond our initial licensing plan because our customer is satisfied with the setup that has been configured and the overall backup environment.

Veeam Backup and Replication is very good software and I am quite satisfied with it. I can recommend it to others without hesitation. In terms of infrastructure, Veeam is really flexible and we hardly ever see any complications. If a server goes down, we are able to dig into a backup from a previous point in time and recover it within minutes.

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

Our primary use cases for Veeam Backup & Replication are backing up to the cloud, backing up to a couple of deduplication appliances, and backing up to local disk - compressed to disk.

Veeam Backup & Replication is far more dynamic as far as being able to generate backup jobs. We used to use a product called NetWorker, and at the time the version of NetWorker we had would not back up to the cloud. I think it does now, but we're not using it anymore. But at the time, NetWorker was fairly new and it was just a tape backing up the disc. So Veeam is far better dealing with virtual environments and the cloud as targets. The capability with Veeam is just there.

Veeam Backup & Replication works. It integrates very well with VMware, but not so well with Nutanix, but that's common, I understand. I have both VMware and Nutanix virtual environments and I'm backing up through the same Veeam services. I have proxies running on both environments. Like I said, integration with VMware is excellent with very granular recovery while with the Nutanix environment it is not as intuitive, not as readily available.

In terms of what could be improved, when creating a backup job with Veeam, you can create a daily backup, but it doesn't do it within that job. It does not give you the ability to also set the terms for monthly and/or weekly backups. It has to be a separate job. It gets clunky to manage the timeframes where you don't want a daily to run on this day and creating weeklies. And you don't want a daily to run on this day doing monthlies. That is hard to deal with. It would be really nice if you could do it through a single command line or a single interface.

It is called a father son, or grandfather, type backup structure. The retention periods are not consistent or not available for different retention periods within that job. Retention periods being daily, weekly, monthly.

As for what I would like to see in future releases, just the integration to other virtual environments. In our case, the Nutanix environment is incomplete with the enterprise manager recovery tools part of it. That's where it is incomplete on the Nutanix side as well on the ESX. On the VMware side, the ability to set your retention policy within a job over multiple periods would be really nice if that was doable.

I have been using Veeam Backup & Replication for well over a year, probably 18 months, maybe even close to two years.

The product relies fairly greatly on the implementations of the storage vendors. For example, we were using large storage in AWS and it was using Microsoft. It's the format - ReFS, the recovery, the storage, the dis format, the volume formatting. We had a serious failure and lost six 30 terabyte ReFS volumes in AWS and lost nine 15 terabyte ReFS volumes on our local storage. I was able to recover the local storage in a little over two months. To recover the AWS storage of our volumes we calculated would have taken between six months to a year and probably cost us several tens of thousands of dollars.

So our volumes are still sitting in recoverable AWS in the case where if we actually have to recover something it's doable at significant cost. But we don't use ReFS storage anymore.

I'm not big. We have 200 employees and maybe 50 or 60 or 70 VM's, something like that. We have a data domain appliance that we rent space on that is offsite. We have an extra grade appliance and I have a bunch of CADA disks on a net app for just local storage. If that's scalable, I don't know. My understanding is that I can create more, but everything is local. So I don't have to have remote backup servers. But I understand that with my license I can create remote backup servers, as well.

That sounds like it's pretty straightforward. You link it and you can move backups from one site to another and then recover them off that other site. From what I've read, it sounds amazing, but from what I've done, I've never had to go into any great remote control, remote access or remote sites. So I don't know as far as the scalability goes. It sounds like it can scale up the ying yang. The one thing that I'm aware of though, is that when you're doing the backup, when you're scaling, you wind up with tears, because you have one server backing up a set of VM's, or an environment. And you have another server backing up another environment or another set of VM's.

If you lose one backup server it is able to catalog those backups from another server. I know you can catalog those backups to another server to recover. So it's dynamic. I've had to do that. I've had to build a new server and then recover the catalogs and recover data. It is powerful, it is capable. I like it.

In terms of direct users, it is me and three others that have gotten their fingers into it a little bit by the documentation that I've written on how to do something step by step. But there is really only me managing the system.

We are using this product extensively now. 

From the time that we installed it until now, we had to switch from CPU licenses to what they call UL, Universal Licensing. Because CPU licensing was only available on a VMware infrastructure and when we entered do our Nutanix infrastructure, we had to change the licensing model. There was a small cost to doing that because of the way it's licensed. We have not had to increase our license count yet. I will be shortly implementing another version of the Veeam. I think it's a very simple license, it's the five user license. It's in the VLU, but it's not the enterprise version of it, for our computer science department. They will be managing their backups with Veeam and a technician who I will be training.

That ReFS issue was one of the things that I had with technical support. For the most part they have been very responsive. They have been helpful when it's actually a Veeam issue. With the ReFS thing, they couldn't do anything about that and they referred me to Microsoft, which was a fricking waste of time. I'm so ticked with Microsoft.

We used to use NetWorker for 10 or 12 years.

We made the switch because of the virtualization and cloud access as well as disc storage on the version of NetWorker that we were running. NetWorker requires a physical appliance and the upgrades to NetWorker were cumbersome. The next generation of NetWorker, if we had stayed, would have required a rebuild of our hardware, which we've done once and was a pain in the backside. At that point, I don't think we could have run NetWorker because it wants to go to talk directly to devices and manage devices at a hardware level. So you can't virtualize the connections. So our NetWorker product had to reside on a physical machine.

I don't know if that has changed since we haven't used NetWorker for probably three - four years. We haven't done any upgrades in four years. So the move to Veeam or Commvault, which was the two that we were looking at, was primarily because we had local vendor support for both products. The move to Veeam was well priced, Commvault was out to lunch as far as dollars and cents. We are a fairly small shop and the pricing was just outrageous for Commvault 300 virtual machines. 

Veeam natively lives in a virtual environment. NetWorker couldn't. We also used to use a Norton product. I have forgotten the name of it - it starts with an S.

Those were retired when we started using Veeam. It has been four years since any of those were active, but those were for our remote sites. They only backed up the tape. We didn't explore Backup Exec in a virtual situation. Just didn't even look at it. I don't know if that was a mistake. I don't think so. Like I said Veeam, works really well. I am very pleased.

The documentation to set it up was great. I think we were up and running in about 30 minutes. That was to set up the backup server. Then there is building other services - the proxies, the repository manager, the enterprise manager for managing backups and recoveries. But to set up the backup server itself was super easy.

We just did it in house.

My advice to anyone considering Veeam Backup & Replication, is, like anything, to build a test site - do it on a test environment. Don't mess with your live system right off the bat, play with it, get familiar with it. It took me about about four, five or six weeks before I felt reasonably comfortable and built up in our production environment and the various servers. I started backing up and playing with a couple of Veeams that were smaller, and not backed up to the NetWorker, but I was backing them up and looking at how I could do recoveries. Eventually, I could do a full Veeam recovery and I could move it to another site and recover it, and all that sort of thing. I watched over time how retention worked. During that time I was asking questions of the Veeam technical support, too. They were very responsive.

So do it in a test environment if you don't have any training. I read online documents and went through a free Veeam school online, a bunch of documents, and there were a couple of YouTube type tutorials. I did a lot of that sort of thing as well. But it was all done ad hoc from work, I didn't go and do any formal train. So build the test environment and play.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Veeam Backup & Replication an eight. It's got room for improvement.

We're using Veeam for our on-prem backup of VMware vSphere environment and a couple of physical Microsoft servers. We're using version 10 of Backup & Replication.

It has an intuitive interface, and it provides us with successful backups without needing to tweak or do any adjusting. We just set it up and like their ad says, "It Just Works."

The one downside to Veeam is that they don't have a cloud product of their own. They partner with people and they support vSphere 7 and our cloud backup doesn't, and neither do many of the cloud backups that they partner with. I've looked at a couple of them. We partner with iland and they don't support version 7. They only support version 6.7.

Iland is our cloud backup and it utilizes Veeam. Veeam supports version 7 of vSphere, so they stay pretty up to date. They lag behind, but everyone lags behind a little bit. Once vSphere VMware does an upgrade, it takes a little while for places to support that upgrade. Of course, we always wait until our backup product supports it. But Veeam does a pretty decent job of keeping a short window, and they're able to support a fairly current version of VMware.

We've been using this solution for two years.

They don't have a dedicated support person for you, like ExaGrid, but their support is decent.

We've used Symantec, Veritas, and Arcserve years ago, and those interfaces were awful. Veeam is hands down the best interface that I've dealt with for a backup solution.

The setup was very straightforward.

I wish Veeam had their own cloud product. We are looking at a company called Infrascale, and I've seen that they have a lot of benefits over the other solutions we've looked at. I also want to look at Unitrends again because it was a pretty good solution when we were using it, but it had some drive failures. Plus, their GUI was all over the place.

With Infrascale, you can boot up your VM in their DR site, just like I can in vSphere, and log into it and look at it. A majority of our VMs are Microsoft Server products, so we could log into it and test that the data is there. That would make it great for testing our backups, which is something we need to do because our New York state auditors require that. It would make it so easy to test the environment, and it's not so easy with Veeam. You need a VMware and a vSphere environment in place to bring those VMs up, but here you don't.

I would rate them a 10 out of 10. They probably have the best product I've ever dealt with.