The usability is perhaps the most useful feature or the most salient feature within Veeam Backup and Replication. You can do things very easily. Some things that, in other tools and solutions, take time to master, can be done in minutes with Veeam Backup and Replication. It's very good to get a new environment quickly deployed and backed up. Also, I think that it is highly optimized for virtual workloads. It works pretty well for that use case, and if you have VMware implemented in your environment, perhaps there is no better solution in the market for that use case (VMware protection).
If you have your VMware virtualization, then Veeam Backup is the best option out there to back up that kind of environment. Perhaps if you have an environment that has heterogeneous requirements or heterogeneous workloads, it wouldn't be the same, but if you have VMware and it's the only requirement that you have or perhaps the most important one, then Veeam Backup is the optimal solution.
On one hand, Veeam Backup is very good at usability, but on the other hand, you have a solution that requires a lot of servers to be deployed, so you have different roles and components that you have to implement in an environment. Sometimes when you have to grow the environment, Veeam Backup requires a lot of resources to get implemented. You'll need several servers and several components deployed on a distributed environment. That is not the case with other tools and solutions that only require one server to get it right, so I think that requires some room for improvement.
Also, the capabilities to identify a problem within the tools are not great. Sometimes logging the information from the product does not give you the information needed to troubleshoot a problem, and that could be an issue for you because you have no tools to get that information. There are no error codes that you can refer to, only the descriptions, and that can make the troubleshooting process difficult. You'll end up creating a ticket with the support area just to help you to identify and interpret the logs, which you should be able to do on your own.
What I would like to see implemented in the future for Veeam Backup, would be the reporting tool that is not only on the enterprise, which is the most expensive licensing. So I'd like to have a decent reporting tool within the basic edition of the product, and not only on the most expensive one. I think that is the most important thing that is lacking feedback at this moment because it's a pretty strong solution overall.
I've been working with Veeam Backup for three years now.
The Veeam Backup environment is only limited to Windows environments because you cannot implement many of the components of different operating systems or environments. You have to resort to Windows. Windows is not the most secure system out there. Perhaps that can also be extended to the applications that you run on the system. In that sense, I think that Veeam Backup has a weakness in relying too much on Microsoft technology and not being able to deploy, for example, the Veeam Backup server on Linux or a Linux machine, and that would be flexible enough for some kind of environmental clients that require some stringent security.
Pricing is sometimes a little bit high. It's well established within the market, so it's not much different from other tools and solutions that you can find out there. The Veeam Universal License, VUL, is one of the ways that you can license the product. I believe it is now the only way that you can license the product. It really facilitates the product and makes it easy to get a good calculation of the sizing of your environment, and it is a good metric for you to license the product. It's very flexible. It allows you to move licenses between different workloads. I think that it's a strong way of licensing this product universally.
I would give Veeam Backup a seven out of ten overall.
It has great features. It is a modern data protection solution, but there are some things that are lacking. It's not well suited for very, very large environments or heterogeneous environments.