Veeam Data Platform Reviews

• With Veeam Cloud Connect and Azure Storage you can get your backups offsite.
• With it, you don't have the complexity of managing an offsite infrastructure.
• It may even help to reduce your DRC strategy costs.

For us, it's a simple solution for our complex environment. It has helped us reduce the time to manage backups.

Everyday technology needs updates, patches, replacements. The challenge for us is to have resources up to date so that our skills and technical knowledge are up-to-date. Such is the case with all products, so it is as well with Veeam Backup.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Absolutely no problems with scaling.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Ease of use
• Robustness
• Scalability

Saves IT operations a lot of time and frustration.

Also, the ROI for our CFO is tremendous whereas we did not have data deduplication on our previous backup product, unless licensed at a cost higher/GB than buying storage. We can now leverage in-box Windows deduplication with excellent results. We have longer retention times and spaces to spare on our backup targets.

For now we’re pretty happy, but we’d like the ability to schedule.

Also, the configuration and fine tuning of the Fibre Channel based off host proxy where we leverage the SAN hardware VSS provider took some work and effort.

I've used it for around 12 months.

None, we did an extensive POC to get to know the product which helped us roll it out smoothly.

Once due to a Windows update. Veeam fixed this extremely rapidly.

For now we have not. As long as you make sure to take care of any hardware bottle necks in the solution (source, target, network) we have been very happy with the results.

It's excellent.

Veeam’s technical support is very good, and their responsiveness in fixing issues like the one we had once after a Windows update sets an industry standard.

We did, but I cannot disclose names. We left them because they were too expensive, not focused on customer needs, and in regards to virtualization they dropped the ball big time.

It was straightforward initially, but see above re: configuration and fine-tuning.

We did all the work in-house.

The ROI lies in the fact that we spend a lot less time dealing with failed and problematic backups.

We spent time setting up a live POC to make sure Veeam B&R could deliver in our real world environment. After deciding to purchase it, we got it up and running with minimal effort. We’d done most of our testing & validation of the configuration in the POC.

We did, but I cannot disclose names.

Ask for a trial license, get hands on experience with the product, ask for help when you need it and you’ll be pleasantly surprised by what it delivers.

Recovering single emails from Exchange and single items from Active Directory.

A different kind of scheduling. We would like to do backup twice a day.

I've used it for one year.

Once we had an upgrade issue, but the excellent support from Veeam solved it fast.

No issues encountered.

No issues encountered.

5/5

5/5

We used MS Data Protection Center, but MS changed the deployment model. DPM became part of a bigger solution which did not fit our needs.

We are working with two backup servers. It took a little time to figure out how to take a backup of the backup.

We did it in-house.

No other options evaluated.

Off-site replication was good.

We were struggling with having software that would give us reliable backup and when we implemented the Veeam solution, it solved the problem for us.

Direct SAN to SAN replication – it didn’t integrate well with the 3PAR SAN that we had.

I've used it for about four years.

No issues – easy deployment.

No issues with stability.

No issues – it scaled to our needs.

Never had to use them – that’s a good sign.

Never had to use them – that’s a good sign.

We were using Comvault for part of our backups and when Comvault allowed their SAN snapshotting we switched it all over.

We looked at a couple but it was cheaper to just go with Comvault across the board and pay one fee.

Do a live demo or trial – make sure it’s a good fit for what you need.

There are so many valuable features but my favourites would have to be Instant Recovery especially when you have very demanding RTO's imposed on you. Virtual lab is also a brilliant feature for spinning up a DR/Test environment for your replicas.

It's afforded our organisation peace of mind knowing that we have reliable, fast and a cost effective backup solution for our virtual environment which also allows us to provide our developers with both test and pre-prod environments in hours rather than days.

I am currently running secondary backup jobs (B2Bcopy) for our business critical virtual machines which are located at an offsite repository in addition to replication jobs which are located at our disaster recovery site without any issues.

I have used this product for 5 years or so and will not use any other solution for my virtual environment.

Deploying Veeam was easy and I made sure to take a few minutes to design my solution prior to installing it.

I did not have any issues with stability post installation. I did initially encounter a few errors with my replication testing but these were down to my misconfiguration.

Very good.

I've not had any issues with technical support who are very competent and generally resolve most issues whilst you are on the phone.

I previously used vRanger Pro when it first came out but I found it frustrating.

I had no issues with the initial setup.

I implemented the solution.

I'd say plan your implementation carefully and work out how many proxy servers you require for your virtual estate and take note of resource requirements.

I would rate Veeam a 5 against the competition but it's no contest in my opinion because the rest of the field is playing catchup.

The speed of performing backups and restores. It's super fast.

We looked for the best solution to get backups of our VM without downtime, and I found this was the best solution. We highly recommend it for virtual servers.

It could be so nice and useful if Veeam had a feature to enable backup of physical servers, especially physical Linux servers. This image-based backup would be an improvement.

I've been using it for three years.

Some little issues with logs which were fixed after updates.

No issues encountered yet.

No issues encountered.

10/10.

10/10.

It was very easy.

I rolled out this service to a meteorology organization.

I tried Symantec system recovery, but Veeam is really faster and user friendly.

This is the number one product for backups and restorations of VMs in an enterprise environment.

Its replication piece allows us to migrate over to different servers and data centers.

Veeam lets me move machines from older platforms. I could have used the replication tools from VMware, but not for the older platform. Veeam allows the upgrade of infrastructure as well. It's easy to use once you get to know the tool.

We can now perform replication for migrating data.

• Compression rates could be improved for moving thousands of machines at a time.
• There was a small glitch that was resolved with a call to tech support.
• Can't perform replication without creating snapshots, which takes up all the space in VM, so I must do so with physical machines.

Technical support is excellent.

Depending on the infrastructure, if it's large, it should just find the physical box with lots of storage, and processors for moving lots of machines at a time.

You should consider the bandwidth, numbers of machines, and then determine whether to use physical machine or VM.

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

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

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

I've used it for six months.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I used to work for a company that provided Backup/DR as a service to its clients we had to look at various backup and recovery tools to quickly and easily bring back customers data. Before Veeam introduced the backup to tape and WAN acceleration features we were using 3 different products across a number of our clients to provide the required services. After those feature releases, we just used one tool through a single console (the infamous single-pane-of-glass) which reduced the complexity and management overheads within our solutions but also provided our customers with a far greater level of service and reliability.

This is actually quite a hard choice to make when dealing with Veeam Backup & Replication. There are a number of great features such as WAN acceleration, deduplication & compression, replication and the grandfather-father-son backup tree. Not to mention backup to tape which has been a key reason to migrate to Veeam. The primary feature of most value to me is the SureBackup and SureReplica featureset. Having the ability to verify backups and replicas of critical servers in a sandboxed environment means that I can sleep comfortably at night knowing that the data is valid and I can confidently restore data and services if required by the business. Snapshot capabilities within NetApp would also be high on that list.

Backup of physical servers. I know Veeam has vehemently said they will never go down that route but it's a feature I need, and badly. Having the ability to use Veeam within all our virtual environments is fantastic, but it also means we still have a requirement to use TSM to back up our physical servers via an agent. With endpoint protection features being announced recently, I can only hope that this develops into the backup of all physical devices and allows it to be managed through the Veeam console.

Recently I've been discussing the capabilities of endpoint protection with a Veeam Rep. around the area of enterprise applications. In this instance I'm focused on SQL and Exchange. Despite my protestations we are still using physical exchange servers (and I doubt we're the only enterprise) so being able to get a good backup of those servers is critical to allow replacement of current backup solutions. Right now Veeam are not confident with Exchange backups and would recommend one of the DAGs to be virtual to ensure the backup consistency. For SQL however they are happy with their testing and while not being a released feature it is something that can be backed up via endpoint protection. This area of development for Veeam is going to be a critical one for them to truly enter the enterprise backup arena.

99% of the time there are no issues with Veeam. It does exactly what it says on the tin and it really is just as easy as they make it look in their demos and videos. On a few occasions I had issues with VSS failing on a server which came down to being an operating system issue. Another time there was a problem where the backup was not truncating exchange logs. Veeam Support provided a patch within 24 hours which immediately fixed the issue permanently.

In early versions of Veeam, before version 6.5, there were issues but since Veeam has utilised backup Proxy servers there's no issue with scalability. You can leverage servers in your environment that have low workloads to be Veeam proxies as well so you get more value from your environment.

Customer Service:

Veeam customer service is top notch. Previously I have worked closely with them to request licensing and further information on their products and they have always answered quickly and politely or returned my call quickly. If it was on a scale of 1-5 I'd give it 5.

Technical Support:

Technical support is exceptional at Veeam. Any issue I have opened with them has been dealt with quickly and within an hour I've had a support technician contact me. On a handful of occasions where I've had severity 1 calls open with support they have passed off support to their colleagues in Europe and later America to work on the issue with me further out of hours with a smooth handover. Normally with support teams this happens but you have repeat everything all over again but I've not had such an experience with Veeam.

Yes. I used to use products such as Symantec Backup Exec and Falconstor but switched to Veeam as it's designed for virtual environments, it's easy to use and lowers the management overhead, it scales easily and provides a stable backup environment. Right now I'm considering using Veeam to replace NetApp SnapProtect within our environment.

The initial setup is really straightforward. It really is a next, next, next install and can be done by anyone. Some of the feature selection during the installation should be thought about in advance but it's possible to easily enable these later if you don't enable the up-front. Once the installation is complete you then need to add servers as proxies and point Veeam at a backup repository, add vCenter and create the backup pools and that's it. Ready, set, go!

I've only ever done in-house implementations of Veeam. I have had discussions on occasions with Veeams technical team before installation of some more complex environments and they have always been insightful and knowledgeable and understood the capabilities of their products at an in-depth level. But normally the implementation was straightforward and didn't require any assistance.

We were able to recover our investment on Veeam within about 8 months. This was due largely to reduced licensing costs initially but the majority of the savings came from a reduction in the management overheads and the previous baby-sitting we had to do of our backup solution.

The original setup costs were in the region of $45k for a 24 host VMware environment. That was for the full Veeam Availability Suite which Backup and Replication is a part of. The day-to-day (Opex) costs we reduced from one staff member spending 5 hours massaging backups and replications to less that 1 hour a day.

Before using Veeam I reviewed a number of backup solutions. These included Symantec Backup Exec, NetBackup, Falconstor, Acronis, Commvault and ArcServe.

I would recommend getting your hands on trial version or even just use the free editions from Veeam to become comfortable with the console and see for yourself just how easy it is to manage backups. If you use the free edition you'll quickly want to use a full version so you can schedule backups and take advantage of some of enterprise features. Run a POC on some VMs and verify it's the right tool for you and see that the reviews don't lie.

I would also recommend reaching out to a Veeam Gold or Platinum Partner if you have a more complex environment and get your design put up on a whiteboard. While getting Veeam into your environment is the end goal a real focus needs to be placed on data migration and integrity. Your previous backup data needs to be accessible and recoverable and this is where the partners should be able to help. This isn't a recommendation just for implementing Veeam but for all backup solution migration. With Veeam however I'm sure it'll be as easy as everything else.