Veeam Data Platform Reviews

It is installed and configured in 15 minutes. It is reliable and you can really count on its restore jobs. It also provides very good deduplication alongside fast backup/restore on tape and instant VM recovery and allowing you to restore a VM onto an NFS mount point anywhere you want on a Windows 2012 Server. Veeam's 3-2-1 backup rule is also good where it has three copies of data, two different medias, with one off-site copy. Lastly, we're able to sandbox VMs without impacting the production environment.

In a fully virtualized environment, the ability to perform instant or quick restore full VM is invaluable, and because this product is reliable, I often forget the backup appliance for weeks or months.
Veeam Backup makes me more confident and agile in managing and maintaining my IT infrastructure.

Since this is a pure 95 % virtualized solution for Hyper-V or vSphere, this product could do more to backup individual files, databases, and or complete guest OS. For now, I have to backup NAS, and doing this for individual files is a pain in the neck and I have to play with two different backup solutions. Also, Veeam will not backup a physical server.

I've been using it since v6.0 in 2013. It was used in parallel with VMware VDR, and then VDP but it was quickly abandoned for a full Veeam solution.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

There have been no performance issues.

I have ordered more socket CPU licenses but I do not know if this will be easy or painful. There is nothing to do when adding clusters/hosts except checking the number of CPUs allowed.

I have, 99 % of time, found an answer to my questions or issues through customer services or via forums.

On-line help is also complete and often come with interactive videos showing how and where to click, and this is amazing.

Prior to Veeam, I used VMware VDR, and then VDP (> vSphere 5.x).

It's complete in 15 minutes. It's so easy that even a child could schedule bakcups. It was the same when upgrading from v8.0 to 9.0. It was simply a click and wait job and completed within 10 minutes.

I’m responsible for choosing and implementing this product. I discovered Veeam through my previous jobs. In this one, it was already implemented by local IT engineers.

Licensing costs are OK, they are a good average when compared to their competitors. The only issue I have is having three NetApp filers and not being able to backup/restore from snapshots, SnapMirror, or SnapVault. So if I had more money, I’d head directly to the Enterprise “Plus” Edition. The Standard Edition is not supposed to manage tapes or deduplication and is limited to small infrastructure environments.

I’m not a specialist of EMC Avamar, but I think that Avamar is more universal (backup of NAS for example), but it is way more expensive and complex than Veeam. I didn’t evaluate any other commercial solution.

There's no need to buy direct attached disks, as you can just build from scratch a “Veeam appliance” with a a big 2U 8 core Xeon server with 16 GB RAM and lot of SAS disks (at least 2 RAID). You then add Windows Server OS and the Veeam software. With this setup, you won’t need extra space, separate SANs, or network switches, except maybe for your LTO drives.

Otherwise, use some VMs for Veeams and separate the proxy so you can make your big physical server a repository. Do not allow your physical server to backup your ESXi hosts with VMFS datastores, as you might not find your VMs in the VMDK virtual disks.

Most important though is to always test your real recovery abilities and try to simulate total failures of a SAN direct attached volume for example, or even from your backup system.

Instant Veeam Recovery is invaluable as it has eliminated the need for High Availability as you can bring back up applications within five minutes if needed.

In term of cost saving, it does reflect the justification made to the management to invest on Veeam B&R rather than build a redundant high availability in either Virtualize or physical environment which is costly to manage and maintain. With IVR, you can also improve your recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) by bringing up the VM within a short period of time, thus minimizing the troubleshooting duration.

I'm not sure if others has the same issue as mine but the full recovery file (.VBK) growth is really causing our customer a headache as they have to perform a full backup, and when the disk capacity is getting low, you have to clear the backup disk and then perform the backup. The previous version seemed to have better integration as it removed blocks from the full VBK file during the backup.

I've been working with it for around four to five years.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

You have to plan for a higher disk throughput rate since the Veeam restore target is to disk, and the full recovery time can be a nightmare especially if you're recovering to thin disk which is super slow.

I have noticed in the new version has some issues with VBK growth which I didn't experience in the previous version. The VBK file will keep on growing, and although some features are added to contain the growth such as compaction & BitLocker, I've not seen any improvement yet.

So far they've been excellent except for one case. It was a Sev One incident, and an engineer only called me back eight hours after I logged it.

It's really straightforward and very user friendly.

We're a systems integrator and we deploy it to different environments. Veeam has great documentation for deployment and planning on their website. My only advice to is to include a scenario base during recovery for example, whenever you do IVR, expect throughput to be slow as it will be mounted from backup repository.

For most customers who don't have budget issues, we usually recommend Commvault. One of the reasons that we recommend Commvault is the ability for the corporate division to use it globally. I find Commvault has a better R&D team and can accommodate most hypervisors currently on the market. The latest one that Commvault supports is Nutanix AHV which has added value to its product portfolio. With the growing popularity of hyper converged systems, this decision is timely. However, Commvault price is high, and can be very expensive if you're going with their Capacity license. I just hope Veeam product team will include AHV compatibility in the next release.

Backup is not much of a concern, but for recovery you do have to plan for additional capacity especially when you want to redirect your restore. Veeam's planning recommendation should include for customers to assign a VM as a thick disk for recovery purposes.

The overall backup tools, as we use this to prevent data loss.

Coming from tape backup environment to using Veeam and cloud upload dramatically changed and improved our backup process. The increase in backup speed was truly amazing, backup windows shrunk, we can also perform more frequent backups if more protection is required. There is obviously also the integration with VMware (which we utilize) and administration via PowerShell. All this, together with CloudBerry allowed us to fully automate our backup and offsite upload process. Reporting via PowerShell is extremely useful too i.e. for our daily checks.

Below, you’ll find various suggestions from both my admins and myself that would improve Veeam Backup

• Built in upload to external storage. Using apps like Cloudberry, even though it can be automated, just adds unnecessarily complexity and one more point to break
• Integrated and intuitive orphaned snapshot management. When things go wrong during backups, you can be left with orphaned snapshots consuming more space on your storage than is immediately visible. This can be very problematic under certain conditions. Integrated visibility into this would be very helpful in these cases.
• Ability to shrink VRB files as servers are removed from jobs
• Ability to reconnect VRB’s in the chain
• Ability to attach and backup physical servers
• Better visibility of deduplication percentages

Only issues were with licensing. Mixed versions across sites made licensing a bit difficult. Also, having to use Cloudberry to upload to AWS S3 is not ideal, although it does work OK.

The product is very stable.

It is highly scalable.

I haven’t dealt with Veeam support, but my team say that tech support is decent and the skill varies significantly from tech to tech. We've discovered more solutions from the user forums than through tech support.

Setup is very straightforward. Creating backup jobs and remote storage learning curve is not intuitive, but a quick scan of the documentation allows for quick study. Difficulty level is low.

However, having to use a separate application (Cloudberry) to upload to AWS S3 is very cumbersome and seems like something that should be integrated into the core product.

We performed it in-house and did not use a vendor team or a consultant.

I wasn’t part of that project, but I believe at the time we also looked at AppAssure and Veeam was more flexible for us and more economical too.

This is perfect backup solution for small to medium businesses that have an onsite VM environment. If you’re using AWS S3 for off-site then look elsewhere. This does not support it natively despite what their marketing might lead one to believe.

Ease of VM and File Restores. The ability to restore an entire VM and guest OS files is invaluable.

We have been able to move away from file-based backups, and now have total VMs protected.

I'd like to see more vendors added for the new array-based backup platform. More IT shops will be able to take advantage of this new backup technology. Using the native VADP snapshot functionality can stress out the VMware kernel.

I've been using it for four years.

It was mostly a smooth transition, but I would caution against using Veeam to back up a SQL 2000 database though, if anyone still has SQL 2000 databases in production. SQL 2000 databases do not acquiesce when snapshots are taken, and the entire SQL database can become corrupted. The SQL 2000 VM must be powered off before the VM backup. I learned that the hard way.

There have been no performance issues.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

We were using Symantec Backup Exec 2010. We moved away from it in favor of being able to perform total VM backups.

It was very straightforward, no issues.

It was done in-house with assistance from our network engineer. It is important to have use a SQL database version for Veeam that matches your production SQL database version.

I would advise you to buy the service contract, as you will get all the version updates for free, which can save money in the long run.

We have not implemented the array-based functionality as of yet. We elected to install a 10 Gb NIC for the main back up pipeline. The new 10 Gb connection has increased backup performance by 20%, and I believe the array-based platform has seen 40% performance increases. We are backing up to SATA drives, so we are trying the 10 Gb route first. If we decide to backup to an all flash array, then maybe the array-based platform will be considered.

Instant recovery of VMs, reliability of backup process are valuable as this is used as a failover migration tool.

We had a vendor screw up a financial accounting program at tax season, a critical time for one of our customers. We were able to roll the VM back in under five minutes, and users were back on the software in under 10 minutes from restore.

The software really needs to expand into physical machines backups. Endpoint Protection is a good start, but physical backups are the missing component to crush the competition.

I've been using it for three years.

We have had no issues with the deployment so far as multi-site WAN acceleration works out of the box, and so far we've been very happy with our experience

There have been no performance issues.

Scalability is all about bandwidth, so the only issue we had was trying to guess how much bandwidth we would need.

It can take a while to get a recovery engineer on the phone, but once you get one the support is excellent. Follow up on issues has been exemplary.

It is simple to setup and the documentation covers just about everything you need to know.

This was all setup in house.

The pricing is reasonable, but tracking and purchase levels are unnecessarily complicated.

I have used and evaluated many backup and recovery solutions. Veeam came out on top for ease of use, reliability of job execution, backup validation, and speed of recovery in virtual environments.

By far it is the best virtualization protection product, but lacking in the physical protection space. It does physical backups, but it fells like an after thought.

The ease of use of the product and overall confidence in the product and Veeam support are valuable.

We can now perform restores as file level instead of the whole VM.

A better reporting function where we can see all the job statistics as standard rather than buying this feature with Veeam One.

I've been using it for six to eight months.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

Using Synthetic Full Backup caused issues with storage, but since switching to True Full Backup everything seams to be fine.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

It's 10/10.

We used an in house script, which did not address a file level restore.

It was fine, but the current setup process could do with some tweaking. It would be nice to have more advice on domain controller restores.

We performed it in-house.

Try it first and see if it does what you want.

Sure Backup is valuable because of its capability to test every backup of virtual machines. Instant VM Recovery is also valuable as it provides us with rapid recovery of failed/lost VMs with a low recovery time objective (RTO).

Using Veeam as a primary backup tool for the virtual environment we were able to reduce drastically the backup windows and offer better services for provisioning VMs for both the testing and development environments.

We would like the ability to backup physical servers. Most organizations still have some of their applications and services running on physical hardware and do not want to deal with multiple backup solutions.

I've been using it for four years.

Main issues were related to sizing the correct infrastructure as Veeam solution needs many components (such as Proxy Servers, Repositories, WAN Accelerators, etc.) for a complete Backup & Replication solution. For medium/large environments, initial configuration may take some time.

We have had no issues with the performance.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

I've not yet had to use their tech support.

Veeam is very easy to setup. The installation is wizard-driven and will install any dependencies you might be missing.

We did it in-house after receiving training from the vendor. In case your company does not have sufficient technical resources, the best option is to contract Professional Services from Veeam Partners.

The price is very attractive and probably the lowest on the market for an enterprise backup tool.

For only virtual backups I have evaluated TSM and CommVault. Veeam is by far the solution that delivers a complete set of features for a small price. And the administration is much more easy.

Do a PoC and compare cost x benefits with other solutions.

Veeam is a solid performer for backing up VMware. By leveraging VMware’s changed block tracking (CBT) the incremental backups are very efficient and small. Veeam also has a rather intuitive interface that is easy to understand and is easy to get up and running in short order. It has several other solid features, such as storage snapshot integration (new feature), Exchange/SQL/file granularity, and some very useful recovery options as well.

Reliable backups are so critical and my Veeam backups (disk-to-disk) have never failed to be restorable. I can’t say that about other products I’ve used.

I have asked Veeam to consider backing up physical devices for years and each time the response was “that’s not what we do”. As a result, they missed many opportunities to sell their products to customers who have a mixture of virtual and physical devices but don’t want to support multiple backup products. Veeam finally started down that path but they are taking their time to get the Endpoint Protection fully developed and rolled into the main product. They need to ramp this up and then I believe they would see even better adoption.

I've been using it for six to seven years.

Deploying Veeam is as easy as you get. The installation is wizard-driven and will install any dependencies you may need that aren’t already installed. On the other hand, I have had some issues with scalability. Specifically, backing up large virtual file servers for me goes very slowly. Veeam has a concept of a backup proxy, which moves the resource load to whatever is designated as the proxy. This can be the local Veeam server or another physical or virtual server.

For me, I have trouble with large VMDK files (multi TB) regardless of where I place the proxy and while there are several others who have similar results, Veeam hasn’t seemed to find a solution for this yet. Note that this is only on the initial full backup and subsequent incrementals are fine. Also note that I have not opened a case myself on this but have tracked the cases of others reporting the same issue.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

Veeam support is pretty good but has degraded somewhat as they have grown. Not surprising as this happens to every company as they ramp up but overall support is as it should be. What is solid though is that their technical people comb through the forums so many of the posts have expert feedback and advice right there, which is very nice. I find it nice to know that they at least care enough to do that and actually listen to the issues.

I’ve used several other products and pound-for-pound in a virtual environment Veeam seems to work the best.

Veeam is very easy to setup. The installation is wizard-driven and will install any dependencies you might be missing.

I work for a Veeam partner so we implement all Veeam deployments ourselves. My best advice for Veeam goes for all other products that support it: use a dedicated backup target such as Data Domain, StoreOnce, FalconStor, etc. Not only are these devices designed for this type of workload (improves performance) but you will get a secondary benefit of the hardware deduplication that makes your backup jobs incredibly small and efficient. You can run Veeam and a server and backup to the local storage to save money but the long-term solution is not as good and problem-free.

Licensing is based on CPU socket of the host servers and if you get the enterprise versions you also get support for file, SQL and Exchange granularity so there is nothing else left to buy. Most other products either require individual licenses for these advanced features or are licensed for the amount of data you have so in either of those cases your costs will rise as your data grows. With Veeam, provided you don’t add more servers, the license cost remains flat.

If you have a VMware or Hyper-V environment, then Veeam is the most mature and solid product in its class today. If you have a mixed environment, well then you may have some thinking to do. Personally I would still consider Veeam knowing they are working on their physical backup solution, which you can use today (although it’s very basic right now) or go with something else on the physical side for the time being.