Veeam Data Platform Reviews

The usability in general, support and knowledge documentation. I also find the training, and webinars useful. Apart from this, it also has specific features that are useful such as easy restore functionalities, instant file-level recovery, integration with multiple storage vendors, and explorer for Exchange amongst others. Also, its replication is very simple and reliable, as well as the synthetic full backup.

Lastly, Veeam Cloud Connect is another valuable feature. This allows you to backup and restore securely to and from the cloud. All you need to do is choose your cloud provider and it integrates into your systems.

It's affordability, ease of use, and reliability has allowed us to save both man-hours and money.

It needs to be able to integrate with more storage vendors, especially IBM and Dell.

I've been using it for almost four years.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

There have been no performance issues.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

7 to 8/10

Very straightforward but knowledge is a must, especially if you have complex scenarios and if you want correct responses and performance.

In-house implementation, we have a lot of skilled personel. Knowledge about the product and about backup theory in general is a must.

Try it! You can test it before buy it, almost without effort and you probably will forget a lot of other vendor solutions.

The ability to backup servers without an agent installed is very valuable. Many of our applications are customized by us, and may break with constant changes and updates to third party software and operating system changes. So the ability to integrate the backup solution into VMware for seamless backups is fantastic. Our users don’t know backups are happening, and it really becomes invisible.

Another feature we value is the ease of individual file restoration. Someone will submit a ticket for a file restoration, and we can have it finished within five to 15 minutes depending on the size of the file. Before, we would be figuring out which backup disk or tape had the server on it for that amount of time prior to even starting the restore.

Our company now has nightly backups, whereas before we only had weekly backups. It’s also allowed us to retire our cloud backup solution (HP Autonomy LiveVault), saving us about $40,000/year in storage costs. Since we completely control the backup environment, we’re able to have onsite backups, offsite backup copies, an archive, and even replication all through one interface. It’s made our infrastructure much more flexible, and in a disaster recovery situation allows us to resume business within hours instead of days or weeks.

Moving backup repositories and merging backup chains is either difficult or not possible as far as I know in the current release of Veeam Backup and Replication. This has made it inefficient to retire backup storage repositories, causing us to keep more backup files than we might otherwise do. This means we are wasting space simply to keep a backup for archive purposes, and I can see this being addressed with scale-out repositories in the future.

Veeam has been in place for at least three years at my company, and I’ve used it here for almost two years. This has been across multiple rebuilds of the backup system to go from not useful to confident we can restore anything quickly.

We did run into a few issues of certain applications not being entirely compatible with Veeam, or requiring a bit of customization to our backup jobs to ensure they work correctly. This is mostly due to SQL express databases not allowing truncation during backup jobs, which isn’t necessary a fault with the Veeam software, but our implementation of other products in our environment

Stability has not been an issue when Veeam is installed on a physical server outside the virtual environment, but I would avoid installing Veeam on a virtual machine if you think you’ll be changing the CPU or Memory limits of the VM that Veeam is running. We found this created a very unstable installation for some reason, forcing us to move the Veeam installation back to a physical server. In some environments, a physical server is desired for direct SAN access or for limiting the impact of a backup server on the virtual environment, so a VM instance of Veeam may not be a consideration for many anyway. For those of you without the extra hardware to set up a dedicated Veeam installation, I’d recommend a set it and forget it mindset for the VM to avoid the possibility of performance issues.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

Veeam customer service and technical support have been fantastic. They’ve been very responsive, very professional, and have resolved every issue we’ve thrown at them quickly. One example is in the previous versions, there was an issue with rotating drives, and support provided a fix for us to use rotating drives for offsite backups within about an hour of us calling. Several other issues relating to database backups and log truncation have been resolved within at most a day or two.

The company previously used Symantec Backup Exec, and Veeam was already in place (although poorly configured) when I arrived. We also used HP LiveVault online backup, which was a very poor solution and required constant baby-sitting to be sure it worked properly. We chose to discontinue using HP LiveVault because restores took a very long time, especially Exchange restores, for example, we had to restore a mailbox of a terminated user that was never exported to a PST. With LiveVault, we had to download a 200GB .EDB file, mount it, and export the mailbox as .PST to get the 5 or so mail messages we needed. When we switched everything to Veeam and properly configured it, we were provided the ability to mount a backup and restore a mailbox directly from the backup, even if it's offsite. This proved to decrease restore times to at most an hour, and along with file-level restorations, SQL backup and restores, and the ease of ensuring proper backups for our entire environment, pushed us well over the edge in choosing Veeam as the product we trust for our backups.

The initial setup is very straightforward for a seasoned system/network administrator. You must create login credentials for Veeam in your VMware environment, and you cannot use Veeam without vSphere, so for someone new to VMware or Veeam, make sure to read the installation documents to ensure it goes smoothly. I didn’t have any major issues with setup.

I implemented our Veeam installation myself with minimal help from Veeam support. I definitely recommend a vendor team that will work closely with you throughout the entire process if you will be supporting the Veeam product on your own instead of Backup as a Service. The advice I have about implementation is to make sure you have appropriately sized backup storage and a dedicated WAN if using offsite replication or backup copy/offsite archive.

I believe it’s possible to work directly with Veeam, but we had our VAR handle it, which made the process fairly hands-off and easy. I recommend handling this the same way for almost any licensing, not just Veeam.

Veeam is the first backup solution I’ve used that’s designed for Virtual environments. With that disclaimer, I’d give the product 8/10 for out of the box functionality and ease of use. However, this is assuming there are no issues for Veeam in your environment, but we did have a few. This required several support calls with Veeam, which did somewhat quickly offer us a properly working backup system. Including Veeam support’s assistance, my rating would go up to 9/10, but this depends if you have a perpetual license with no support, or a subscription with ongoing support. The support increases satisfaction in this product, at least initially.

I’d highly recommend considering an offsite storage provider that supports Veeam Cloud Connect. We use SingleHop, which costs about $900/month for 7TB of online storage. This is expensive, but allows us to have our backups hosted offsite, secure and fully supported by Veeam. Also, make sure your local backup target is fast enough to support simultaneous writes and reads at a high enough rate not to eat into your production day, or at least minimize backup windows. It’s obvious to me, but maybe not obvious to others—don’t skimp on your backup storage, and don’t put your backups on your production storage device (SAN, NAS, etc.) It makes backups pointless in the case of a storage device failure.

Below is a screenshot of our Archive settings, which pull from production backups and keep weekly, monthly, quarterly, and yearly backups up to our retention policy automatically. It's very hands-off, which I love and it's great for auditors, as we just send them this screenshot and they check off the box about records retention and backups.

This is a list of our backups and backup copy jobs to show how we’ve set it up. Note our “Production Servers” backup says it last failed, due to an issue with our backup storage location not being fast enough and getting bogged down. I was working on this as I wrote this review.

It's very simple to implement and very fast to learn. One backup can be done and many restorations are possible from that backup. It's mature integrity within a virtualized environment has always been important.

Veeam B&R saved our many files that accidentally had been deleted. By using File Level Recovery, all of them got restored easily and in a time manner.

Not covering the physical environment is both a pro and con of the product. Many organizations still have to consider other enterprise class solutions because of their physical servers. The other thing that they need to consider is the integration between Veeam and other storage vendors to use all the array level features to make backups even faster and more efficient. I guess Veeam needs to have a look at the enterprise market and not get stuck with small or mid-range forever.

I've been using and proposing this product to many customers for more than five years.

Patch release and support are both very efficient and it doesn't take ages for most issues to be resolved.

There have been no performance issues.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

I would rate it very highly.

It's been easy to deploy, and I've never had any complaints from a customer.

I did it myself and used my team in projects. I found the SureBackup implementation quite tricky, especially the health check mechanism which can be a bit confusing.

It's not cheap for sure but in comparison with rivals it's not very pricey as well. Disaster recovery and backup solutions are not cheap and investing in them is worth much as it helps you to protect valuable data.

Veeam clearly stands in the middle, somewhere between simplicity and richness. I have proposed and designed backup solution based on many other products such as EMC Networker or Netbackup, but Veeam suits many customers' needs.

The best approach would be to implement a trial in a test environment to test it and run all the features to help you decide which edition and features you need and understand the architecture needed to run it.

The highly granular yet simple restoration capabilities for critical applications such as Active Directory, Exchange, SQL, SharePoint and Oracle, via an agentless single-pass backup. The deep integration with NetApp Integrated Data Protection capabilities, including controlling and managing Snapshots, SnapMirror and SnapVault, as well as the ability to provide granular, automated restoration from these protection sources. Lastly, the ability to leverage backup data copies directly for disaster recovery, test & development and/or data mining activities.

Veeam Backup allows FLEXdata Solutions to offer a more complete data protection strategy to our client-base, and one that delivers greater business value than the majority of legacy backup solutions in-place today.

Each organisation we work with has different data protection products and processes in place, so we are exposed to many different products and approaches. We specifically chose to partner with Veeam for a number of technical and commercial reasons. These include its rich feature set coupled with ease-of-use, strong roadmap, roadmap delivery history, simple and predictable licensing model, channel model, and deep integration with NetApp Integrated Data Protection features.

• Scheduling functionality is not as intuitive or as flexible as it could be.
• Some terminology can also be confusing or misleading.
• For service providers, multi-tenancy capabilities could be enhanced.
• Greater capabilities to protect physical hosts and applications would expand the use cases.
• Continuous data protection (CDP) capabilities would be well received.

I've been using it for 18 months.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

The product is very stable.

It is highly scalable.

They’re great from a partner point of view, but I can’t comment from an end-user point of view.

The initial set-up and configuration is straightforward, and the product can be installed and configured to protect data very quickly. However, like all data availability products, you must understand the data flow and the “plumbing” required to support data movement for backup, replication, and restoration activities. Most importantly, the data protection strategy must align to business requirements and expectations, so upfront design and planning is important to ensure a successful outcome.

FLEXdata implement Veeam B&R for our clients, working in partnership with their in-house teams. Putting in design and planning effort upfront ensures we deliver successful outcomes to our clients.

The Veeam B&R licensing model is very straightforward – it is licensed per-CPU socket of virtualisation host system. This provides a predictable cost model, and avoids the often crippling “virtual machine tax” that capacity–based or agent/system-based licensing structures can impose. It is also recommended to consider Veeam's bundled offers, such as the Availability Suite or procuring additional maintenance/support upfront.

Firstly understand the business requirements and expectations, then design and architect the deployment in line with these requirements. Ensure you get the “plumbing” right, never forgetting that the reason you backup is that one day you may have to restore. Plan and prepare for that day.

Application data recovery works great in our environment especially restoring MS Exchange mailbox items. There are cases where emails or attachments which can back date to more than 12 months old are needed by users.

Backup and recovery windows have been significantly improved. By using an adequate number of backup proxies, more jobs can be executed simultaneously. Image replication for DRP and Sure backup to verify data consistency have also met our audit criteria for data protection objectives.

We expect to see more integrations from the software company with storage vendors. Especially on dedupe appliances and non unified storage arrays. This will help us to cut down the storage investment cost and have more flexibility on hardware choices. Also, there are demands to protect data on end user computers and devices. Hope to see more update in this area in near future.

I've been using it for five years.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

We have experienced slow backup performance, however it was been rectified in the latest release, and they have added a feature for processing parallel jobs.

With limited storage space available, we have to use reverse incremental backup to keep only one set of full backup on the latest date. This helps us to manage the free space and make sure fast recovery always available.

The tech support is always there to help out but you need to take note of the time difference. They don't seems to have dedicated resource to cover the APAC time zone from what I have experienced.

Setup is straightforward, so just follow the wizard, but make sure you've got a plan for your storage sizing and backup retention policy. The challenging part will always be the sizing and how you place your backup proxy to make sure backup performance is top.

We performed an in-house setup. You need to make sure there is a proper planning especially if snapshot backup is needed on storage array. This feature makes sure that no VM snapshot committed to a virtual server can cause a ping drop, and this is crucial on sensitive servers. The requirement to make it happen is likely to have the Veeam server running on a physical box with direct connectivity to storage array.

Worth the money especially if you have high consolidation ratio per physical host.

I have tried a few other products, some of them are meant for multi-platform (virtual and physical), or as a native backup solution. We ended up with Veeam as we are a fully virtualized environment and the features and product capabilities have met our requirements.

It suits all the needs for a fully virtualized environment, just make sure you have proper planning on the storage sizing.

It has very strong and useful features for a virtualized environment such as those based on VMware or Microsoft Hyper-V. The backup software management is user friendly.

Backing up a virtual environment is quicker than our previous solution.

I am expecting better support for physical tape copy. Support for backing up physical servers from the open area such as Windows and Linux servers with bare-metal restore functionality needs improvement. Support for the NDMP protocol for the several NAS devices.

I've been using it for years.

I had some issues at the start of the project with the performance. The problem was solved after analyzing and setting changes. I have not solved an issue with MS SQL Always-on servers with transaction lag backup. The case has so far been opened for half-year.

There have been no performance issues.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

They are very useful.

I am currently also using using HPE Data Protector and Unitrends UEB.

It was very simple, but after deploying the software it needed improvements in the settings to reach the goal.

We did it in-house.

Look at the price for the support. It is very high. Close the deal with -5 years support from the beginning.

The ability to restore both the VMs and single files is very flexible in Veeam 9. We can restore from disk, tape or from our NetApp appliance snapshots. It has a myriad of effective ways to backup and recover.

By allowing us to restore from our NetApp appliance directly, we have realized a tremendous time and resource savings in our virtual environment.

The only real issues that I’ve had have been navigating the user interface particularly with restores. I feel that more attention could be paid attention to the restore interface. It’s just not as intuitive or fluid as it could be.

We have had no issues with the deployment.

There have been no performance issues.

It's been able to scale for our needs.

I would definitely recommend Veeam 9 for its quick and effective backups to disk, tape and even the cloud. Having said that, the restores have been reliable once completed.

The Backup Enterprise Manager is great as it allows me to see and manage all backup jobs from multiple Backup servers. The ability to create separate backup and replication jobs and also create failover plans. The Direct NFS Access is also a great feature for backing up VMs on our Tintri storage.

Previously we had been using a CDP based backup solution where an agent was installed on the guest OS. Besides taking longer to configure backups, performing a BMR was much more complicated and required creating a new VM and using a boot disk. Using Veeam has made the entire process much easier and I can quickly restore an entire VM even in a test environment.

By default, I use “Enable parallel processing” which is great to have multiple jobs run at the same time. I would like the option to disable this within the Backup Job so certain jobs run sequentially instead. Reason being, I may have an application that runs on several different VMs that I would like to keep in a single Backup Job, but if they backup at the same time such as the app server and SQL server, it causes spikes in the application. The only way around this is to create separate backup jobs scheduled to run at different times.

We've been using it for two years.

We had no issues with the deployment.

With Veeam v7 in conjunction with vSphere 5.5 using vSphere Flash Read Cache (vFRC), I started seeing issues with Veeam backups either failing or VM Snapshots constantly needing consolidation. This was directly related to vFRC which a stopped using in favor of a better solution.

Scaling out is very easy, especially with the newly added feature “Scale-out Backup Repository”.

Customer service has always been excellent.

Technically support has always been excellent, although rarely needed.

Setup was not too complicated, but I do recommend deciding how you are going to use the Backup Proxies and design around that. There are a few options for backups such are Direct Storage Access, Virtual Appliance, and Network. The Network backup is great with a 10Gb network, but I recently switched to take advantage of the Direct NFS Access. I have also used the Direct Storage Access with NetApp when it was added to version 8, but this has since been replaced with Tintri storage. There is also a matter of the Guest interaction proxy that does application-aware processing for Exchange, SQL, Domain Controllers, etc. I tend to set this up with more restrictions so not all proxies can access all subnets. Veeam does automatically select the correct proxy based on subnet which makes it easy once you have completed your initial setup.

I designed and implemented it myself.

I am using the Veeam Service Provider solution where you pay per VM that is being backed up. So, the ROI is basically from the day you deploy it.

If you are an Enterprise and you think the price tag may be high, contact a Veeam Service Provider and see how they can help.

Make sure you do your research before deciding to purchase a different product other than Veeam even if that include reaching out to someone like myself that has used the product. You will see other products that don’t use snapshots and claim to be better, or don’t cause VM stun because their product is different. The fact is a lot of this depends on your underlying infrastructure especially storage. If your infrastructure is old or using slow storage, then any product may not be easy to implement without issues.