Veeam Data Platform Reviews

Using Veeam Data Platform, I manage data migration to the cloud, business recovery, and various configurations.

The most valuable data protection features in Veeam are encryption and error handling. Encryption safeguards sensitive information like credit card data, while robust error handling ensures data integrity.

Apart from security improvements, enhancing compatibility with various platforms and addressing limitations related to integration and verification would be beneficial. For instance, ensuring seamless integration with AWS and overcoming hardware-related constraints for incremental verification would enhance overall usability and reliability.

I have had a great experience with their support team. They are highly professional, knowledgeable, and always willing to help, providing valuable assistance in improving our product. I would rate the support at a nine out of ten.

Positive

Veeam's security might be weaker than Dell's, but in terms of performance and reliability, Veeam often matches or surpasses Dell. For tasks like isolating areas for maintenance, Veeam offers more automated solutions compared to Dell's manual processes.

The initial setup of Veeam is easy, typically requiring minimal personnel for maintenance.

The pricing for Veeam Data Platform varies based on functionality needs. While it can be costly for clients requiring application backup, it is generally considered reasonable considering the extensive features offered.

We use Veeam for backup and disaster recovery because of its ease of use and our team's expertise. However, we are exploring other options, like daily security solutions, to ensure we provide the best fit for our clients' needs, rather than sticking to just one tool.

Veeam works best in Azure environments, but it might not be ideal for security-focused solutions like ADAP. However, it excels in hyper-converged infrastructure setups, making it a strong choice for those environments.

Veeam's scalability and flexibility benefit our organization by seamlessly integrating into existing environments, especially with popular hypervisors. This ease of integration simplifies management and allows for efficient testing, making it straightforward to use and manage.

Overall, I would rate Veeam Data Platform as an eight out of ten.

Veeam ONE is for dashboarding purposes. Veeam ONE has the ability to forecast how the infrastructure will be working in the future. You can visualize how you manage your resources or forecast storage. Veeam ONE can also forecast the usage of servers or the lifecycle of servers. It can tell you how your server's working currently and if you use X in the future, how many servers you require for new deployments. 

It's very useful, customizable, and scalable.

It's good for forecasting future needs.

The dashboard has been very useful. It has good reporting on offer. 

The solution offers a very straightforward setup. 

It's stable. 

There aren't really any areas for improvement. 

The pricing is very high. 

I've been working with the solution for about five years. 

The scalability is very good. I'd rate it nine out of ten. It's easy to expand.

We have five to ten users on the product right now. They monitor 500 or 600 users from the dashboard. 

I haven't used technical support. I haven't had any issues. I've been able to manage everything so far. 

The setup is very simple and straightforward. That said, it can get complex once you add servers. It takes time to sync the server, for example.

It takes one to two hours to deploy the solution.

The whole process is very simple. You just click next, next, next, and you are done. 

The stability is good. In a previous version, the stability was good, however, in the newer version, it is working properly. It's reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

It's an expensive solution. Clients sometimes wonder why they pay so much if they only want reporting. 

Users can choose between monthly and yearly pricing. 

It is a very good product; however, it's expensive. I'd rate it nine out of ten based on the capabilities and value we get out of it. 

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.

The main use case is performing a backup of a virtualized environment.

The most valuable feature is adaptability, where it automatically adapts to the environment that it's being installed on. It can auto-configure backup transport, whether it be a direct-attach or network-based.

It has one-click restores and instant recovery, which is important because if a product doesn't have a good restore and recovery capability, then the backup is pretty much useless.

They need full cloud integration such that an on-premises backup can be offloaded to the cloud for storage. It is my understanding that they are focusing on solidifying that now. Everybody wants to be able to integrate with the cloud.

I have been using the Veeam Backup & Replication solution for 12 years.

Around the first quarter of this year, they rolled out release 10. The last stable version was 9.5 Update 4, and since the release of version 10, they just rolled out the first update, which is 10 Alpha.

Version 10a has a lot of fixes. For the most part, it's a very fluent software, and very stable. However, some of the new features, when they're trying to roll them out, they seem to have to do the updates just to stabilize those.

Over the years they've had some minor bugs, but nothing that stands out in the crowd compared to anything else because everybody else has the same issues.

This is a scalable product.

I've been very, very pleased with the Veeam software tech support. When you call in, you actually get a live person and they are typically able to assist you or direct you to second-tier support if it's above their typical area of expertise.

The complexity of the initial setup depends on the environment and whether it is an all-in-one or distributed. For an all-in-one situation, it can be very straightforward. You just install it and press next, next, next. You will get everything you need and a fully functional product.

In a distributed setup, you have a couple of components that are external to the server that you're loading the main software on. This is a database server and reporting server, as well as an enterprise managing component. With these additional components, you have just a little bit more configuration. They're not that complex and I've actually done some other backups in the past that were more complex.

Overall, it is pretty straightforward.

In the company that I work for, we have a managed services group. So, our backup and engineering team for managing other environments are also are skilled at doing Veeam.

We have a lot of customers that use Veeam, and I'm the installer implementer. I implement these solutions and do upgrades to them. There are a couple of us who are field engineers, and either of us can maintain and deploy updates.

My understanding is that it is a fairly small price point. They have two different models, where one is based on the sockets that you're protecting, and the other is based on instances, or servers. You can choose whichever model works best for you.

I think that this is a good product across any environment. I've installed it for schools, in the financial industry, for lawyers, and places that vary in size from small to large. I've never had any issues and I recommend it.

I know that there are always new features being released but at this point, there is nothing to say that I need anything more. That said, there is always room for improvement.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.

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.

I use the solution in my company to monitor the backup status and to plan in areas like capacity planning, such as how much current backup utilization is used. The tool can maybe predict the future trend of the data groups and their growing size.

The solution's most valuable feature is that its reports are detailed compared to other tools. It can integrate with VMware, and it can see VMware's recent status while it can receive alerts for Veeam Backup. The tool can be highly integrated with VMware and other Veeam solutions. Reporting-wise, the product is good. You can choose any templates for your report from the solution's consolidated data.

The tool should add more hypervisors inside it, like Hyper-V or Nutanix since it is an area of concern in the solution currently.

I feel that the product's support team needs improvement.

I feel that there are some new features in the new version of the product, which is Veeam ONE 12.1, and it also has some anti-malware functionalities. I have not found the new features in the product to be useful because it has so many false positives. The product needs to be integrated with some antivirus solution so that its new features can be used in a better way.

I have been using Veeam ONE for three to four years. My company has a partnership with Veeam ONE.

So far, my company has not had any issues with the product in terms of stability. We have installed the product and it runs properly without any major issues.

The solution's technical support is satisfactory. I rate the technical support an eight out of ten.

Positive

My company uses Arcserve and some products from China, like Vinchin. Acronis was also a solution that was used in my company in the past. So far, we found that Veeam ONE is quite good compared to other products. Veeam ONE is balanced in terms of its interface, backup design concepts, and backup infra.

The product's initial setup phase was quite straightforward.

One person can manage the product's installation phase.

The solution can be deployed in two to three hours. You just let it run with SQL and some other things. The installation process is quite straightforward. I just follow the installation steps, and it can be done easily.

I have seen some time-saving benefits from the use of the product in my country, up to 20 to 30 percent.

I consider that the product's price falls under the middle range category.

The solution is easy to maintain, but so far, we didn't have any major issues with the tool.

Actually, in our organization, we didn't go for any compliance parts with the tool. For our customers, we went for some audit purposes to meet some compliance requirements. Veeam ONE can generate some particular compliance report files from its users' available data.

I rate the tool a nine out of ten.

I use the solution in my company mainly as a server backup for Windows Server.

The cost of the product is an area that would prevent me from using it in the future. The aforementioned area needs to be considered for improvement.

I have experience with Veeam Data Platform for three to four years.

The tool's stability is good.

The tool's scalability is good, but it can get very pricey. 

I personally use the product for around ten endpoints, a couple of servers, and VMs.

I haven't used the solution's technical support since it provides good online documentation.

The product's initial setup phase was not the easiest one I have dealt with recently. It has some level of complexity to it. It is good that the tool has built-in ransomware protection. The tool protects workloads on Azure, Blue Prism Cloud, and AWS.

The product's installation phase was okay.

The solution can be deployed in a few steps. It's not the type of product that you set up, and forget about it since it needs some more steps to get it started. It is important that the tool remains reliable. Some other backup solutions provide the backup features, and then you have to get back to them every week and sometimes every day to make sure that nothing has stopped it from working.

The product is expensive.

Compared to the other solutions in the market, I chose Veeam Data Platform since I knew that it was one of the top products. The product also offers a community that I wanted to try.

In terms of data recovery, I use the tool to back up servers and VMs. It is a reliable and easy-to-use tool.

The security features offered by the product are good.

The ease of use when deploying and managing the product is not difficult, especially when you become familiar with Veeam's interface and the way things are organized. In general, the tool is not very complex, especially if we consider the aforementioned aspects.

I think Veeam is one of the two or three best solutions in the market, but users have to balance the course and the things they want to do with the product. One needs to be ready with the resources needed to maintain and keep it even working. It is better to be set up and maintained by an experienced technician.

I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

Our common use case is to offer backup solutions and disaster recovery services to customers.

A key benefit is the constant security of data. It enables us to assure customers that their data is consistently accessible, even in the face of server issues or potential disruptions.

The most valuable aspect is its reliability in recovering any replaceable data in the event of server issues in a production environment. It proves to be a dependable solution for ensuring business continuity in case of a disaster occurring at the current production site.

It would be beneficial if it could expand its coverage to support Frostbox and provide greater flexibility for service providers to recommend backup solutions based on customer preferences in prospective environments.

I have been working with it for more than one year.

It provides good stability.

It offers high scalability capabilities.

So far, the support team has proven valuable in providing effective solutions and useful guidance.

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward.

In the initial stages of deployment, it's essential to understand the customer's backup infrastructure needs. This involves determining the specific requirements of the customer and assessing whether our existing environment is equipped to meet those needs. Maintenance is relatively straightforward for me.

Customers are experiencing a significant positive return on investment.

The pricing is reasonable. It provides good value for the money. Licensing costs can occasionally present a significant financial challenge.

It's particularly useful for those looking to offer backup services, complemented by optional additional recovery and replacement services with Veeam. Overall, I would rate it eight out of ten.