Veeam Data Platform Reviews

In my organization, we use Veeam for both online and on-premises backups for around 200 sites across the globe. All our secondary cloud backups are performed using Amazon Web Services. We first started with version 8.4 which came out about six years ago and we're now currently using version 10.0, with plans to upgrade all our backup infrastructure to version 11.0 in the near future. 

For each site, we have independent and standalone VBRs and every one of them is managed through the Enterprise Manager's console. For our reporting needs, we use Veeam ONE and a SolarWinds integration.

With regard to our operational requirements, Veeam is very good because it's so user-friendly. Working with Veeam has been a most satisfactory experience. 

My biggest issue with Veeam at the moment is how the backup reports are displayed. We use the SolarWinds integration to generate consolidated reports for monitoring purposes, but we aren't getting all the available data shown to us in the way that we want. For our Apache site regions, we are not able to get all our site-to-site and server-to-server reports in one single PDF or Excel sheet.

Ideally, we would want the reporting mechanism to add everything into a single file automatically, because currently we have to do that manually. For example, when I'm looking at server backups for an entire region, I would like to be able to add all those server backup reports into a separate reporting group, which would then be added into its own separate status report for that region only.

We also have to perform large NAS backups up to 10TB of data, and we have found that it can be a bit slow. Along with improving the speed of these transfers, I would like to see Veeam add more support for block level backups and snapshots of NAS storage devices.

I have been using Veeam Backup and Replication for almost six years.

It's really stable. There are no errors, faults, or anything, and we've never had any negative impact to our business as a result of stability issues. Our backup operations are going smoothly, even though we do encounter some rare backup-related issues. However, these issues are typically human errors.

We have around 40 to 60 staff making use of Veeam software in our organization, and we are using it across 200+ sites all over the world, so I would label it sufficiently scalable.

Their support is really excellent. 

Our customer did not want to go with any type of legacy backup infrastructure, so they phoned my team in order to collaborate on an appropriate solution that ensures their backup infrastructure will be safe in terms of disaster recovery. That's when we decided to go with Veeam Backup and Replication instead of an older legacy type of backup solution.

The initial setup was simple. And, because we're partnering with Veeam, our deployments are all done by them. Our customer is fully satisfied with the setup environment so they're not looking to extend the deployments further, however we are planning to upgrade from version 10.0 to 11.0 soon. For this, we'll be getting a solution from Veeam's engineers and architects after sending them a request for upgrade and solution design form. Based on that, the upgrades and everything will be taken care of by Veeam, and we won't have to handle the migration ourselves.

Veeam itself implements our solutions, although when it comes to maintenance activities, that depends on the customer.

Our licensing runs for five years, and after that time we do the renewal. There haven't been any further costs beyond our initial licensing plan because our customer is satisfied with the setup that has been configured and the overall backup environment.

Veeam Backup and Replication is very good software and I am quite satisfied with it. I can recommend it to others without hesitation. In terms of infrastructure, Veeam is really flexible and we hardly ever see any complications. If a server goes down, we are able to dig into a backup from a previous point in time and recover it within minutes.

I would rate Veeam Backup and Replication a nine out of ten.

We primarily use the solution as a backup.

From our view, from HPE, the engineering teams of HPE and Veeam are working together, and we are developing some products. There is a tight integration between Veeam's product, Veeam Backup and Recovery, and HPE storage products.

This is, I can say, a win-win approach. Most of the features that we can use with HPE products are directly integrated with the Veeam. This is very important for the customers to have only one pane of glass to manage the backups and also use the HPE products for the backups.

One thing that is always requested by the customers is to have new functionalities integrated very rapidly into the product. There are always new features that we must integrate. The market is pushing very hard to have new functionalities.

Right now, for example, there is a very high demand for protection against ransomware, and we want to integrate the data immutability features in Veeam and integration with HPE products.

For example, in the case of Veeam, they have many other partners. They have Dell. They have Pure Storage. They have NetApp also. For the engineering of Veeam, it's not very easy to integrate the features of all the third-party partners. I can say that the relationship between Veeam and HPE is very strong. We are working on 10 projects. Half of the backup projects that we have with Veeam most of the time.

There are certain solutions, such as Rubrik and Cohesity, that are little by little, taking market share. Veeam needs to be more aggressive to keep their dominance in the space.

I'm in the storage business for more than 20 years. From the beginning, I used to work with VM backups. It's one of the major projects that I handle on the customer side. I used to work with Veeam as it is the leader on the market for VM backups. I used to work with Veeam.

It's a very nice product. The feedback from the customers is that most of the time, it's very good. We install it, and that's all. It works. It's a great product. The only thing is when we have very important environments, I can say it's a little bit complex.

It's so easy to set up that sometimes the breadth of the product is not very well used by the customers, as there are a lot of features inside. Unfortunately, the customers don't have enough time to see all the features that they can use to improve their backups.

In the data center, with HPE, they have some entities in Veeam. We have gateways. We have proxies. As soon as we have some scalability, to size these entities is not very easy. All the time we must work with a Veeam architect to set up the right environment. It's not so easy regarding scalability. It's mostly for large enterprises. For 80-90% of customers, it's very easy. However, for the 20 remaining percent, it's not very easy. It's not so easy, as there are so many features in Veeam that sometimes they are not very well used.

Two or three years ago, we had an important escalation regarding the Veeam environment. It's not very easy to have access to level three. That said, for 90-95% of the cases, it's okay. Sometimes, when we have a real problem, it's not very good, however, that's a general truth in the IT market.

We have a direct relationship with Veeam pre-sales. Most of the time, when we have a very tough escalation, we can make a request to Veeam directly in France, and they can help us in a very efficient way. We have a very strong partnership.

I've worked with a variety of solutions.

Veeam is very, very good when we have a virtualized environment. It's a major part of the virtualized environment. However, in the data center sometimes some other products like Commvault, for example, or NetBackup, have more features than Veeam. When we have very important environments with bare-metal servers, Commvault is a better solution compared to Veeam in some situations.

The difficulty of the initial setup depends. For the smaller environments, it's straightforward. It's very easy to set up an environment with one ESX cluster and one backup appliance to back up 100 VMs, for example, 100 or 200 VMs.

However, when we are in the data center, little by little, what we want is it to be present, to be an enterprise product, and when we are in the data center, when we have a lot of environments, bare-metal environments, virtualized environments, specific applications to back up, I can say that it's not so easy.

You must have the expertise to set up this kind of environment. The consulting phase and the preparation phase and the setup phase are very important. As soon as the environment is set up, changing something is not so easy. Many times we had to change the architecture after the initial setup as all the aspects were not been very well optimized for the environment of the customers.

There is not a very easy answer, as it is not only for Veeam. A backup project is a complex project due to the fact that we have some interaction with all the entities of our customers. We must have some workshops with all these entities to have the right solution to propose and to set up.

The licensing of Veeam sometimes is quite complicated, even if they have improved a lot the way that the licensing is working currently.

I'm a consultant. 

We're an integrator. I'm working for HPE. We are integrating only our products. Sometimes we integrate third-party products too, however, most of the time, we try to use our products. That said, it's impossible for my company to be the leader in all the environments. For example, for the backup,s we have some technology, some preferred partners, and Veeam and Commvault are the main partners right now for the backups.

I'd advise potential new users to analyze exactly what they want to do before implementing the solution as it's always better to know exactly what they want to do.

To set up the environment is very easy, however, you must anticipate future problems and think about scalability. You also need to think about how you are going to add more power to the environment. Everyone needs to prepare for the coming years. 

Right now, there are new demands on the market, and Veeam as a leader in backup software must anticipate these needs. Right now, we have some demands regarding the backups of objects, as, little by little, we have a lot of customers using objects as primary storage. 

In terms of anticipating such kinds of demands, Veeam is one of the leaders of the market.

I'd rate the solution at an eight out of ten. It's a great solution.

We're using Veeam for our on-prem backup of VMware vSphere environment and a couple of physical Microsoft servers. We're using version 10 of Backup & Replication.

It has an intuitive interface, and it provides us with successful backups without needing to tweak or do any adjusting. We just set it up and like their ad says, "It Just Works."

The one downside to Veeam is that they don't have a cloud product of their own. They partner with people and they support vSphere 7 and our cloud backup doesn't, and neither do many of the cloud backups that they partner with. I've looked at a couple of them. We partner with iland and they don't support version 7. They only support version 6.7.

Iland is our cloud backup and it utilizes Veeam. Veeam supports version 7 of vSphere, so they stay pretty up to date. They lag behind, but everyone lags behind a little bit. Once vSphere VMware does an upgrade, it takes a little while for places to support that upgrade. Of course, we always wait until our backup product supports it. But Veeam does a pretty decent job of keeping a short window, and they're able to support a fairly current version of VMware.

We've been using this solution for two years.

They don't have a dedicated support person for you, like ExaGrid, but their support is decent.

We've used Symantec, Veritas, and Arcserve years ago, and those interfaces were awful. Veeam is hands down the best interface that I've dealt with for a backup solution.

The setup was very straightforward.

I wish Veeam had their own cloud product. We are looking at a company called Infrascale, and I've seen that they have a lot of benefits over the other solutions we've looked at. I also want to look at Unitrends again because it was a pretty good solution when we were using it, but it had some drive failures. Plus, their GUI was all over the place.

With Infrascale, you can boot up your VM in their DR site, just like I can in vSphere, and log into it and look at it. A majority of our VMs are Microsoft Server products, so we could log into it and test that the data is there. That would make it great for testing our backups, which is something we need to do because our New York state auditors require that. It would make it so easy to test the environment, and it's not so easy with Veeam. You need a VMware and a vSphere environment in place to bring those VMs up, but here you don't.

I would rate them a 10 out of 10. They probably have the best product I've ever dealt with.

We use it at our site for our nightly backup and for disaster recovery (DR) replication to another site. So, we use WAN Accelerator. We use scheduled copies to another datastore, and then, of course, we do it for our backups for SQL servers and other servers.

WAN Accelerator helps tremendously with replicating our data because we have a large chunk of data that gets replicated between our two facilities. We're getting ready to purchase Nimble Storage that has Veeam integration, and it is supposed to improve our replication even more.

The SME that helped us with the implementation would probably have more insight because he used it way more than we have. We just use it for making sure that our backups are done daily, and the replications are being performed between sites. We haven't had any issues at all with it other than the fact that there is a slight process to acquire additional licenses if we want to expand our number of hosts. That's because it is based on the number of cores and threads that are used. 

I have been using this solution for three or four years.

So far, it has been pretty steady and stable. I haven't run into any type of issues with it.

It is scalable. What they definitely don't recommend is running it off a virtual machine rather than its own physical machine, but then we have some replication servers that we use for VM. So, the actual Veeam installation is set up on a physical Dell server, and then it is almost like they are sub engines. You would use these other processes to kick off the replication for whatever you want to be replicated to your DR. So, it is not all functioning from a single server. We have like three or four of those forms of replications.

The tech support and the training are pretty good. I sent one of my former employees, who was an intern and also my main Veeam administrator, for the training. He said it was very technical, and there was a lot to digest. He couldn't just do a transfer of knowledge because someone would have to go through that program to get a good understanding of how the solution works. He had gone through a lot of reference documents that came from it, and based on his feedback, it was pretty good.

We used to have Symantec Netbackup, and we replaced it with Veeam. Symantec Netbackup was clunky in terms of the upgrades. The other issue was that you couldn't throttle the replication bandwidth. 

It had the capability of doing a DR replication, but if you fall a couple of versions behind, there was no gradual update. If you fell behind by four versions or something like that, it was a nightmare trying to get it upgraded to the latest version. We had to have a consultant come in who worked with Dell but was intimate with Symantec products. He had to spend a week or two weeks with us to go through that upgrade process. It was more designed for backup to tape, and that was the main function for which we were using it. When we decided to go away from backup to tape and we wanted to do site-to-site replication, we didn't think that it had that inline capability. It was also costly.

From my understanding it was straightforward. A colleague in one of our other facilities was more intimate with the solution. Basically, we bought a physical box. It was a Dell box that had storage on it. It was our main Veeam backup server that handled the replications because it was used to store the backups. So, we didn't back up to tape. We back up to disk, and it replicates to the DR disk. Setting that up wasn't a problem. 

We also had to expand our local backup by using an additional span and then configuring that in order to work with Veeam as well. We didn't have any issues with it. 

In terms of maintenance, we only assign one person who manages it. So, it is a part of his daily tasks. This person looks for success and failure, and, if needed, kicks off a backup that failed. He also does the quarterly review to make sure that it is up to date and addresses any replication issues. 

If you are trying to replace an existing solution, you need to map out how to integrate Veeam while not impacting the current backup. That's what we did. We had to look at how do we continue our Symantec backups while implementing our Veeam. We slowly graduated at it. 

If you are doing any replication with Veeam, you need to determine the tier of the replication to a DR site. We broke out our SAN datastore so that the storage for what we would consider critical backups are done from a different datastore versus the entire SAN. Instead of implementing it first and then trying to change everything around, we did a lot of such pre-work prior to implementing it.

One of the things that Veeam doesn't like is a major change. In such a case, you will lose your data points or restore points. This means that if you've done 14 restore points and you go and make some major change to it, it could break that 12 restore point chain, and now you basically have to start all over again.

I would rate Veeam Backup & Replication a nine out of 10. 

Our primary use case with Veeam Backup & Replication is to backup critical data. We would recommend that a person put on a Veeam backup service so that in a disaster recovery scenario you set what has to come back up first because that is going to be the critical information that has to go back up as quickly as possible. You can put anything on critical servers, but we recommend that you use it for critical data that it is going to be restored within a four hour timeframe.

Veeam Backup & Replication can be deployed as agent-based or you can set it up to replicate back to a NAS, some sort of device onsite, so that a copy of your data goes to the device onsite and another copy goes to a data center for a backup as well. Then, if that server crashes, the device that's at the location has the latest copy of the good data from where they get the backup.

Veeam Backup & Replication has most definitely improved our organization because it saves the IT a lot of headache. 

Veeam Backup & Replication is a great alternative to what is out there. Some of the backups just allow an agent backup to the cloud. You can back up a thousand different ways, but this is a great way to keep a customer and a company in compliance in that they've got their data secure onsite and offsite. The data being transferred to the NAS at the customer's location and also the data being sent to the cloud is encrypted in transit and it's also encrypted at rest so that nobody is going to be able to hack into that. No one will have the keys to do that.

The dashboard is very, very easy to understand. We do demonstrations all the time with customers just to show them. If they've lost particular files because of a server going down, we can retrieve those files for them and quickly bring those files back up. So in a disaster recovery where you've got a location that's either been hit with a tornado, a hurricane, an earthquake, or whatever the disaster might be, this company and customer has to be up, then this data is secured offsite as well, and can be pulled down either to a VM, a virtual machine, or to another physical server. It is just a matter of how fast your internet connection is.

Until internet connectivity becomes standard all over the country and all over the world, as far as minimum speeds, the main thing would be just making sure that your data is being transferred as quickly as possible, that the data transfers are seated correctly, and that the replication takes place and is monitored. The service can be managed or unmanaged, it just depends on the customer's IT ability as to how much or how little we can help.

There is always room for improvement on anything, but at this point I think it's perfect. But I'm sure there are other things that customers are wanting that Veeam could probably put in their next update or patch. But at this point I don't have any information on that.

As companies grow, it just depends on what their needs are as to what we can help them with as far as the recovery is concerned. Larger businesses with more than 300 VMs would be a perfect scenario for Rubrik. Veeam, I think is good up until 300 VMs. With other services that we have, it could be lower than a hundred VMs, but it seems that Veeam is in a good spot.

I have been using Veeam Backup & Replication for probably the last four years.

This solution runs very smoothly unless there is a server that goes offline on a customer's site that we don't know about, but other than that, the service is rock solid.

The scalability is pretty much straightforward. It's just like updating software. For anybody that has a little bit of sense about how to update services it is pretty straightforward and simple.

Our clients are a mixture of small, medium and large businesses and they are all over the country.

I do sales, so I'm the one that is responsible for selling the sizzle. My IT folks, my engineers, are the ones that face Veeam the company. I would say that the majority of the companies that we deal with in backup and recovery are very, very responsive and I feel Veeam is the same way. It's a great software package, it is inexpensive and it does a lot of things that IT companies and people in general want to see.

We use EVault software and Carbonite backups, it just depends on the customer. If you can tolerate 12 to 24 hours of being out of service, then we have other backup services that are right in the ballpark in pricing, but just older technologies. Nowadays everything is like McDonald's and I want it now. I want my hamburger now and I want my data now. It is getting to where customers want that faster RTO and RPO so that they can have their company back up and making money as quickly as possible.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward if you've got a person that knows how things go. Most midsize and large companies will have an IT person on staff that would understand that. If they don't understand it, of course our guys, our engineers, can train them for that and show them which way to go. But normally IT people are pretty familiar with dashboards.

My advice to anyone considering Veeam Backup & Replication would be to definitely demo it and see what you think about it because you can't try it before you buy it, and see how it works in your environment. I'm not too sure if there are any trials that go on for a month at a time, but it depends on the customer. If they decide that this is something good for them, then we move forward with it and adjust as we go. But the majority of our customers know what Veeam is and have seen the product out there, because I send a lot of information out via LinkedIn and send emails to my customers about those services. It would just depend on whether it was an attorney's office, a hospital, whatever he is, but those folks would want to have their data as quickly as possible.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Veeam Backup & Replication a 10.

The solution's interface, GUI (graphical user interface), and backup are good.

The solution’s scalability could be improved. Veeam Data Platform has limitations for features like Hyper-V and open-source hypervisors outside VMware.

I have been using Veeam Data Platform for five years.

Normally, the solution is not very stable when we back up big databases.

I rate the solution a seven out of ten for stability.

It’s not very easy to scale the solution.

I rate the solution’s scalability a six out of ten.

The troubleshooting provided by the technical support team needs to be improved.

Neutral

The solution’s initial setup is easy.

One person can deploy the solution in two to four hours.

We have seen a good return on investment with the solution. Veeam Data Platform has helped save 70% of our time.

Veeam Data Platform's pricing is affordable.

Veeam Data Platform is not a good solution for customers who do not use VMware. Veeam Data Platform doesn't have storage and needs to integrate with other vendors for storage. Customers using anything other than VMware should clarify all the requirements and limitations of Veeam Data Platform before using it. It is easy to integrate the solution with other systems like Lenovo and Dell.

Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

We use the product as a backup solution during emergency scenarios. 

One thing we like about the product is that it's good and not as expensive as similar products. Right now, there are different ways to back up your information—you can back up directly to a disk or the cloud. It allows you to have various kinds of repositories.

It would be nice to see more affordable training options for individuals who want to enhance their skills. Some people I know have been interested in training courses, but they found them too expensive.

Veeam Backup & Replication is a stable product. 

I rate Veeam Backup & Replication's scalability as nine out of ten. 

The product is stable and takes care of everything we need. We've only had to ask for support a few times, but each time, they've been really helpful.

Positive

The main difference between the solution and its competitors is based on pricing. Other products are more expensive. 

Veeam Backup & Replication's installation is simple. 

Every backup solution is like car insurance. You'll see the return when you have a problem. If you don't have any problems, you won't see the value of a backup solution. You realize the value when something goes wrong. It helps you feel more confident that you can recover the information if something happens to your company.

The solution's pricing is cheap. 

I rate the overall tool a nine out of ten. 

I worked on a project involving a multi-cloud environment, specifically backing up on-prem servers to the Azure cloud. However, the project was not completed due to financial issues between our company and the client. The technical configuration, such as creating a Veeam Data Platform plugin on Azure and connecting it with on-prem servers, was mostly done, but the project was halted before creating jobs. The challenges were financial and not technical. This was my first and last experience with such a multi-cloud project. 

One of the newest features in version 12.1 is malware detection. This feature allows the software to detect malware before initiating a backup job for a server. Although I haven't had the opportunity to personally try it out due to its recent release, I came across it while working on an environment in a cluster for a customer.

The solution's pricing may be expensive compared to other products. 

I have been using the product for one and a half years.

We have faced several issues with Acronis because their support hasn't been as helpful compared to Veeam Data Platform's support. It has been very supportive and has assisted us in many cases. Unfortunately, our experiences with Acronis support have not been as positive, leading us to discontinue working with Acronis for several months now.

Positive

The solution is worth its money. 

Veeam Data Platform has a significant difference compared to other tools or products. It is not very simple because it offers a lot of advanced features that can solve various problems in customers' environments. However, managing it is not difficult, but it's not as straightforward as Acronis, which is simpler because it focuses on core features like backup and simple recovery without many additional complexities. 

I find that I rarely encounter issues with the product. One notable aspect is the simplicity of its licensing, especially when compared to other vendors. Additionally, with each use, I discover more features. 

I rate the overall product a ten out of ten.