Veeam can help simplify your backups and recovery.
September 06, 2016
Veeam can help simplify your backups and recovery.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Overall Satisfaction with Veeam Backup & Replication
We use Veeam Backup & Replication to protect our internal servers. In addition, as a Managed Service Provider we sell and support Veeam across our clients. Veeam is our main choice for backup & replication when the workload is primarily virtual on VMware. Internally, we protect our entire virtual workload with Veeam and replicate the data across regions to our second datacenter.
- Restoration is VERY easy with Veeam, much easier than other backup products that we use. Whether it's the Instant VM Recovery or one of the Backup Explorers (for File Server, Exchange, SQL, or AD) it's very simple and easy to restore files.
- I like the flexibility of the Veeam Suite and how it fits well in any size company. A lot of our smaller businesses that we support only have a single Veeam server, while some of our bigger ones we have multiple Veeam servers and proxies.
- As part of the Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) program, we are able to provide cloud storage to our customers as a very simple process. We can also do subscription based licensing for protected VMs which fits our MSP business model very well instead of perpetual licensing.
- My biggest complaint with Veeam is the backups seem to fail with new errors every time for no particular reason. Anything from VSS, NTDS, other Backup Providers, and some still unknown errors. Veeam B&R seems to be a lot more sensitive to it's environment than other backup solutions are which causes more management time needed.
- Another problem we have is that Veeam simply cannot coexist with other backup solutions. We have been moving clients from other software to Veeam, and instead of being able to have them both running for a time we have to completely uninstall other software before installing Veeam. It's quite the hassle and in some cases (our critical internal servers) we'd prefer to keep protecting with both if possible.
- Veeam doesn't have an easy way to handle long term backup chains. We promise 90 days retention to our customers so we are forced to just keep 90 data points (or more if we're doing more often than daily). I'd like to see a way to have it do weekly/monthly rollups of a backup chain and have it keep those on a separate retention rate for longer term backup storage.
- We directly provide backups to customers, so having a reliable and low cost backup solution affects our bottom line directly in a positive way.
- The ability to have confidence in our backup solution and knowing that in the event of a data loss we would be able to recovery quickly and easily is huge for our business.
- Since moving to Veeam we have had to spend more engineer hours on management simply do to some extra failures that we wouldn't normally see on our old software. We've determined that it's worth it for the faster ability to recovery from failures, but we continue to look at ways to streamline the management process.
- ShadowProtect
Our other backup software that we use is StorageCraft ShadowProtect. They are both image based backups, both have the ability to do virtual recovery or bare metal restores. Both can mount backups and pull out data easily.
Where ShadowProtect shines over Veeam is the resiliency of the backup chain. We're able to store backups for up to a year and be able to recover back that far if we need to. We've had to design different backup jobs that are set at different intervals to be able to store that same long-term archive of data.
However, Veeam is MUCH easier on the restoration front. It has the built-in Veeam Explorers, and the Instant-VM recovery is superior because it's much simpler and it uses the CPU/RAM of a VM host instead of the server running the recovery.
Where ShadowProtect shines over Veeam is the resiliency of the backup chain. We're able to store backups for up to a year and be able to recover back that far if we need to. We've had to design different backup jobs that are set at different intervals to be able to store that same long-term archive of data.
However, Veeam is MUCH easier on the restoration front. It has the built-in Veeam Explorers, and the Instant-VM recovery is superior because it's much simpler and it uses the CPU/RAM of a VM host instead of the server running the recovery.