Easy, robust backups at a generally reasonable price
June 20, 2017
Easy, robust backups at a generally reasonable price
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Veeam Backup & Replication
Veeam Backup & Replication is our preferred tool for backing up virtual machines. It provides efficient, reliable, and cost effective backups of virtual machines without being overly complicated. I can teach a new admin how to use it effectively within 30 minutes. You can't really say that for most other backup software. We use it company-wide, as it simply offers an excellent mix of efficacy and cost effectiveness.
- Fast, simple backups - Once you have everything setup, starting a backup takes only minutes.
- Robust feature support - Supports integration with certain SAN's for improved performance and efficiency, and supports very granular backup and restoration options.
- Cost effective - Veeam is full feature backup software, without the full feature price. They've always provided great software at a reasonable price.
- Free version has limited functionality - The free version of Veeam Backup & Replication offers only very basic backups, and doesn't work well with free versions of VMware ESXi as a result.
- Cost goes up with lots of cores - While generally quite affordable on the lowend, Veeam can get costly if you're backing up a large number of ESX hosts with a large number of CPU's and cores, especially with the Enterprise and Enterprise Plus versions.
- Can require a dedicated admin in larger environments - Veeam is very hands-off for many installs, but some Enterprises with a large number of VM's and ESX hosts may require a dedicated admin to manage Veeam.
- Helped standardize backups - Veeam helped us achieve consistent, reliable backups at a fairly reasonable cost. Having dependable backups is very important.
- Increased executive faith in IT - With backups being more consistent and readily available, executive trust in IT's recovery and disaster recovery increased substantially.
- Easier Disaster Recovery - Veeam makes disaster recovery, especially across data centers, fairly painless. It's easy to restore a VM that lived in one datacenter, to another datacenter. This is critically important when outages occur.
While Backup Exec is a good product, it isn't nearly as robust or easy to use as Veeam. It isn't ideal for backing up large numbers of VM's, and it also requires that an agent be installed in each VM, which can be both problematic and intrustive to user experience.