Veeam: it just works
July 09, 2019

Veeam: it just works

Branden Beachy | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Veeam Backup & Replication

We have approximately 140 virtual servers for the district and we use Veeam to back up almost all of them. We have had multiple occasions where we have had problems with a server that was easily fixed by rolling back to a previous Veeam backup. The process for doing that is simple and hassle-free, and it always works.
  • Trouble free backups. Once you have it set up to do a backup you can pretty much forget it, especially since it can do multiple tests on its own of the backups to verify their integrity.
  • Application level backups. We are able to restore things at a very granular level, like individual SQL tables and AD objects like users and groups.
  • Choosing which servers to back up by vSphere tags. Once the backup is set up to back up everything with a certain tag, new servers can be added in vSphere and tagged, and they will then get backed up without ever having to go back into the Veeam console and selecting them.
  • Would be nice if there was more integration with vSphere, maybe a plugin that would allow backups and restores to be made from the vSphere console.
  • Integration with more 3rd Party SAN providers would be nice.
  • Some kind of daily summary email report would be nice.
  • Having reliable backups has saved us time (which is money) on many occasions.
  • Our objective is to educate students, and we need our servers running all the time to meet that objective. Having them backed up properly allows us to do that.
  • Peace of mind in knowing we have good backups is always a positive thing.
We have not used these features much yet, but are looking forward to being able to lower the costs of our backup storage by using object storage on cheaper drives, as well as possibly restoring certain servers to a cloud environment in the case of a disaster recovery scenario. It is nice that it is a built-in feature that is already available to us with our existing license.
We have had scenarios where we have needed to run a "test" environment consisting of certain servers, as well as an active directory domain controller (since the application uses AD integration for login). When cloning a server, you also clone all of its network attributes, and obviously cloning a domain controller and putting the clone on the production network would be very problematic. By using the sandbox feature, we can bring the application servers AND a domain controller up together in an isolated network and do all the testing we need without changing any server settings. That is a huge time saver.
I have looked at other solutions like Symantec (Veritas), which I used to use at a previous job, and Unitrends, and while they may have great features, and might perform "just as well" as Veeam, none of them have given me a compelling reason to switch away from Veeam. Since it does everything I want and seems to do a great job at it, it is hard to find a reason to switch.
Any environment with a large number of virtual machines would benefit from using Veeam. If you have a large number of physical servers, while Veeam does offer the ability to back them up now, it is slightly cumbersome compared to the process for virtual servers.

Veeam Data Platform Feature Ratings

Universal recovery
10
Instant recovery
10
Recovery verification
10
Business application protection
10
Multiple backup destinations
9
Incremental backup identification
9
Backup to the cloud
9
Deduplication and file compression
8
Snapshots
7
Flexible deployment
8
Platform support
8
Retention options
8
Encryption
10