Veeam + VMWare, Name a More Iconic Duo. I'll wait.
November 20, 2019
Veeam + VMWare, Name a More Iconic Duo. I'll wait.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Veeam Backup & Replication
Overall Satisfaction with Veeam Backup & Replication
Our IT infrastructure team uses Veeam to back up our on-premise server environments. We have two physical server room locations with cross replication and Veeam makes keeping additional copies very easy. Our third copy of data is written to tape, which Veeam can also handle nicely. On top of all our required backup processes, we have begun using VeeamONE for capacity planning and virtual machine utilization and optimization. It's saved us money and time compared to the solution we were already using.
- Backing up a VMWare based environment is a SNAP. The easiest solution we've used by far.
- Managing layers of jobs and stringing related jobs together to minimize overlap and delay in processing data.
- Reporting on backup processes and success rates is a breeze. Set the daily/weekly reports and forget about them.
- Veeam Agent for physical machines licensing is difficult to manage at times, especially if you use free licensing and paid licensing in your environment together.
- Real-time job reporting and logging takes some time to read and understand. If a job fails, you won't know immediately why all the time, and have to dig through the logs yourself or consult with support.
- The terms used in tape job management can be confusing to newcomers. Exporting vs. ejecting vs. remove.
- Time spent on managing backup processes has been reduced by 80%.
- Veeam with deduplicated storage has allowed us to double our backup capacity using a comparable budget.
- Backup jobs are now completely outside of business hours, reducing the impact on production servers and applications.
We initially started backing up 150 virtual servers, which quickly grew to 180 virtual machines. We then started tacking on physical agent backups to our environment, using the same backup repositories and added another 30 physical machines. The growth was unexpected, but we haven't had any issues in processing time from Veeam. The deduplicating storage along with Veeam still has another 40% raw capacity leftover and we couldn't fill that up even if we tripled our retention periods.
We don't exactly have our environment set up that way. We have two primary sites, each backing up to a StoreOnce appliance. The StoreOnce appliances then cross replicate to their respective sister site, which is also where failover would occur if one site was down. We have fortunately not required this in a live incident, but it's been tested and worked well.
We LOVE SureBackup. It automates our backup testing monthly and has great scheduling built right in. It brings up your necessary network services before your tested VMs. The lab environment is easy to build in VMWare, and everything is on it's own network. We based our storage solution choices around appliances that can utilize this feature and weeded out those that couldn't immediately. It's that important to us!
It has much better features, is easier to use, and is comparably priced. For our environment, there wasn't even a contest. TSM was what we originally used, and is time intensive for backup operators. You also are never quite sure if everything went well or not, and had to wait for jobs to complete before checking the status. Backup Exec was just not built to compete with Veeam. There was a large discrepancy in features for such a small difference in cost.