Veeam Backup and Replication is THE answer for your virtual backup and replication problems
Updated April 21, 2020
Veeam Backup and Replication is THE answer for your virtual backup and replication problems
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Software Version
Veeam Backup & Replication
Overall Satisfaction with Veeam Backup & Replication
We use Veeam in the IT department to back up all of our VMware virtual servers and virtual desktops. We also use it to replicate to our backup VMware hosts. It provides for quick, reliable daily backups and replications. Granular and full restores are quick and simple. We use it to backup Windows server and workstation operating systems plus several flavors of Linux and FreeBSD. In addition, we backup several types of SQL databases, Exchange and Active Directory. It handles all those operating systems and application platforms very well.
- Quick incremental backups of virtual machines.
- Quick replications of virtual machines.
- Reliable full scheduled full backups.
- Easy to monitor and manage.
- It excels with virtual machines. We don't have as much success with physical servers. It works but takes more effort to get working.
- Scheduled backup copies to USB aren't as easy to set up as I think they should be.
- Interaction with vCenter can be buggy in some versions.
- Veeam's licensing model for virtual servers is by the CPU on hosts so you can spin up a new VM on an existing host and it won't add to your backup licensing costs.
- Veeam gives us flexibility with backup destinations in one product (on prem and offsite).
We protect about 25 virtual workloads in our organization. Including our client base, Veeam protects over 200 virtual and 50 physical workloads. Most of our clients have 2-5 virtual systems protected and 1-2 physical systems. We continue to push Veeam as our backup platform of choice for virtual and hybrid environments.
We have not utilized the Veeam backup to cloud aside from doing some testing of backing up to Amazon S3 cloud. The testing has gone well but we haven't deployed this organization wide as of yet because we have an existing cloud backup solution that we are happy with. We may revisit this in 2021.
We have used the sandbox testing features quite a bit to test updates. We've also used the sandbox features to extract data from restored server instances that we don't want on the live network. Most recently, we needed end of year inventory report data from a retired SQL server. We were able to restore a 2-month-old backup of the server to a sandbox along with a domain controller from the same time, extract the data we needed, run the reports and complete our year-end financials. This process took less than 2 hours. Without Veeam it would have been an all-day project.
Veeam is the best choice for virtual and hybrid environments. We like the cost, licensing model, and extended feature set. It's simple to monitor, manage jobs and backup new virtual instances. It has never let us down.