Veeam Backup & Replication - Put value in your data
April 01, 2020

Veeam Backup & Replication - Put value in your data

Stefan Zuban | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Community Edition

Overall Satisfaction with Veeam Backup & Replication

We use Veeam Backup & Replication Community Edition in one of our departments in our local data center. Our local data center counts 3 HP ProLiant DL 380 GEN10 servers and a 48 TB SAN supporting corporate applications running on Windows servers and Linux servers on top of VMware vSphere 6.7 U3 Hypervisor. More than 30 VMs are available for users. The infrastructure is protected with a specific backup policy in place.
  • Very good user interface.
  • Compatible with Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere virtualization infrastructure.
  • Optimized backup size.
  • Backup scheduling features.
  • Compatibility with Citrix XenServer Hypervisor infrastructure.
  • Allow adding low cost storage e.g. a regular NAS to the storage infrastructure.
  • Improve reporting and allow better online error or warning description, avoiding intermediate reporting through a browser.
  • In a business model were one have several deployment types, e.g. acceptance, production, load tests, with recurrent new releases to deploy, or software development environments based on VDI, with developers constantly experimenting tools or testing their development, in case of disaster, rebuild the infrastructure may take a lot of time with significant losses if a quick restore of a healthy environment is not possible.
  • Organizations vulnerable to ransomware might find a huge burden to rebuild a whole infrastructure if backup policies and tools are missing.
  • To Public sector ought to provide access to public data or archives, backup/restore and disaster recovery capabilities is paramount and the lack of according tools and policies may lead to unrecoverable losses.
We do not use this feature as of yet. Corporate IT policies, Data protection are all matters to be dealt with prior the European Commission would go for it. For the time being our data center provides private cloud and backup and replication is kept to the classic features.
The community edition of version 9.5 limits the deployment of storage infrastructure to Cisco Hyperflex, Dell EMC, HP Enterprise, IBM Spectrum Virtualize, NetApp or specific plugins available on the Veeam site. So for the time being we did not use these capabilities, though it seems very promising and interesting. We are looking forward to having a closer look on this.
Unlocking the value of the data instead of just storing it waiting for odds is key for our organization. Three basic activities become custom, now that managing replications of the infrastructure with Veeam become so versatile: data recoverability verification, security testing and proof of concept through sandbox environments. The main is the data recoverability verification. It is not on the day of a disaster that you want to discover that you cannot recover one of your servers.
Efficiency for the public money is the main driver pushing us to adopting technology progress specially in IT as soon as they are mature enough for heavy public sector usage; but then not all new technology is suitable for the business. Proof of concept in the adoption of any new technology is a mandatory stop and with Veeam's sandbox testing and environment recreation is easy and quick enough to stay effective.

Xen Orchestra for Citrix XenServer is a complementary product to Veeam, as long as Xen Orchestra addresses Citrix Xen Servers and Veeam does not. Both are great tools, although Xen Orchestra community edition is a whit better than the already free XenCenter, the reference management console for Citrix XenServer.
Should you have a virtualization infrastructure based on Microsoft Hyper-V or VMware vSphere, should you host several virtual machines some in production, some in acceptance, should you have a business model where you do regular upgrades and deploy new releases or just want to have a backup capability in case of business critical application requiring disaster recovery capabilities, should you keep backup footprint as small as possible, care for a community edition for smaller businesses and full edition for more corporate environment, this tool is for you.

Veeam Data Platform Feature Ratings

Universal recovery
10
Instant recovery
10
Recovery verification
10
Incremental backup identification
10
Deduplication and file compression
10
Snapshots
10
Flexible deployment
10
Platform support
7
Retention options
10
Encryption
10