Great for older on-premise Active Directory backups
September 10, 2020
Great for older on-premise Active Directory backups
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Veeam Backup & Replication
Overall Satisfaction with Veeam Backup & Replication
We currently use Veeam Backup & Replication within our IT Department to backup critical components within our IAM infrastructure, specifically the Active Directory Domain Controllers and related systems. We were previously using the built-in Windows backup for our needs, however, this did not offer much in terms of flexibility, speed, reliability, and practicality. Due to residing on older hardware, backups would fail often and on occasion would become corrupted. After switching to Veeam, we gained much-needed confidence in our backup process and disaster recovery plan as a whole, due to the built-in specialty support for virtual DCs and dedicated recovery tools such as object-level restorations. Overall, the product has proven beneficial in mitigating the risk associated with catastrophic failures from an older infrastructure and has allowed us to defer costly upgrades for the time being.
- Virtualized workloads
- Endpoints and physical servers running Windows & Linux
- In addition to back up, we also snapshot some of these workloads
- Cloud-hosted VMs within AWS or Azure
- NAS filers
- Application-centric recovery using Veeam Explorers (for Exchange, SQL, Sharepoint, etc)
- Capacity Tier to store data within object storage for longer term retention
- Automating test restores to validate recoverability
- Failover or recovery scripts/plans for orchestrated recovery
- Application-centric recovery using Veeam Explorers (for Exchange, SQL, Sharepoint, etc)
- Object-level backup and restore for Active Directory
- Robust interface and recovery tools
- Dedicated VM tools
- Pricing, while competitive, is high for smaller businesses.
- Minimum 10-license purchase required, even if using less
- Intermediate - Difficult learning curve for those coming from non-enterprise solutions
Veeam Backup & Replication is currently being utilized on 5 platforms within our organization (four domain controllers, one file server). We initially tested this on one domain controller, and after being satisfied with the results, eventually extended to the remaining three and finally the associated file server (where folder redirects and AD metadata is being stored). The streamlined process for virtual servers will probably see us onboarding more VMs in the future.
- Mitigate risk of catastrophic failure with critical systems
- Reduce downtime for recovery activities
- Streamline backup and recovery testing
- Lower performance overheads associated with performing backups/replications
Prior to using Veeam Backup & Replication, we were using the built-in tools for backup that came with our infrastructure. While the process was initially automated, we resorted to doing daily manual backups as it would often fail without warning. Backups would also take an extended period of time due to the older hardware. Veeam allowed us to streamline our backup and recovery efforts by reducing the amount of time taken to backup, reduce the performance overhead associated with replication, and lower the MTD for application recoveries whenever failure arises.
We currently only use Veeam Backup & Replication for on-premise solutions, so we are unable to comment on the cloud-based capabilities.
We have recently started using Veeam Backup & Replication for our file shares as an extension to our Active Directory Backup regime. We have found that the product has been very efficient with backup times while minimizing overhead and has given us the ability to perform quick restores with object-level functionality.