Veeam: Moving on from net-backup and backup window contentions!
February 06, 2021
Veeam: Moving on from net-backup and backup window contentions!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Veeam Backup & Replication
Overall Satisfaction with Veeam Backup & Replication
Veeam B&R is being used across our organization in two datacentres. It was primarily brought in to modernize our older backup system (NetBackup) and to reduce our backup windows.
- Virtualized workloads
- In addition to back up, we also snapshot some of these workloads
- Cloud-hosted VMs within AWS or Azure
- Application-centric recovery using Veeam Explorers (for Exchange, SQL, Sharepoint, etc)
- Application-centric recovery using Veeam Explorers (for Exchange, SQL, Sharepoint, etc)
- User interface is easy to manage.
- Restoring from file/brick-level backup is much easier than recovering from our old backup.
- Scheduling is easy to understand and manage.
- When mounting a backup for restore, this process can be slow.
In our environment, we are backing up approx 200vms. Including Exchange, Sharepoint, File Servers, and other various application servers/workloads. This has grown since we originally purchased the product, but that has been organic growth in the business. We do not currently backup cloud/physical workloads, but we are starting to move things into the cloud and have started to look at Veeam to back up that data.
- Positive because we are not spending money on tapes.
- Also not spending as much on offsite tape storage. Our data is still replicated offsite, and tapes go offsite weekly vs daily.
- Shorter backup windows ensure that we are not juggling data retention esp with larger SQL backups.
The biggest thing that drove us to Veeam was backup windows and contention. Our SQL backup was a bak file dump from SQL. The tape solution was not finishing writing to tape before the next daily SQL backup wanted to write a new bak file. Moving to a disk-based backup and Veeam solved this issue right away.
We have not used any workloads for production in the cloud so have not had to back these up as of yet. We are looking at teams and bringing SharePoint online into the equation as I write this. So Veeam will be used to back that up. As we get our hybridization projects rolling in 2021 we will continue to make sure data in the cloud that is production oriented is backed up.
We use Windows File servers for our file services currently. Veeam does back this up. Our first line for restoring data is ShadowCopies as this can be user-driven and self-managed. If something older does need to be recovered using Veeam to get data is easy and quicker than our old solution. We don't have to recall tapes if the data is still on our disks and even though mounting the data can take a few mins, it's a fraction of the time that reading data from a tape would take.