Veeam Backup & Replication | A Solid BC/DR Solution for Companies of All Sizes
Updated October 13, 2023
Veeam Backup & Replication | A Solid BC/DR Solution for Companies of All Sizes
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Veeam Backup & Replication
Overall Satisfaction with Veeam Data Platform
We needed an easy backup & replication solution with solid reporting, that scales very well. I've been implementing Veeam for over 8 years now. At our company, we started at the branch office level, and then scaled up globally to our datacenters. We needed a standardized solution that was easy to onboard new sites, new servers, perform BC/DR testing, and cross-train employees on the technology. Coming from a fragmented set of backup solutions, this was an easy win to ensure we had a solid BC/DR plan in place for all of our infrastructure, at all sites.
- Virtualized workloads
- Endpoints and physical servers running Windows & Linux
- Enterprise applications such as Oracle or SAP HANA
- Cloud-hosted VMs within AWS or Azure
- NAS filers
- In addition to back up, we also replicate some of these workloads
- In addition to back up, we also snapshot some of these workloads
- Enterprise UNIX servers running Solaris & IBM AIX
- Application-centric recovery using Veeam Explorers (for Exchange, SQL, Sharepoint, etc)
- Capacity Tier to store data within object storage for longer term retention
- License portability as your environment needs change
- Automating test restores to validate recoverability
- Integration with cyber-security tools for SecureRestore
- Immutable storage to protect against ransomware
- “Instant” recovery or portability between platforms (physical > virtual > cloud-hosted)
- Failover or recovery scripts/plans for orchestrated recovery
- Capacity Tier to store data within object storage for longer term retention
- License portability as your environment needs change
- Automating test restores to validate recoverability
- Immutable storage to protect against ransomware
- “Instant” recovery or portability between platforms (physical > virtual > cloud-hosted)
- Failover or recovery scripts/plans for orchestrated recovery
- DR orchestration
- BC/DR testing
- Great UI/UX
- Reporting
- P2V of workloads to VMware
- Datacenter migrations between vCenter clusters/environments
- Failure events should be more verbose in the summary reports.
- SNMP documentation for monitoring via an NMS (SolarWinds/Nagios) should be more in-depth.
Do you think Veeam Data Platform delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Veeam Data Platform's feature set?
Yes
Did Veeam Data Platform live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Veeam Data Platform go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Veeam Data Platform again?
Yes
We have around 1500+ virtual/physical workloads and growing, the majority of which were VMware vSphere 6.7+. We are spread across 40+ sites globally, with servers around the world. We've been able to repeatedly and reliably deploy Veeam over and over again with great success, to the point to where we have new deployments down to a science. It does what it says out of the box with very little tuning/customization needed. Any time we've ever run into an issue, support gets us back on our feet immediately.
- Easy to sell - its a great insurance policy for the company.
- Easy to demonstrate in a lab environment.
- Has saved us from multiple BC/DR scenarios where quick restores were needed.
- Allows us to rehearse our BC/DR strategies and playbooks regular.y
We came from a fragmented set of backup solutions, each of which needed to be tended to and checked every single day. We always keep a close eye on our backups, but it was too labor intensive to be managing 6+ backup solutions, none of which had centralized reporting. Having come from an MSP where Veeam was the gold standard, we made the move to roll out Veeam globally, bringing everything under one Veeam Enterprise instance.
We have started protecting our cloud workloads with Veeam Data Platform to bring our cloud servers' BC/DR under one umbrella with the rest of our on-premises workloads. It's nice to gain visibility into instances that are virtual in a datacenter you don't fully control. We've also added offsite backups of our on-premises workloads into public cloud for easier DR testing/recovery.
We don't have a lot of NAS/file share workloads protected with Veeam as we mostly have modern Windows OS based file servers. That being said, in our limited testing with the NAS/filer-based workloads we do protect with Veeam, it was simple to setup, simple to test restores, and provided us peace of mind that we have offsite backups for these older workloads.
Using Veeam Data Platform
40 - Our local IT administrators and corporate infrastructure services team all leverage the Veeam Data Platform for BC/DR of our server infrastructure. These users range from intermediate to advanced users of the platform, and Veeam makes it easy to cross-train them on the technology so they understand how to support and use it on the day-to-day to empower them.
40 - We have around 40 IT users who support Veeam Data Platform in-house. These users will regularly monitor things, checking in daily on any backup/replication alerts or failures, and rarely need to open cases with Veeam support or escalate to corporate IT for larger issues. All of our branch site instances report back into one centralized Veeam Enterprise server for corporate IT oversight into how things are going at the branch level.
- BC/DR
- DR Orchestration
- Replication testing
- Backups testing
- Offsite backups
- DR sandbox testing with SureReplica/SureBackup.
- DEV/QA testing by cloning production servers.
- P2V of workloads to VMware when we found VMware converter was discontinued.
- V2V datacenter migrations between distinct vCenter clusters.
- DR replication between branches, not just datacenters
- Migration to public cloud from on-premises
- DR replication to public cloud
Evaluating Veeam Data Platform and Competitors
Yes - We replaced several platforms including Acronis Backup, Symantec/Veritas Backup Exec, Synology Active Backup for Business, Synology Hybrid Backup, Unitrends, VMware Data Protection, Legato Backup Solution, and EMC Networker. These were all distinct products, with different UIs, different capabilities, and no good centralized management solution to have them all report into for corporate oversight/management.
- Cloud Solutions
- Scalability
- Integration with Other Systems
- Ease of Use
The integration with VMware as well as the centralized Veeam Enterprise Manager solution, as well as the advanced reporting we get with the Veeam ONE platform were key parts of our choice to migrate to Veeam Data Platform. Veeam Enterprise Manager has been a great solution due to its comprehensive features and user-friendly interface. It offers centralized management and monitoring capabilities, allowing us to efficiently manage our data protection and backup operations across multiple Veeam backup servers.
The centralized approach Veeam Enterprise gives us enhances visibility and control, making it easier to monitor backup jobs, ensure data availability, and streamline administrative tasks. Veeam Enterprise Manager also provides self-service capabilities, empowering local IT administrators at branch sites to perform restores and manage their data without corporate IT intervention.
The centralized approach Veeam Enterprise gives us enhances visibility and control, making it easier to monitor backup jobs, ensure data availability, and streamline administrative tasks. Veeam Enterprise Manager also provides self-service capabilities, empowering local IT administrators at branch sites to perform restores and manage their data without corporate IT intervention.
I joined the company later on in their BC/DR journey, and so I came into them having quite a few solutions already in-place. For new environments/offices we setup, we ensure that Veeam is part of that day-1 solution for the sites, to avoid the headaches of a fragmented BC/DR solution across our global office presence.
Veeam Data Platform Implementation
- Implemented in-house
Yes - We broke our implementation up into doing one branch at a time. We setup our Veeam server/storage infrastructure side-by-side with the existing backup solution server/storage infrastructure. We then setup concurrent backups, confirmed our Veeam backups looked good, paused the old solution's backups, then sunset the old solution. We'd then move on to the next site and wash/rinse/repeat. Very simple.
Change management was minimal - We had to go through our regular change management request process to make the changes to migrate, but it was templated and fairly straight forward. Once we proved through our POC the process, the approval process was minimal to get the changes pushed out to roll Veeam Data Protection globally.
Veeam Data Platform Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | None |
We have the support contract that comes with the Veeam Universal Licensing solution. The support we get through the regular support channel on the Veeam website has been great, and for more advanced inquiries and solutions, we've been able to consult with our account manager and subject matter experts at Veeam with great success.
Yes - We've found very few bugs with the Veeam platform during our testing and regular use. When we did come across these edge case bugs, we were able to easily export and upload logs to Veeam support via the Veeam support portal, and work through with our support engineers to come to a solution. These solutions always came back in a timely manner.
We've been able to come up with some great creative solutions to our DR strategy of one of our biggest datacenters where we're replicating hundreds of servers. Being able to whiteboard virtually with our subject matter expert engineers has been a great experience for us, collaborating with the professionals who know the product best.
Using Veeam Data Platform
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using | Requires technical support |
- Backup
- Restore
- Replication
- Instant Recovery
- File Level Recovery
- Monitoring
- Job Management
- Storage Management