Honest review of our transition to Veeam Data Platform
October 18, 2023
Honest review of our transition to Veeam Data Platform
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Veeam Backup & Replication
Overall Satisfaction with Veeam Data Platform
We currently use Veeam Data Platform for full VM backups. Our last product was a file level recovery product with no means of recovering a VM or server without installing an OS first. Veeam Data Platform has resolved that issue exceedingly well. We can recover full VMs within only a few minutes. We were also tasked with encrypting our backups, which was an easy task for Veeam Data Platform. We currently have another product for replicating VMs to an offsite datacenter, and plan to start testing the CDP and Replication parts of Veeam Data Platform to see if they can compete with our other product soon. Small test suggest that Veeam Data Platform does an excellent job with CDP and Replication, but maybe not quite as organized as our current product.
- Virtualized workloads
- Endpoints and physical servers running Windows & Linux
- Enterprise UNIX servers running Solaris & IBM AIX
- In addition to back up, we also replicate some of these workloads
- Cloud-hosted VMs within AWS or Azure
- In addition to back up, we also snapshot some of these workloads
- Failover or recovery scripts/plans for orchestrated recovery
- Failover or recovery scripts/plans for orchestrated recovery
- Uses custom storage and is not tied to any particular storage vendor.
- Veeam Data Platform has the ability to dedupe and encrypt backups on custom storage, including ZFS.
- Backup and recovery of entire VMs is very convenient.
- Backing up VMs on multiple vCenters across multiple sites is seamless with Backup Enterprise Manager
- The scalability on Veeam Data Platform is great. You can run everything on one server/VM in a small environment, or scale out more VMs to manage the workload the larger your environment is.
- The Veeam Data Platform documentation on their website is very comprehensive. Sometimes overwhelming, but most things you need to know can be found there.
- Veeam Data Platform could use a web interface for the Backup and Recovery product without having to install a separate application (Backup Enterprise Manager)
- Being able to see some stats without the VeeamONE product, such as how much storage an individual VM is using.
- The documentation is well done, but it is still difficult to discern which roles do which job. Such as the Veeam Proxies connect directly to the Hypervisor, and the Veeam Gateways mount the repositories if they are network shares.
- Continuation from the last point, allowing individual ports through firewalls requires quite a lot of planning, the larger your environment is. If you have a small environment with only one Veeam Data Platform server, this is not an issue.
- Getting an agent installed on semi supported versions of Linux for our bare metal servers can end up being a one by one process. Our Windows bare metal servers installed seamlessly. The different flavors of Linux has been a challenge.
- Hopefully they are adding more granular ACLs for the VM Recovery. Currently, if someone needs to recovery an entire VM, they have to be given access to everything on the Virtual Backup and Replication server. If they need file level recovery, they can leverage the web applcation if you have installed Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager and they have local admin/root access to the machine they want to recover to.
- Veeam Data Platform could use a proper High Availability for its own management servers. The current method to replace any of the Veeam Data Platform management servers is to create a new VM/server and restore the backup of the internal database (that you better keep up with). This is probably my biggest concern with the product. We are using the competing 3rd party product to replicate the Veeam Data Platform management servers to our HA and DR sites.
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 currently have just over 900 workloads on one location and working our way up to 500 in a second separate location. This is right on spec for what we were expecting.
- The ability to recover entire VMs from scratch, even if deleted as been great. It has allowed us the "courage" to move forward with VM OS upgrades and use Veeam Data Platform to recovery back if the upgrade goes sideways. Which has happened quite a few times.
- VeeamONE has allowed us to gather reports and billing information on how much storage we are using per VM and can be broken down by week, month, year.
- We also keep ransomware in mind, and Veeam Data Platform's constant improvements to battling ransomware is one of the major selling points to upper management.
- The dedupe feature is something that we didn't have in our last product. Deduping alone is saving us a tremendous amount of storage. With our current retention period, our total storage usage is hovering around 150% of each VM. Multiple times less than our previous product. To note, this is using our custom storage that is not deduplicating on its own.
- Our old backup solution was a file level recovery solution only. With no way of recovering entire VMs without manually reinstalling the OS with the same name as the destroyed VM, reinstalling the applications, then using the FLR to overwrite the configs. This was a disaster waiting to happen on its own. We are now able to recover full VMs within minutes, very similar to recovering a VM snapshot, but we don't have to keep the snapshot around and destroy the VM's performance.
- We are now able to use Veeam Data Platform to do a full backup copy to our offiste DR location and have tested recovering there from this backup copy.
- The ease of adding VMs to and from a backup job's schedule is as easy as adding a tag to the VM. No need to manually adding them one by one and keeping up with them manually.
- Our previous product had no plausible way of ever recovering from a ransomware attack. Veeam Data Platform is working with every update they do to help find and prevent ransomware attacks early.
We currently do not have cloud workloads in the typical sense. We currently utilize multiple datacenters for our "cloud."
We are using NFS for our primary and offsite repositories. Veeam Data Platform uses a "Gateway" role to mount these repositories for each job. Veeam Data Platform has a built in NFS client that allows you to use either a Windows or Linux server as a Gateway. This was one of the primary reasons we choose Veeam Data Platform over the other alternatives is because Veeam Data Platform actually supports this type of repo. We are also leveraging Veeam Data Platform's dedupe and encryption on these NFS repos.