Veeam on VMware - force multiplier.
April 08, 2025
Veeam on VMware - force multiplier.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Veeam Backup & Replication
Overall Satisfaction with Veeam Data Platform
We use Veeam B&R to protect VMware, Proxmox, Hyper-V, and baremetal workloads. It is able to meet our RPO and RTO needs with room to spare. Veeam helps us sleep better at night.
Pros
- Integrations - building your environment around Veeam offers real benefits (eg DirectSAN)
- Flexibility - the new instance based licenses proved to be far more flexible than the older socket based licensing. 1 VM / 1 workstation / 1 instance.
- Hardware Agnostic - bring your own Hardened Linux Repo / SAN / compute.
Cons
- ProxMox integration - glad they've added what they have, but it is clearly incomplete
- Lower priority support cases - high-severity cases still get prompt attention, but lower priority cases draw on for weeks or in some cases months.
- Scoped access / RBAC in Veeam B&R. Enterprise Manager offers SOME additional controls, but the B&R thick console is very rigid in its role assignment.
- Virtualized workloads
- Endpoints and physical servers running Windows & Linux
- Enterprise applications such as Oracle or SAP HANA
- In addition to back up, we also replicate some of these 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)
- Capacity Tier to store data within object storage for longer term retention
- License portability as your environment needs change
- Utilizing backup copies for secondary purposes via DataLabs
- Automating test restores to validate recoverability
- Immutable storage to protect against ransomware
- “Instant” recovery or portability between platforms (physical > virtual > cloud-hosted)
- Accessing data for data mining or re-use of backup copies via API
- Failover or recovery scripts/plans for orchestrated recovery
- Utilizing backup copies for secondary purposes via DataLabs
400 or so. This number has gone up a lot since the move from socket-based licensing to instance-based licensing, which allows us to protect workloads we didn't have in Veeam before.
- Veeam is easy to stand up once you're comfortable with it - I rebuilt my environment off our AD recently, and the process took about 6 hours from start to finish.
- The Veeam console is intuitive; I can rapidly train new hires on the workflow and features.
Before leveraging VDP, we were using Backup Exec. Jobs took north of 2 weeks to complete, rarely finished successfully, and only a fraction of our environment was protected. Now, Veeam automatically protects 100% of our environment.
Our organization hardly leveraged the cloud. We are not using these features in a way that would be of interest to potential readers.
We opt to protect entire fileserver VMs instead of NAS / Fileshare (the Veeams license model allows you to protect a 30TB VM as one "Instance," where protecting a 30TB file share would be ~100 instances). The features are near-identical if you have DirectSAN, so I see no incentive to use these features.
Veeam was far more feature-rich and affordable than any of the other options we evaluated.
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
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