Veeam is great for peace of mind and for migration away from VMWare with minimal downtime
April 29, 2025
Veeam is great for peace of mind and for migration away from VMWare with minimal downtime
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Veeam Backup & Replication
Overall Satisfaction with Veeam Data Platform
We use Veeam Data Platform to keep backups of production systems, both for the interests of various departments, but also to keep up with retention regulations. From an IT prospective Veeam makes it really easy to migrate to new servers when they reach EOL or have hardware malfunctions, and it also helps keep users happy when a file they accidentally deleted a week ago would take them several hours to recreate.
Veeam Data Platform has specifically came in clutch for me during our migration away from VMWare due to the increased licensing costs. Its as simple as doing a quick backup of the VMWare VM, then doing an instant restore to Hyper-V/Proxmox and the downtime for our users is under 10 minutes, even for VMs that are 5TB+ in size and take several hours to migrate.
Another time Veeam Data Platform has been very useful to me was when a departments server had its Raid controller fail: I was able to instantly restore the server to a backup DR server and had them up and running in a couple hours (Most of this was making changes to the network structure to migrate DHCP/DNS to a different server and setting up routing/firewall rules), instead of them being down for several days while we wait for new hardware to arrive
Veeam Data Platform has specifically came in clutch for me during our migration away from VMWare due to the increased licensing costs. Its as simple as doing a quick backup of the VMWare VM, then doing an instant restore to Hyper-V/Proxmox and the downtime for our users is under 10 minutes, even for VMs that are 5TB+ in size and take several hours to migrate.
Another time Veeam Data Platform has been very useful to me was when a departments server had its Raid controller fail: I was able to instantly restore the server to a backup DR server and had them up and running in a couple hours (Most of this was making changes to the network structure to migrate DHCP/DNS to a different server and setting up routing/firewall rules), instead of them being down for several days while we wait for new hardware to arrive
Pros
- Instant recoveries are great for migrating servers to new hardware/clusters
- Makes backups easy and quick even on network with low bandwidth
- Provides peace of mind that backups are working as expected when set up with email alerts
- Keeps detailed logs of all backups which is useful for our yearly audits
Cons
- More detailed documentation on procedures when something goes wrong, rather than just having to contact Veeam support. Specific example: In the middle of a Instant Recovery to Hyper-V we had a network issue and the restore failed, however since it was an instant recovery changes were made to some documents on that restored server. I could not find documentation on how to restore files from that failed instant recovery's snapshots, but thankfully the end users just told me to not worry about it since the changed were minimal.
- When adding a new VM to a backup job, "Quick Backup" doesn't work because it hasn't had its initial backup yet. It would be nice if there was also a "Full Backup" right click option on the VM in the inventory area so that I could start the backup job easily only including that single VM (Or if quick backup would do the full backup).
- It would be nice if Veeam supported replication from VMWare to Hyper-V or vice versa, rather then needing to use Instant Restores to migrate. It would be nice if the bulk of a 5TB server could be migrated in advance, then quickly updating the replication with the changed data and do a quick swap over.
- Virtualized workloads
- Endpoints and physical servers running Windows & Linux
- 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
- Cloud-hosted VMs within AWS or Azure
- Application-centric recovery using Veeam Explorers (for Exchange, SQL, Sharepoint, etc)
- Automating test restores to validate recoverability
- Integration with cyber-security tools for SecureRestore
- “Instant” recovery or portability between platforms (physical > virtual > cloud-hosted)
- Failover or recovery scripts/plans for orchestrated recovery
- “Instant” recovery or portability between platforms (physical > virtual > cloud-hosted)
130. This is more than we anticipated, as our organization has gown since we started using Veeam, and more servers have entered the scope of what we would like to protect with Veeam Data Platform. It is nice that Veeam had some flexibility with the number of workloads supported by our backup repository server as we initially undersized our license not realizing how many instances we needed.
- For organizations that operate on a 24/7 basis, reducing the time to migrate a 8TB physical server from 18 hours using traditional migration methods, to 10 minutes using instant recovery to Hyper-V to facilitate a P2V migration is great.
- During audit season, Veeam has reduced my time generating backup reports from around 5 hours to around under an hour. This gives me more time to work on other important tasks
- Veeam Data Platform has assisted us with our migration away from VMWare after their increased licensing costs. In a way, Veeam making the migration quick has sort of paid for itself in that we can avoid paying another years of licenses to Oracle.
When I started my job we used EMC NetWorker with some EMC NAS. At some point those NAS started to have issues, and since our support license with EMC had expired they wanted us to buy whole new server, so we switched to using a combination of the software Backup Exec, and backup scripts. These, while they worked, were a nightmare to manage and keep up with, so eventually we switched to using Veeam. Compared to EMC and manual backup scrips, its night and day how much better Veeam is. Veeam Data Platform is about on par with Backup Exec, however its much easier to centrally manage backups with Veeam than it is to manually manage every server with Backup Exec.
Our origination uses the cloud backup features to keep a 3rd copy of our important workloads in the event that a natural disaster takes out our primary and DR datacenters.
We use Veeam Data Platform to backup our NAS's that departments have, however we have yet to restore to/from those specific backups as the hardware has yet to fail, and the users have yet to accidentally delete something.
- Dell Networker and Veritas Backup Exec
VS Networker, its hands down better with support and ease of use. It also has many more features.
Vs Backup Exec, its much less confusing to use as Backup Exec doesn't have an intuitive interface. It also, like Networker, has many more features than Backup Exec.
Vs Backup Exec, its much less confusing to use as Backup Exec doesn't have an intuitive interface. It also, like Networker, has many more features than Backup Exec.
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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