Veeam Backup & Replication Reviews

Our primary use for Veeam Backup & Replication is for enterprise backups and replication.

It's used pretty heavily by us.

The features I find most valuable are probably the VMware snapshot backups and the Veeam replication. Their replication is very good.

It can easily be used for disaster recovery in a number of situations.

I don't know how it would compare to Zerto, for example, but considering that it can leverage backups for replication purposes, this makes it superior to either a backup product or a replication product. The fact that you can mix and match, for example, you can replicate off of a backup or off of a backup copy somewhere else, or off of the source machine directly, makes it superior for me.

In terms of what could be improved, they need a better solution for backend storage. Other backup products that I've used, like Commvault, have at least a disc based backup. If you don't have a D duplicating appliance, like Commvault who has its own duplication engine, it's doing its best to duplicate data going into the repository. Veeam is not very good at that. There is some level of data reduction, but it's not much. So if your backup targets don't have a good D duplication data reduction, it's a problem because you just create massive amounts of data on the backend.

I like that you can use any kind of disc target and you can use any kind of high speed fiber channel as backend.

On a scale of one to 10, I would say that Veeam Backup & Replication is one of the best, so I'd probably give it a nine. There is not one perfect backup product and I think one of the challenges with Veeam is the lack of clients. Meaning, we have certain older systems that there is no Veeam client for, and there's no incentive for Veeam to make the client for it. But it does VMware backups very well.

We use this solution to backup and replicate our visualized and physical infrastructure. We use it to take backups on a daily/monthly basis; to take snapshots for disaster recovery; for application-aware processing.

Veeam Backup and Replication is mainly used by our IT team but we have a Veeam Backup Agent deployed on all of our workstations to make backups for end-users. In total, there are roughly 60-65 people using this solution in our company. 

For maintenance, we only require two engineers and a manager.

This solution is very flexible and user-friendly — it's very good. It's very good with our virtual and physical infrastructure.

They need to improve the reporting. There is something called Veeam ONE Reporting — it's a separate module altogether. It's not included in the Veeam Backup and Replication bundle; it has to be purchased separately.

There's a lot of room for improvement surrounding the backup process. Searching through folders is complicated; customization involving backups is lacking. For instance, if I want to backup a particular server and store it in another repository, I have to first define a repository then I have to create a policy. Next, I have to execute the policy. It's not as if I just snap my fingers and it works — no. You need to build it and put that intelligence inside of it in order for it to act intelligently. 

In addition, it should be more flexible when it comes to customizing policies. 

I have been using Veeam Backup & Replication for roughly two years. 

The technical support is very slow — their response time is very slow. 

If I raise a ticket, they should quickly respond. Their first response is very slow; they work on their own sweet time. For instance, four days ago I reached out to technical support with an issue; only last night did they respond — they sent me an email asking me for our logs. The response time is very slow. It took almost four days for them to even respond. After I've uploaded the logs, they'll review them and come back with their findings. In other words, it takes roughly eight to 10 days just to understand the case — that's really bad.

On a scale from one to ten, I would give their support a rating of zero. 

The initial setup was very straightforward; however, the configuration was not straightforward. After it's set up, you then need to build it. Think of it like making a pizza: first, you need to make the dough; then you need the proper ingredients; then you need to preheat the oven to the proper temperature — it's a precise process. 

We pay on an annual basis. We pay roughly $12,000 for our software subscription. 

I would recommend Veeam Backup & Replication to others. Overall, on a scale from one to ten, I would give this solution a rating of eight. The only issue I have is with their technical support; otherwise, it's a great product. 

We chose Veeam because, according to Gartner and multiple reports, it's the number one product for virtualized infrastructure. We got the demo and began a POC on a couple of servers. It was good for performing backups, etc., but it's not about the product. The product is good, it's the service after the sale that you have to look out for. After the sale is complete, the service and support are what matters. This can make or break a product.

I have found the backup call feature very good.

I have found that the reporting could improve in its structure.

In an upcoming release, the remote site application, physical workload, and other application integration could improve.

I have been using the solution for approximately four years.

We have experienced some bugs that we reported to the Veeam team and most of the issues have been resolved. For example, we had an issue recovering a file that was 256 characters long which we were testing out. We resolved it by restoring the whole volume.

We are satisfied with the technical support.

We have also worked with Acronis, Commvault, and Veritas.

The initial setup is very simple.

The price of the solution could improve when comparing it to competitors. The market is very competitive and they should have some discounts or special offers.

We have evaluated Commvault and they have a very fantastic rating compared to Veeam Replication. 

I rate Veeam Backup Replication an eight out of ten.

For our clients, the optimal use case depends on their specific requirements. It excels in safeguarding commercial machines, physical servers, and diverse workloads, including those hosted on AWS EC2 instances. It proves highly effective in managing databases, catering to various platforms such as Cisco and Oracle, and addressing the unique needs of different clients.

The most valuable aspects are the latest features in version 12.1, which introduced enhanced security features.

Margins should not be distinct; instead, they should seamlessly integrate with the Veeam Backup and Replication tools, requiring minimal separation.

I have been working with it for more than five years.

I would rate it stability capabilities eight out of ten.

It offers excellent scalability. Our clientele typically consists of small, medium, and enterprise businesses. I would rate it nine out of ten.

I would rate its technical support services ten out of ten.

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward. I would rate it ten out of ten.

The deployment process typically takes two to three hours.

It is highly cost-effective when compared to other solutions. With only one license needed, all features can be enjoyed, eliminating the need for separate licensing for individual components.

We recommend using it because of its simplicity. Overall, I would rate it nine out of ten.

Our primary use case with Veeam Backup & Replication is to backup critical data. We would recommend that a person put on a Veeam backup service so that in a disaster recovery scenario you set what has to come back up first because that is going to be the critical information that has to go back up as quickly as possible. You can put anything on critical servers, but we recommend that you use it for critical data that it is going to be restored within a four hour timeframe.

Veeam Backup & Replication can be deployed as agent-based or you can set it up to replicate back to a NAS, some sort of device onsite, so that a copy of your data goes to the device onsite and another copy goes to a data center for a backup as well. Then, if that server crashes, the device that's at the location has the latest copy of the good data from where they get the backup.

Veeam Backup & Replication has most definitely improved our organization because it saves the IT a lot of headache. 

Veeam Backup & Replication is a great alternative to what is out there. Some of the backups just allow an agent backup to the cloud. You can back up a thousand different ways, but this is a great way to keep a customer and a company in compliance in that they've got their data secure onsite and offsite. The data being transferred to the NAS at the customer's location and also the data being sent to the cloud is encrypted in transit and it's also encrypted at rest so that nobody is going to be able to hack into that. No one will have the keys to do that.

The dashboard is very, very easy to understand. We do demonstrations all the time with customers just to show them. If they've lost particular files because of a server going down, we can retrieve those files for them and quickly bring those files back up. So in a disaster recovery where you've got a location that's either been hit with a tornado, a hurricane, an earthquake, or whatever the disaster might be, this company and customer has to be up, then this data is secured offsite as well, and can be pulled down either to a VM, a virtual machine, or to another physical server. It is just a matter of how fast your internet connection is.

Until internet connectivity becomes standard all over the country and all over the world, as far as minimum speeds, the main thing would be just making sure that your data is being transferred as quickly as possible, that the data transfers are seated correctly, and that the replication takes place and is monitored. The service can be managed or unmanaged, it just depends on the customer's IT ability as to how much or how little we can help.

There is always room for improvement on anything, but at this point I think it's perfect. But I'm sure there are other things that customers are wanting that Veeam could probably put in their next update or patch. But at this point I don't have any information on that.

As companies grow, it just depends on what their needs are as to what we can help them with as far as the recovery is concerned. Larger businesses with more than 300 VMs would be a perfect scenario for Rubrik. Veeam, I think is good up until 300 VMs. With other services that we have, it could be lower than a hundred VMs, but it seems that Veeam is in a good spot.

I have been using Veeam Backup & Replication for probably the last four years.

This solution runs very smoothly unless there is a server that goes offline on a customer's site that we don't know about, but other than that, the service is rock solid.

The scalability is pretty much straightforward. It's just like updating software. For anybody that has a little bit of sense about how to update services it is pretty straightforward and simple.

Our clients are a mixture of small, medium and large businesses and they are all over the country.

I do sales, so I'm the one that is responsible for selling the sizzle. My IT folks, my engineers, are the ones that face Veeam the company. I would say that the majority of the companies that we deal with in backup and recovery are very, very responsive and I feel Veeam is the same way. It's a great software package, it is inexpensive and it does a lot of things that IT companies and people in general want to see.

We use EVault software and Carbonite backups, it just depends on the customer. If you can tolerate 12 to 24 hours of being out of service, then we have other backup services that are right in the ballpark in pricing, but just older technologies. Nowadays everything is like McDonald's and I want it now. I want my hamburger now and I want my data now. It is getting to where customers want that faster RTO and RPO so that they can have their company back up and making money as quickly as possible.

The initial setup is pretty straightforward if you've got a person that knows how things go. Most midsize and large companies will have an IT person on staff that would understand that. If they don't understand it, of course our guys, our engineers, can train them for that and show them which way to go. But normally IT people are pretty familiar with dashboards.

My advice to anyone considering Veeam Backup & Replication would be to definitely demo it and see what you think about it because you can't try it before you buy it, and see how it works in your environment. I'm not too sure if there are any trials that go on for a month at a time, but it depends on the customer. If they decide that this is something good for them, then we move forward with it and adjust as we go. But the majority of our customers know what Veeam is and have seen the product out there, because I send a lot of information out via LinkedIn and send emails to my customers about those services. It would just depend on whether it was an attorney's office, a hospital, whatever he is, but those folks would want to have their data as quickly as possible.

On a scale of one to ten, I would give Veeam Backup & Replication a 10.

I used to work for a company that provided Backup/DR as a service to its clients we had to look at various backup and recovery tools to quickly and easily bring back customers data. Before Veeam introduced the backup to tape and WAN acceleration features we were using 3 different products across a number of our clients to provide the required services. After those feature releases, we just used one tool through a single console (the infamous single-pane-of-glass) which reduced the complexity and management overheads within our solutions but also provided our customers with a far greater level of service and reliability.

This is actually quite a hard choice to make when dealing with Veeam Backup & Replication. There are a number of great features such as WAN acceleration, deduplication & compression, replication and the grandfather-father-son backup tree. Not to mention backup to tape which has been a key reason to migrate to Veeam. The primary feature of most value to me is the SureBackup and SureReplica featureset. Having the ability to verify backups and replicas of critical servers in a sandboxed environment means that I can sleep comfortably at night knowing that the data is valid and I can confidently restore data and services if required by the business. Snapshot capabilities within NetApp would also be high on that list.

Backup of physical servers. I know Veeam has vehemently said they will never go down that route but it's a feature I need, and badly. Having the ability to use Veeam within all our virtual environments is fantastic, but it also means we still have a requirement to use TSM to back up our physical servers via an agent. With endpoint protection features being announced recently, I can only hope that this develops into the backup of all physical devices and allows it to be managed through the Veeam console.

Recently I've been discussing the capabilities of endpoint protection with a Veeam Rep. around the area of enterprise applications. In this instance I'm focused on SQL and Exchange. Despite my protestations we are still using physical exchange servers (and I doubt we're the only enterprise) so being able to get a good backup of those servers is critical to allow replacement of current backup solutions. Right now Veeam are not confident with Exchange backups and would recommend one of the DAGs to be virtual to ensure the backup consistency. For SQL however they are happy with their testing and while not being a released feature it is something that can be backed up via endpoint protection. This area of development for Veeam is going to be a critical one for them to truly enter the enterprise backup arena.

99% of the time there are no issues with Veeam. It does exactly what it says on the tin and it really is just as easy as they make it look in their demos and videos. On a few occasions I had issues with VSS failing on a server which came down to being an operating system issue. Another time there was a problem where the backup was not truncating exchange logs. Veeam Support provided a patch within 24 hours which immediately fixed the issue permanently.

In early versions of Veeam, before version 6.5, there were issues but since Veeam has utilised backup Proxy servers there's no issue with scalability. You can leverage servers in your environment that have low workloads to be Veeam proxies as well so you get more value from your environment.

Customer Service:

Veeam customer service is top notch. Previously I have worked closely with them to request licensing and further information on their products and they have always answered quickly and politely or returned my call quickly. If it was on a scale of 1-5 I'd give it 5.

Technical Support:

Technical support is exceptional at Veeam. Any issue I have opened with them has been dealt with quickly and within an hour I've had a support technician contact me. On a handful of occasions where I've had severity 1 calls open with support they have passed off support to their colleagues in Europe and later America to work on the issue with me further out of hours with a smooth handover. Normally with support teams this happens but you have repeat everything all over again but I've not had such an experience with Veeam.

Yes. I used to use products such as Symantec Backup Exec and Falconstor but switched to Veeam as it's designed for virtual environments, it's easy to use and lowers the management overhead, it scales easily and provides a stable backup environment. Right now I'm considering using Veeam to replace NetApp SnapProtect within our environment.

The initial setup is really straightforward. It really is a next, next, next install and can be done by anyone. Some of the feature selection during the installation should be thought about in advance but it's possible to easily enable these later if you don't enable the up-front. Once the installation is complete you then need to add servers as proxies and point Veeam at a backup repository, add vCenter and create the backup pools and that's it. Ready, set, go!

I've only ever done in-house implementations of Veeam. I have had discussions on occasions with Veeams technical team before installation of some more complex environments and they have always been insightful and knowledgeable and understood the capabilities of their products at an in-depth level. But normally the implementation was straightforward and didn't require any assistance.

We were able to recover our investment on Veeam within about 8 months. This was due largely to reduced licensing costs initially but the majority of the savings came from a reduction in the management overheads and the previous baby-sitting we had to do of our backup solution.

The original setup costs were in the region of $45k for a 24 host VMware environment. That was for the full Veeam Availability Suite which Backup and Replication is a part of. The day-to-day (Opex) costs we reduced from one staff member spending 5 hours massaging backups and replications to less that 1 hour a day.

Before using Veeam I reviewed a number of backup solutions. These included Symantec Backup Exec, NetBackup, Falconstor, Acronis, Commvault and ArcServe.

I would recommend getting your hands on trial version or even just use the free editions from Veeam to become comfortable with the console and see for yourself just how easy it is to manage backups. If you use the free edition you'll quickly want to use a full version so you can schedule backups and take advantage of some of enterprise features. Run a POC on some VMs and verify it's the right tool for you and see that the reviews don't lie.

I would also recommend reaching out to a Veeam Gold or Platinum Partner if you have a more complex environment and get your design put up on a whiteboard. While getting Veeam into your environment is the end goal a real focus needs to be placed on data migration and integrity. Your previous backup data needs to be accessible and recoverable and this is where the partners should be able to help. This isn't a recommendation just for implementing Veeam but for all backup solution migration. With Veeam however I'm sure it'll be as easy as everything else.

We have used the solution for combining cloud and on-premise storage, like a hybrid repository for storing our data and offloading. We have also created backups for Exchange and SQL. We also use the solution for endpoint protection like laptops and bare metal restore.

The product has introduced cloud storage, which can be used directly for backing up the data. We need not have an on-premise storage location. It makes everything easy. The product’s configuration and settings are very easy.

The endpoint protection console is not centralized. It needs to be improved. The product must improve its reporting features so that it can be used for audit purposes.

I have been using the solution for at least eight years.

The initial setup is straightforward. If everything is in place, deploying the solution takes one to two hours.

One or two people from our team can handle the deployment process. They have admin-level access to the server. It is easy. No other intervention is required.

I rate the tool’s pricing a seven out of ten. The product is expensive for small businesses. However, it is not that expensive.

The product is suitable for a BDM organization that does not have the option to store data on-premise. It is really easy to manage. It can also be restored very easily. If we have a good network speed, it does a quicker restore. Overall, I rate the solution an eight and a half out of ten.

We use the solution to back up all our products, like Exchange, SharePoint, Linux, Windows, Oracle, and SQL.

The solution has a user-friendly interface.

The solution's admin scheduling scripts need improvement. Also, import and export processes for information and policies could be better.

I have been using the solution for six months.

I rate the solution's stability as a nine.

I rate the solution's scalability as a nine.

The solution's customer support team is responsive and efficient. It resolves the issues promptly.

We have used IBM TSM and Symantec NetBackup before. In comparison, the solution is simple to use, integrates well with third-party solutions, and has dedicated technical experts.

I rate the solution as a nine out of ten.