Trying to understand limitations of VBR Community re: cloud backups

[DazOG]

Hi

I'm currently running VBR Community Edition to back up 5 Hyper-V VMs, 2 hypervisors (volume backup) and replication of the Veeam Server (which is a VM on one of the hosts) to the other host. This is all being backed up to an on-premises NAS via an iSCSI target.

This is all working great, save for one issue where I rebooted the NAS and the volume that was previously formatted as ReFS came back as RAW and couldn't be recovered, which lost me 20 days of backups, so I ended up having to start from scratch (this time I formatted as NTFS, for what it's worth).

That prompted me to look more closely at cloud backups. Having started a trial of a S3 solution I was unable to get it to work (couldn't see the bucket) in Veeam, but upon further checking it seems like backing up to object storage is not supported in Veeam Community Edition anyway.

It looks like I would need to buy Veeam Data Platform Essentials to do this. It seems like a reasonable price when I look at this page:



..but upon proceeding further it seems like you can only buy these in packs of 5, making the minimum purchase £446.23/year. With my setup, would I not need at least 7 licences? (5 VMs + 2 hypervisor backups)

So I'm just trying to understand if I'm looking at either continuing to use VBR Community Edition and no cloud backups for free, or have to pay a minimum of £446.23/year to get access to S3/cloud backups? Is that right?

Thanks in advance!

[Mildur]

Hello Daz

Yes, Veeam Data Platform Essentials can backup to object storage.
But I still recommend to keep your primary backups on-premise and use a copy job to copy your backups to a cloud object storage provider. This will give you more performant restore. Also don't forget, that some cloud object storage services do bill you for API calls. Having backups on-premise for restore will save you money in that case.

5 HyperVMs requires you to buy 5 VUL instances. If you use Veeam to replicate your backup server, another instance will be required.
We don't recommend to backup the hypervisor itself. No need to deploy a Veeam Agent on Hyper-V. It should be easy to deploy a new Windows Server and enable the HyperV role.

Veeam Data Platform Essentials is sold in 5er packages up to 50 licenses. You can use our license calculator for small business to get an idea how many licenses you need to buy.
If you have more licenses related questions, I recommend to reach out directly to our sales team: https://www.veeam.com/contact-sales.html

I can also recommend to check out our feature comparison guide. It will show you what feature you have with each Veeam Data Platform edition. Veeam Data Platform Essentials includes "Veeam Data Platform Foundation" and "Veeam One Monitoring":
https://www.veeam.com/veeam_data_platfo ... son_ds.pdf

Best,
Fabian

[DazOG]

Thanks Fabian.

You say "use a copy job to copy your backups to a cloud object storage provide" - but that can't be done with VBR Community Edition, can it? That was my question.

It appears that you can't do anything cloud based (or S3 object based) if you are using the free version - is that correct?

The bit I'm struggling with is the jump from £0 to £446.23/year, that seems like a considerable increase for the most basic version of Veeam.

[Mildur]

Yes, community edition does not allow writing or copying backups to Cloud Connect or object storage. Veeam Community Edition only allows you to restore from backups on object storage.
One exception, you can use Veeam's object storage service "Veeam Data Cloud Vault" with the community edition.

This information is documented on page 10 in the feature comparison guide:



Best,
Fabian

[DazOG]

Thanks. I'll look into Veeam Data Cloud Vault.

[Mildur]

You're welcome.

Best,
Fabian