Veeam good for SBS-replacment scenario?

[Photogregor]

Hi,

To me it is difficult to sort out whether Veeam can achieve all that is needed in system setups, that will replace thousands of SBS 2003/2011 in smaller companies in the near future. Since outsourcing, server 2012 originally was designed for, is no more option and SBS does'nt exist anymore people have to use the robust virtualization features of Server 2012 to build their own "SBS". So I would like to ask point-blank what Veeam can do in the following situation:

An SBS 2003 will be replaced with Server 2012 R2, acting as Hypervisor. There will be two guests, the first one is a Server 2012 R2 acting as DC, DNS, DHCP and file server, the second one is a Server 2012 R2 with Exchange Server. The physical server (no cluster, just one box) has a single internal LTO-3-SCSI-Drive, there will be only one RAID 10 which has to carry host system as well as guests and data. On the old system OS and data could easily be backed up on tape with Backup Exec 2010, so the restore of single data, e-mails or the whole system was no problem. How can I achieve a similar state of security for the new virtualized environment with Veeam? Precisely:

1. Is there a Veeam product that is capable to perform a disaster recovery for the host and/or(!) for the guest systems in case of hard- or software crash?
2. Can I restore a single email or a complete email folder back into mail store?
3. Can I restore single files or folders, accidentially deleted by a user?
4. Is there one product to achieve this within one backup job or do I need different modules?
5. Can I safe all these data to and restore from tape drive with Veeam without having to think about an additional disk subsystem only for the purpose of backing up (no stuff like B2D2T)?

Thanks in advance for a clarification whether Veeam is the right product for this default scenario.

Regards,
Stefano

[tsightler]

Veeam is not a direct replacement Backup Exec to tape, but I think it can potentially be a very good option with some minor redesign:

1. Is there a Veeam product that is capable to perform a disaster recovery for the host and/or(!) for the guest systems in case of hard- or software crash?

While Veeam cannot recover the host system, it can of course recover the guest systems, and can do so instantly from backups or via full restore of the VM.

2. Can I restore a single email or a complete email folder back into mail store?

Yes, Exchange Item Level recovery are built right into the product. To restore directly to the mail store requires the Enterprise level license, but all versions can recover individual items, either by saving to a file or emailing the recovered item to a user.

3. Can I restore single files or folders, accidentially deleted by a user?

Yes, all versions of Backup and Replication support recovery of individual files and folders from a VM backup.

4. Is there one product to achieve this within one backup job or do I need different modules?

It's all one product, although there are some license levels that provide various additional capabilities such as restoring directly to the mail store. These are well described on the Veeam website.

5. Can I safe all these data to and restore from tape drive with Veeam without having to think about an additional disk subsystem only for the purpose of backing up (no stuff like B2D2T)?

Veeam is a D2D backup product so, as such, requires the backups to be stored to disk, and then they can be moved to tape, however, an alternative approach is to replace tape completely with a cartridge based disk solution such as the RDX models which are quite popular. Using these in concert with the enhanced support for rotated media in V7 Patch 3 can provide a very similar experience to direct to tape backup, but using disk technology instead.