Is this product any good?

[247it]

Hi All, I am a VMware reseller and have a number of clients using VMware essentials plus, and the vmware 'Data Recovery' software for backups & DR. SOme are having major issues with the integrity checks taking days. So I am shopping around for a more intelligent solution to recommend to my customers. Does Veeam B&R have similar issues, is it as good as they say it is in the data sheets?

Comments welcomed.

[Gostev]

Does Veeam B&R have similar issues

No, we do not have issues with integrity checks taking days. Our backup storage is specifically designed for high performance on the fly deduplication and quick data access, so integrity check (performed each time when the job starts) takes no more than a few seconds even with largest backup files.

[just2test]

I am currently evaluating Veeam.

I am using Data Recovery for some weeks, it is horrible. I have 4 appliances. Every one of them gets corrupted or does simply not response from time to time.
Integrity checks never ends, backup of some vms run for ever. You can stop jobs and nothing happens. After a week i rebooted the Data Recovery VM to get rid of the snapshots.
Then the appliance runs for some days without problems while on another appliance recovery points get damaged without reason. To get rid of damaged recovery points you have to mark them and run inegrity check that can take days, then restart the appliance. So you are for days without Backup because it can only run if there are no damaged restore points. On of my appliances lost 40 restore points and did no backup for more than a week. It a lottery, horrible. Nothing to rely on.

I would call it alpha software, or even proof of concept. I have seen a lot of beta software that was way more stable.

On the other hand deduplication is better with Data Recovery. Veeam creates a file for every job, even for every full backup while Data recovery puts everything in one store.
Not hard to guess that deduplication is more effective if you put all in one store. But it does not help if it does not work reliable.

Since my backup space is limited the only drawback with veeam is the way the data is stored. Is not as effective like Data Recovery.
For example i would like to create multiple jobs that store their data in one file so dedup can work. Thats seems to be impossible with veeam.

[pacmantravis]

We are also Vmware partners and have had issues with the VMware Data Recovery appliance. Integrity checks were a HUGE issue for us and we finally gave up and purchased Veeam and haven't looked back since.

[AlanP]

We used Veeam in anger just last week after total failure of our SharePoint. Veeam worked as it should and we were up and running again in just over and hour. There are issues but they are addressed pretty quickly with releases and support and forums are very good.

[glemmestad]

Veeam is probably the easiest, most powerfull backup software for backing up VMs in VMWare.

Contrary to Data Recovery, I am glad that Veeam stores different jobs in separate files, as we need to do backups to tape for compliance reasons and off-site storage. On a weekly basis, we backup the .vbk files only (latest complete backup), while leaving the .vrb files (changes from last backup, one per daily job run). That gives us one complete backup of all VMs on tape, without having to copy the entire Veeam backup storage.

Good luck, and I am sure you won't go wrong with Veeam. We've been using Veeam Backup for 2 years, after having used a mix of all the other ones (and even re-evaluated these later), but Veeam always came out on top because we trust the backups performed. And performance is awesome, which is great