[GIVEAWAY] All-inclusive VeeamON 2017 experience

[SKratzTS]

Veeam: Friends don't let friends use anything else.

As a senior systems engineer that also routinely looks at customer environments (we're a small MSP shop), I have routinely used Veeam to get our foot in the door. I'm passionate about Veeam, how easy it is, how well it works., and it's bailed my customers' rears out of tight situations more times than I can count. All I have to do to launch a p2v/VMWare project with Veeam backup and replication is to just talk about what it does and the amount of time it takes, and it really does sell itself. If they still need a little nudge, I have a demo Exchange server set up at work that I remote into, dismount the databases, delete the things, then show instant recovery off. 10-15 minutes later, they see my Outlook start connecting - I love seeing the look of amazement when they realize the server is "up" while it's still restoring data from the backup.

[ronken]

Our team loves Veeam B&R, but we've used another vendors software for backup to tape for many years. Our few remaining physical servers still use that software. I've been training in someone to do the restores that are occasionally needed. When I gave him another request recently, I told him it was on a VM, so just use Veeam. His reply: "Oh good. That's SO much easier to use." Roger that!

Roger

[daniel.farrelly]

"You use Acronis, the story ends. You wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You use Veeam, you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how protected your data is.”

[crazylefty]

All I can say about Veeam, is that its ab out time that a software vendor produced a reliable backup product that just works. Plain and simple. It just works.
And not only backups, but I can also test my backups proceduraly in a lab environment. Talk about a huge sleep-saver! No more going to bed worrying if your backups are going to work, and if they do can you restore??
Having Veeam in place lets me get back to doing anything else but managing and maintaining my backups.

[tiffaj03]

The Veeam Self Service Portal for vCloud Director is amazing

The extra feature in update 1 which is not heavily publicised side by side restore is a game changer for us

[kenmil66]

Veeam.....It does a backup good!

Borrowed from a retro commerical for milk

[seb1410]

Hi to everyone,
Here is my experience / story that straight made sense for me to be shared.
We all know every user has his little personal habits, ways of storing and sorting stuff especially when it’s down to email. The environment where this happened had no limit in mailbox size and someone quite high in the management had a very weird way of archiving his emails. He was storing everything in the deleted items folder but of course never ever emptying it. Mentioned him several times that this was a very special / dangerous way but the older you get the less you change your old habits.
Anyway, one morning, a special morning where all the staff is heading to a get together 2 day trip that occurs each year, I arrived in the office at 8:30. Buses were leaving at nine. On time, all fine…
Most of staff was having a good time in the lobby drinking coffee and making plans on the trip when suddenly that person came to me, with an expression on his face that made me think for a sec that I would not be able to get on the bus on time. He had accidentally emptied his deleted items and of course he needed urgently to find & send something before getting on the bus.
The restore was launched in no time from last night backup. Was a bit stressed as this was also my first Exchange restore with Veeam and turned out to be simple as 1- 2-3 . Even my 4 year old son could have done it, so intuitive…. Informed him that things would be back in within an hour and reminded him it could be good to change this archiving method.
We were all in the bus, on time and he quickly access his emails from his phone. That scary face went away, we had a great get together trip and admitted being impressed by our backup solution.
That day Veeam saved our life once again. Easy as 1-2-3 and just for the fun of the story, that guy job title was “Head of IT”

[Marco.Teijido]

I am from a small country in South America called Uruguay, and, although small, it is quite advanced in IT technology services.
The company I work for has almost 80 years in the market.
As a leader in the market in terms of IT technology, both hardware and software, to name a few brands we represent, are Microsoft, Vmware, Dell, NCR and Veeam of course.
As a specialist in backup systems, I have been suffering with many solutions from different manufacturers.
Everyday mistakes, escalating cases, random failures, were, as we say here "the daily bread", until we met Veeam.

I still remember what I thought when I implemented my first veeam project:

It works! It really works!! I do not have to make registry changes, nor adjust drivers, nor anything complicated solutions that I was used to until Veeam.

So the company and me, decided to priorize Veeam over other solutions, and we strive to aquire knowledge and experience with Veeam, implemented and recommended the product to all our customers, with excellent results.

Today Veeam is a great ally for us, it is our first card of introduction when we face a backup project with all our customers.

I am happy to recognize that Veeam is the only backup tool we work with, which have "zero regretted or frustrated" customers, as is usual with other backup solutions

Unfortunately, some priorities did not allow me to be with you in the Veeam-On event, which would be a great experience for me, since I personally am committed to the product, I have trained and become a Veeam referral specialist for our company, I have achieved the VMCE certification and I aim to achieve the VMCE-A soon.

Hope you'll consider me to be with you in VeeamOn this year, will be a wonderful expirience to be with you (pts... I also have passport and visa ready to go!!! hahaha)

[GarrettL]

I wanted to help share our story with Veeam and how much this product has meant to us.

We started off as a one-many shop over a decade ago in in the past 5 years have started to grow from that one man shop to a full sized office. We were growing and with that our standards jumped leaps and bounds, our professionalism matured, and all of this meant that our expectations for the solutions that we offer our clients were increasingly more demanding. We had been with a backup vendor for a majority of our company's history and about four and half years ago I began the search to take our company to the highest level of providing disaster relief in all forms, local and cloud. We had begun moving our clients to Hyper-V when our search started and our expectation of server recovery was anywhere from 3 hours for a small business such as a dentist office to sometimes an entire day if it's a large company with terabytes of data to recover. I began searched and vetting dozens and dozens of solutions spending countless hours, thousands of dollars in labor, and a lot of gray hairs. I can safely say I've tried nearly every backup vendor there is from the old days of BackupExec to Datto and everything in between. Nothing met my standards of what I envisioned.

I remember the first time I installed Veeam and ran a backup without any documentation, no pre-sales demo, nothing. I sat in the office of the owner and attempted to instantly boot a server as a demo of Veeam to him. I had never tried this nor had I even gone through any restore for that matter. On my first try and within only a few minutes, we sat there staring at our server in amazement. That is a statement by Veeam in that "It Just Works."

From then we signed on as a partner for local server backups and joined with a Veeam cloud provider. We've had our ups and downs with bugs and releases and later decided to drop our cloud provider in light of becoming our own provider. Now we've taken a step further with 9.5 in that our Cloud Connect server is using ReFS and Server 2016 allowing us to use the new spaceless backups and giving our customers 6 month retention in the cloud while keeping our Azure storage space to a minimum. This is truly remarkable and there is a lot of pride to this despite the constant battles I've fought in keeping this solution due to the thousands invested in engineering our solution. Coming from what we were and the archaic process of restoring a server to being able to say to a customer or prospect that our RPO is 6 months and RTO is under 10 minutes is a testimate to our partnership with Veeam. We've had a number of incidents occur over the years and each one with Veeam has saved our company from financial and legal disaster. Despite the challenges we've had, support has been phenomenal and reassures me that we'll get through any development challenges we face and their dedication to fixing our issues is paramount. It makes me pretty darn proud to endorse Veeam and given the hundreds of hours I've spent making it work for a small business like us, it shows that persistence and perseverance pays off!

Thanks everyone!

[Kas_Tigar]

I am Russian, born in Ukrainian, working and leaving in Germany using Veeam
it's kind of Ouroboros

[superdekster]

First time I heard about Veeam from some virtualization forum in 2011. I tested several backup solutions for our VMware vSphere platform and noticed that Veeam B&R had great functions and amazing simplicity compared to other products. In that time my older brother worked as virtualization admin in big US Company.

I asked him, "What do you use to backup your virtual severs? Do you know Veeam?"
He answered, "Veeam? No, I don't know. We use [some famous expensive software]. It does it’s job well, try it!"

I spent several weeks in testing and chose Veeam. In 2 months later we bought our first licenses. In the end of 2016 my brother called me. He asked, "What did you tell about Veeam? Where I can download it to test?" It made my day ))

Now we have 50+ Availability Suite licenses, experience of dozens restores and 0 MB lost data in virtual infrastructure. Choose Veeam, choose future!

PS my brother is planning to visit VeeamOn in May, hope to see him soon )

[jhottes]

I wear my VEEAM shirt, given to me by our account exec, to every Commvault and Vertias meeting we have.

[cookie-monster]

At my work I'm known as the "Veeam guy" because I won't shut up about how great the product is

[cloudy]

Now this is a story all about how my life got flipped-turned upside down. I'd like to take a minute, just sit right there, I'll tell you how Veeam became our invaluable availability platform.

A few years ago I was a week into leave after my first child was born. My colleagues in the office were in the process of a scheduled migration of our AD domain controllers, migrating all DCs from server 2008R2 to server 2012R2 and later upgrade the functional level to 2012R2. Pre migration tasks on each DC were AD backup, Veeam backup and VMware snapshot. Somewhere during the migration process replication across the domain became dysfunctional when a DC became only partially removed from the domain and some DCs were recognizing incorrect DCs with FISMO role(s) they didn't hold. Long story short AD was completely FUBAR, perhaps aided by user error. Our AD backups taken just prior to the migration didn't work when they tried to restore. I received a phone call outlining the above points and we figured we’d try using the VMware snapshots. Reverting from snapshots wouldn't fix the issues because of the tombstone lifetime age, each DC was in a state where the other DCs tombstone lifetimes had expired and could not be synchronized to. This is something we had not taken into account or event thought of beforehand would be an issue. AD was new to us and while not yet deployed to the desktop it was used widely across the organization and as a backend authentication source, the impact would be felt should AD not be back online the following business day. AD repair/recovery couldn't fix the issues. We quickly came to the determination that a complete Veeam restore of AD domain controllers was necessary.

I remoted into my workstation and began thinking out the restore process. While coming up with a restore plan I came to the realization that all of the backup infrastructure was AD authenticated, which obviously presented a rather large problem, no access to backup data. This prompted a complete reconfiguration of the backup infrastructure to use "workgroup" configurations on repos and other backup assets (something to keep in mind in case ship happens, no fault of Veeam). We had actually moved away from this model several months before in favor of centralized management using AD credentials, never thinking AD would be the single point of failure. Once reconfigured I was able to restore the domain controllers one by one. The secret to this success was Veeam’s ability to run through the Active Directory repair/recovery tools automatically thanks to its application-aware processing feature. One by one they came online and all was well, like nothing ever happened, successfully avoiding the weeks long process of rebuilding our AD infrastructure manually. I was then able to go back to enjoying life with my new little one . Thanks, Veeam!

I can't imagine using our old backup product in this situation with any modicum of success, file restores would frequently be unreliable, much less an entire server or VMs. I have to say that the Veeam Availability platform is the most reliable and consistently performing backup, replication and monitor system I've ever used. My inbox is always green instead of red and I can find and fix issues before they become problems.

TLDR; AD domain became FUBAR and Veeam saved the day with a full domain restore. Go Veeam or go home.

[kaito]

Veeam started slow Going Pro.

I have started using Veeam when I was Integrator in small company working with SMB and Gov, First months of using Veeam shows that it could be something more, when I get better, Veeam Also get bigger. I fallow the 3 simple rule:
"The 3-2-1 Rule of Successful Backup"
Have at least 3 copies of your data
Keep these backups on 2 different media
Store 1 backup offsite

It STILL makes sense. Until Veeam will go this road I will keep Using best Backup Software for All...
Keep on going Veeam Team.

[leo.white]

My boss was Leary about relying on just Veeam as a backup solution. He typically did flat file copies of all critical data. About 6 months after we got Veeam i lost a RAID Card in a server. Luckily it was on the weekend. It became clear that we would not have the Array back up by Monday. The Array held our main SQL server. Everyone was freaking out. With Veeam I was able to restore the VM to another host and essentially just loose about 15 min worth of running time. Quickly and easily. Really sold my boss on the power of Veeam.

[Baptiste]

Everytime i do a Presales on VEEAM :

I am not selling you Veeam because it's the best on the market, but because it really works and fixed many of our backup issues in our datacenter !

[RubinCompServ]

We were using (against my better judgement) a different backup service to provide our Backup-as-a-Service offering. There were multiple issues with the vendor's support, the site being down, data actually not getting backed up (despite the job claiming success); in short, it was a fuster-cluck. However, as soon as 9.5u1 released provided the direct connection for vCloud customers to have their own portal directly to Veeam to manager their backups, I had a presentation built and management convinced. Three weeks later, we migrated our first vCloud customer away from "Fuster-Cluck Backup Cloud" and over to Veeam (where I wanted them from the beginning). Since then, these customers have all built out their own backup jobs and are performing their own restores. The coup-de-grace was when I demonstrated to one of our "problem" customers how to restore a VM directly to his cloud environment in 5 clicks, and then he was sold!

[VMCommando]

Being a managed service provider means you encounter a lot of different challenges as you may have environments with sometimes widely varying setups. Veeam is the one product that we are able to consistently push our customers to use. The one scenario I keep coming back to which resonates with customers is ransomware -- what do you do when you have a several terabyte fileshare that is now completely unusable? Do you send everyone home for the day while it restores or do you use instant recovery to have it up and running within 15 minutes? The choice is simple.

[Delo123]

Just want to say thanks for letting us have a good night's sleep since Veeam. Even wife and kids noticed Daddy was much relaxter. Nothing more important as keeping the family happy
That's some 7 years ago now... So thank you Veeam, rock on!

[cristiano.cruz]

I came into the company as a trainee and always looked at the backup analyst controlling the Veeam, I always found it interesting and did not imagine that I would fall in love with the tool. I became an employee and started running Veeam that only backed up our production storage with a monthly copy for LTO5 tapes. Still, we needed another 10 hours to perform our daily incremental backup, which had several errors almost every day. Today, Veeam backs up our entire environment to an EMC Data Domain and backs up another EMC Data Domain that sits on a site dedicated to disaster recovery and replicates our entire production environment. There is hardly any failure to execute the backup and it finishes in a maximum of 3 hours. In short, as an analyst I am very satisfied and I have come to live this world of Veeam solutions more. I really came to love this software.

[jdubyak]

My former job working for an MSP / re-seller brought me much confidence to convince my new employer (government) to ditch their NetBackup solution and move forward with Veeam. Full system/image backups, tape drive integration, and off-site replication, we've really taken a huge step forward in the past 12-months. The few times we've had to restore ANYTHING have been worry-free, and we owe much gratitude to the fact that Veeam simply works, and it simply works well. THANK YOU!

[CarlMcDade]

Ive been working with Veeam since 2011, and still to this day one customers stands out (they wont mind me sharing this)

We had a new engagement with a customer that needed a better backup strategy for their production VMware infrastructure. Veeam was position after a quick product demonstration, and a couple of weeks later we were back to install the product. Two days after installation, the customer rang me extremely distressed. He had an exchange consultant onsite and he had somehow managed to delete the public folder database (this customer extensively used public folders for most business functions before migrating to sharepoint 2013). He had kicked said consultant offsite due to the what happened, but he needed to get his exchange public folder store back sharpish. Within a couple of minutes, we recovered the public folder DB back into the exchange system running from the backup target. Overnight we migrated the VMDK back to the production storage.

The moral of this was within two days Veeam's worth became obvious within 48hours. Fast forward 5 years, the customer now uses the full availability suite and offsite backup via CC to a CSP

Cheers

[CarlMcDade]

VAW backup direct to Veeam Cloud Connect! WOW!

https://carlmcdade.com/2017/03/29/veeam ... rkstation/

[Kas_Tigar]

We used IBM TSM before and switched to Veeam over.
It is like to get divorce with old, ugly and belligerent women and to marry a young, pretty and obedient girl.

[will.daw]

From Backing up data to disk
Veeam can easily do all this

Need long-term retention for an alternate escape
Backup Copy it all to tape

Upgrades have you banging your head
Veeam On-Demand Sandbox will knock 'em dead

Need to recover a email, a user, or a specific table
Veeam Explorer is no fable

Worried in the storm of your primary site
Replication will allow you to sleep at night

Managing physical hardware may be a problem
Cloud Connect is able to resolve 'em

Dependable, Reliable, and Always Available
These are qualities that make Veeam capable

Veeam "It Just Works!"

[BBush]

Hello, I'm the new guy.

We have only been using Veeam Backup & Recovery for a few months. When I was interviewing for this job they were excited about me taking over backups. It is my first time to be a Backup Administrator. Veeam makes this part of my job so very easy.

I can certainly testify to anyone who is considering a backup solution to use Veeam. For starters the Customer Service has been excellent. Every time I call Veeam Technical Support is thorough, helpful, and patient. That last quality is important with a newbie like me. The quality of technical support should be important to everyone.

Secondly, it works. It really works well. Veeam Backup & Recovery is easy to set up, maintain, and use in general. Yesterday we had our first recovery using Veeam. I was out of the office so a colleague jumped on and figured it out on his own. He was very impressed at the ease and speed at which he was able to recover a number of specific files from Veeam's backups.

Finally, I like how I'm notified that the backups completed successfully or not. It lets me know if I'm getting low on storage. It lets me know if there are issues. Mostly, it lets me know that the backups ran successfully.

Thanks, Veeam, for a great product and great service.

[oliverL]

So far i've never used Veeam as someone else had his hands on that while i needed to work with a backup solution from a company which also sells anti-virus solutions.

For some months now i have been working with veeam in different projects and have to say that it is a really good product and handles stuff way better than the other mentioned product I'm really looking forward to work further with Veeam.

Also something which comes in my mind is the support which does a fantastic job!

[christiankelly]

Veeam == Best product, created by some of the smartest people I know. (Note I didn't say backup product)

[Gostev]

Hi all,

Today is the deadline for me to provide the winner, and we have the clear one based on the number of likes! So, congratulations to Geoff Burke aka ober72 for winning the Grand prize - all-inclusive VeeamON experience!!

Thanks for so many great submissions - lots of great stories and some cool catchy phrases there in fact, I decided to try and get free conference passes for a few more best posts on this thread - if I manage to get these approved, you will hear from me here on Monday!