We are evaluating the Veeam Agent for Windows to replace our Acronis B&R and during our tests we have seen many things we would like to get in a future release just to get a bit closer to your competitors.
1. For our Workstations of course we would use the Workstation License of Veeam Agent for Windows and centrally manage them within our Veeam Backup and Replication 9.5 console. Within the Workstation license, it's not possible to see the status of an Agent during its backup. We have to wait until the job ends and then we get all information's, but during the backup, we have no clue if the status is at 10% or 95%, we can only see 0%. I know, within the Server license it's possible to see the status, but the server license is 3 times more expensive than the workstation license and we would like to see the status also on workstation backup jobs, not just on server jobs. With 150 Workstations and not being able to see the job status is not really practical and I don't think this "basic feature" should be linked to the license model just to get more money for basic features. We have to compare the product with your competitors and in the same price range is your Veeam Agent for Windows Workstation license, definitely not the Server license.
2. It's not possible to select the SYSTEM partition on the source item menu, it's only possible to enter the physical drive letter C:\ or D:\. On some systems the Windows partition is not on C:\ so it would be helpful to being able to select the "SYSTEM" partition as variable instead the physical drive letter.
3. With the Scheduler it's only possible to create a daily base job which we can extend in maximum to once a week with the weekday selection. It's not possible to create a backup job just once a month or once in a quarter. Again, it's possible with the Server license but not with the Workstation license. In our case we don't have to back up the workstations because they have data stored on their computers, it's only an emergency backup for the IT department and to be able to do a quick OS and Application restore if the disk of such a Workstation becomes damaged. So once a month or once a quarter would be sufficient to back up those computers and that's also the reason why it's not a Server which of course we would like to back up on a daily base.
4. It would be nice to have the Reverse Incremental functionality also for the Backup Agent for Windows as we appreciate this option for our virtual Servers.
5. For a backup job with plenty of computers we would like to have some backup delay start option for all the computers in the same job, so they won't start all at the same time and create a bottleneck on the LAN. Acronis has something like "Distribute backup start times within a time window of" where we can put a value for hours, so it will delay the start of a bunch of computers during this time period.
6. Maybe it's just a known bug, but we get for each Agent a seperate physical backup folder on the repository. It's not like on the server backup jobs, that each backup job will create a folder and all the sources from such a backup job are located in a sub folder. Now we get in the root of the repository for each Agent an own directory looking like "VeeamAgentUseraa34bf98-1254-11e6-9c43-bc00009e0000" and in this folder is again a sub folder with the host name of each computer. So we would have 150 folders in the root directory, for each Agent one.
After all this improvements will come into a next release, we really can take into consideration to replace our existing physical Workstation Backup solution with Veeam Agent for Windows and have everything together in one application, virtual Servers and physical computers, but for now it's difficult and we would have to choose the Server licensing version of Veeam Agent for Windows, we would have to pay three time the price per Workstation as we do now and just to get almost the same features we have with the competitors now. Veeam, you are on the right path, but please put some special efforts into this product until the next build
Thx
Wayne