New to Veeam, Best Advice Migrating from StorageCraft

[WORKS2019]

Hi, I'm new to Veeam, like less than 24 hours. We've made the decision to move from StorageCraft after endless support issues which has just gotten worse as time goes by. I've been using StorageCraft over 8 years and after researching and many discussions with other technicians and MSP's we believe it's time for us to make the move.

Allot of preparation changing out our clients backup solution and moving to Veeam. Questions I have as of now? Sorry some are likely very obvious, please excuse me as there's allot of data to take in.
- Is there the option to seed data?
- Is there the option to password protect data?
- Does Veeam have a datacenter? We currently use StorageCraft's datacenters and have contemplated building our own however this is a possible future endeavor.
- We currently have a majority of clients running 2016 Microsoft Standard with 2 VM's, one a PDC and the other Exchange server. What is the best Veeam approach to backing this environment up? Currently we're backing up the entire host to a BDR and replicating this offsite. We would like to have this same approach with Veeam. Note, rather than backup the entire Host (VM's included) we would like to backup the VM's separate.

I'm sure more questions will come up and appreciate any assistance. Maybe the best question is "someone that's never used Veeam and is new to the products and is ready to replace their current backup solution", what advice do you recommend on how to get started migrating?

Thank you

[HannesK]

Hello,
and welcome to the forums

1) yes you can seed backup jobs, backup copy jobs and replication jobs. each one is described in helpcenter.veeam.com . the fastest way is often google as you get answers from helpcenter, knowledge base & forum.

2) yes you can. it's in the job settings for backup & backup copy jobs

3) no, Veeam is not in the hosting business. there are Veeam cloud service providers all over the world

4) I'm not sure what you mean with clients running "2016 Microsoft standard". As you talk about that you "backup the host", I guess you are running Hyper-V? Well, that does not allow granular restore of mailboxes or active directory items. So backing up only the VMs is the way to go. Additionally, some people use the Veeam Agent for Windows to backup the Hyper-V host for bare metal recovery.


I suggest starting with the evaluation guide. It is not updated to the latest version but I guess that this is not relevant for the beginning.

Keep in mind that the product is built to engage customers to meet the 3-2-1 rule.

Best regards,
Hannes

[WORKS2019]

Hannes, thank you for the information. I'm excited about making this move now as I continue to learn more about Veeam. What are your thoughts on Amazon S3 to backup clients data? We have an account and are testing Veeam against it now. Seeding is $200 a drive which is and isn't expensive. SC doesn't charge anything so likely why I'm making anything about it. It's a small price thought to get clients seeded.

Is there a datacenter you recommend?

Thank you again for the info.

[HannesK]

Hello,
I still don't know what you mean with "clients data". Are you talking about using "Veeam agent for windows" or about VM backup? In both cases please note, that Veeam uses "normal" disk space for primary backup. S3 is only for aging out old data.

No recommendation for a Veeam Cloud Service Partner or datacenter as I don't know them good enough to give recommendations.

Best regards,
Hannes

[WORKS2019]

"I still don't know what you mean with "clients data". Are you talking about using "Veeam agent for windows" or about VM backup?"

@Hannes, when referencing 'clients data' I mean data as in documents as well as the Exchange server (that's a VM) and the PDC (which is a second VM).

"S3 is only for aging out old data."

How do you figure it's only for this. What do you do in the event a building burns down and you have to boot from the cloud to get production online.

[veremin]

Hannes's described the way our object storage integration currently works. S3 is a place to which old backups get moved after they age out of the specified time period.

Check this section of our User Guide for more information regarding that.

Thanks!

[JHuston]

I feel like the OP doesn't fully understand How Veeam works...

OP, you install the Veeam console on a local management server. From there you have servers that host different roles ( many times multiple roles) to backup your VM's. Typically a proxy and a repository are on the same server. The repository is often local disk space on the server where Veeam stores the backup files. The proxy service handles the communication of moving data from your vmware or hyper v hosts to the Veeam repositories.

From here you would have backup copy jobs to a secondary tier storage or a Veeam cloud connect partner. We use SingleHop for this at some of our off site locations and it works great. It's presented just as another repository in Veeam to run backups or backup copy jobs to. We use it for backup copy jobs. The S3 feature you are talking about is more of a archival of backups from something Veeam calls a "Scale Out Backup Repository". In this scenario you set values on the data in the scale out repository to be moved off site. Lets say 7 days. 7 days of backups would remain on site, anything after that would be sent off site to S3/Azure etc.

Hope this helps. I'd recommend you get reading about all the features and how they work together. Stick to a local copy on fast disk with little retention, a second copy on slower media and longer retention (maybe with Veeam cloud connect?) and a offsite/offline copy on tape or another media.

[WORKS2019]

Hannes, we ended up going with a Veeam Cloud Service provider. I understand what you mean by S3 and aging out old data now. Difference of terminology in my own head, thanks for the info. I have four clients migrated to Veeam over the weekend and absolutely love the software. 100 times faster and more robust then SC.

Thank you everyone for all the feedback.