How hard is it to implement your own installation?

[robnicholsonmalt]

I realise that this is a pretty open question, but how difficult is it to implement your own cloud based Veeam Backup for Office 365? I've worked in the back office for many years and I'm totally familiar with Windows Server and Azure. How big is the learning curve? I can't imagine it's weeks?

Whilst backup is of course critical, one of my clients is seeing their 3rd party costs for Veeam triple this year and idly wondered "How hard can it be"...

So questions to those of you who have done it - how long did it take, was it easier/harder than you expected and was it worth it?

[robnicholsonmalt]

And if course, is Azure the right platform? From a cost and performance view point really.

[nielsengelen]

Hi Rob, to clarify, you want to offer VBO365 as a service? Or would you be doing the installation etc for the customer in their infrastructure (or Azure)?

[robnicholsonmalt]

Installation for a client in their infrastructure. No, not planning to offer a service - I'm too small for that. So provision an Azure server, the storage, license and install VBO and tell it to suck the data from their M365 tenant. Already familiar with the VEX clients for restoring.

[Mike Resseler]

@robnicholsonmalt
It's not that difficult. It depends on the size of your customer. If it is not too large, you deploy the marketplace image on Azure, add the license file, define a storage account and you can basically start. You should be up and running in about an hour. The steps are available on the helpcenter.

[robnicholsonmalt]

Thx for that - they're a medium size company with 100 users, ~5TB of data in SharePoint (mainly Office 365 groups/document library & associated conversations) and Exchange email. OneDrive is used for personal documents.

[Mike Resseler]

Yeah, a one server installation in Azure (look at our proposals for a good size of VM) would be good. I would suggest to save the data on object storage.

[robnicholsonmalt]

Thanks Mike - much appreciated. Will investigate further. I work with a couple of other much smaller Microsoft 365 clients (5-10 users) who currently don't have a backup aside from what Microsoft gives you (recycle bin, versioning). Might experiment with their tenant.

[robnicholsonmalt]

Another question - clearly Microsoft 365 data resides in a data centre somewhere, e.g. on a SharePoint virtual web server chatting with a SQL server. Are there any performance benefits from putting the backup server is the same data centre? Is that even possible with Microsoft 365 where it's always a little vague exactly there the underlying servers reside? In a good old private data centre, backup over the local network was always faster than across the WAN. I know data centres have much bigger pipes but the same principles apply. I do know that the initial sync of this client's data (probably 2TB at the time) was a problem for the 3rd party. And I'm aware that the fundamental APIs used to communicate to SharePoint aren't exactly speedy.

[Mike Resseler]

@robnicholsonmalt
Microsoft 365 remains technically in the same datacenter as Azure, but in reality, they are fully separated so there are not really benefits, besides that a VM on Azure can use great networking which most datacenters not even have.