Evaluating Veeam - Some Questions

[OREOSpeedwagon]

Greetings!

So, I've just been informed by Symantec that our PureDisk implementation is running on unsupported hardware (Equallogic SANs) and they're unwilling to resolve our outstanding issues. Now I find my self scrambling to find an enterprise class backup solution to cover a dozen ESX-i servers, a hundred VMs, consuming about 10TB of storage. I've heard good things about Veeam, but I have some questions and was hoping that the Veeam folks and/or community here would answer for me. Your input is much appreciated!

So, here are a few questions:

1) How large is your implentation? e.g., how many servers, VMs, and storage are you protecting? How's it performing?

2) Are you using tape? This is a big must for me for long term (up to 7 years) data retention requirements.

3) Are you augmenting Veeam with another product for application level backups? I'm thinking of using Netbackup for AD, Exchange, Sharepoint, SQL, Oracle, etc... and Veeam for VM level backups.

4) Have you had any DB/Exchange corruption issues when restoring? I saw a thread on this and that has me worried.

5) When does 5.0 come out?

6) What's your biggest complaint about the product?

7) Any other comments?

I'd really appreciate any and all comments. Thanks for your help!

[Gostev]

Since you asked Veeam folks to respond as well, here I come

1) Our largest customer to date has 1000 sockets of product purchased, so you can guess the size of environment.

2) Based on feedback, I am guessing at least half of customers who have 10 or more sockets purchased do. If you search this forum for "tape", you will find many topics about it.

3) Based on feedback, some people do this. For Exchange, mostly to get most flexible application item restore options (that we won't have until v5). For Oracle and SQL, to do this because they are used to backup and restore SQL in a certain way.

4) This, although of course not very common (as you can see from this forum), can happen with any backup vendor - if you have been backing up the VM which already has the corruption. This is the reason why we are implementing SureBackup.

5) Late Q3

[schaffeb]

We have a relatively small cluster (6 hosts, ~25vms) and have had great success with Veeam.

It's intuitive, stable, and the support is fantastic. This forum has made me a die-hard Veeam supporter

I was recently at a VMware training (just passed the VCP test, yay!) and I was telling my classmates about how great Veeam was.

We do use a third party product by Quest for exchange to simplify the recovery process. If someone needs a message recovered, we restore a backup boot it up, load our tool and restore the message. The key for us is having the recovery tool on the machine at all times so that the backup image already has it available when the time comes.

We use tape to archive older VMs using another product as Veeam does not have native tape support.

The thing that most impresses me are the cutting edge features like the file level recovery appliance for Linux FLR and support for VSS for Exchange 2010. We don't find ourselves waiting for the features we need, they're implemented very quickly. We're very excited that FLR for linux without an appliance is coming in v5.

My only complaint with Veeam is that I cannot import replicas into a newly built Veeam server. If this were possible we'd only need to have replicas and would not need to have an additional set of backups as well. However, this is a minor issue at this point.

Edit: I think it I need to add some more emphasis to how great Anton Gostev's support on this forum is. I've never experienced this level of commitment from an official employee on a forum before. Virtually every single query gets attention form Anton or a developer. Simply fantastic!