My Experience with Veeam

[daddygrant]

I want to share my experience with Veeam. I manage 25 sites connected via VPN through public networks in 4 states. All services are centralized in NY and replicated to a DR site in Long Island. We decide to consolidate our infrastructure to VMWare about two years ago.

First we started with DAS then moved on to Dell Equallogic SANS. Having a reliable backup for our virtualized infrastructure is a priority. After testing a few competing solutions I settled on Veeam for my D2D and Symantec for D2T. Things worked out well, so well that eventually we moved from doing SAN replication to using Veeam replication. For us the backups were faster, more flexible and less complicated than using SRM.

I have been using Veeam for over a year now and its one of my favorite products. The software is easy to use. We run a small shop (5 Team Members) so I don’t have time to get certified to use someone’s product. When there is a problem, support is actually there. I think bad support is becoming a plague in the industry that must be crushed. The pricing is reasonable. If you’ve look at the pricing for vmware backup solutions form the old school companies you know what I’m talking about. Finally they deliver on their promises. I rather have fewer features that work than a fruit punch of features where some things are hit or miss.

I’ve had my share of issues with veeam but they fix the problemsquickly. An email request for assistance doesn’t fall into a black hole. It works for us and I wanted to share something positive. Usually in forums you hear horror stories.

[Frosty]

I'm with you ... I'm a sysadmin looking after a small environment (~100 users) and Veeam is probably my favourite product. The level of support via these forums and via the official channels is second to none in my experience.

[Gostev]

Thank you both for taking your time to write this. Kind of feedback that keeps all the Veeam folks up at night.

[stevenrodenburg1]

I'm with you ... I'm a sysadmin looking after a small environment (~100 users) and Veeam is probably my favourite product. The level of support via these forums and via the official channels is second to none in my experience.

Could not agree more!

It's fast, stable, easy to use and it just works. No aggrevation or sleepless nights. It just works!
I love it.

Ask any backup-jockey out there: when was the last time you installed a backup-product and jobs actually ran flawlessly since their creation?
Exactly !!

[camerond]

What greater praise can be put on a product than "it just works". I use Veeam Backup & Recovery to protect about a dozen VMs on three hosts servicing about 150 users. I backup to nightly, weekly and monthly FreeNAS physical storage servers via iSCSI on the local network. Just recently I built a HP MicroServer with FreeNAS and put it at our branch office that connects with a 4Mb/s private fibre link. After connecting the iSCSI share I used TrueCrypt to encrypt the volume and B&R now does WAN backups at 1MB/s thanks to compression. Now I'm working on backing up to a FreeNAS VM at our ISP's data centre.

From my observations I can make these recommendations:

1) Upgrade to B&R version 6. I started on v5 but WAN backups were slow. V6 fixed that, which allowed for more backup options. Plus I really like how the backup repositories are presented and organised.

2) Use iSCSI. I found it to be faster and more reliable than my SMB/CIFS and NFS shares.

3) Throw as much CPU and RAM at the B&R server as you can. Mine is a VM so this was easy, and backups were processed faster and I could use higher compression that made the storage go further.

My colleague accidently deleted some rows from a SQL pricing table we'd been working on for a week. It took ten minutes to restore the database files, attach to a temporary database and restore the lost data. It really was that quick and simple. Well done Veeam.

Cameron

[Natoli]

I used to agree with this post, sadly that is no longer the case.
For me "it just works (except for a couple vms that just won't replicate any more and it seems impossible to figure out why)"

[Gostev]

Hi Anthony, sorry to hear - let's hope that Santa will do its thing, and help our technical support to make those couple VMs working for you!
On a serious note, we'd like to wish everyone a very Merry Christmas, and I could not find a better topic to post this into. Thank you!

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