Newbie - Need guidance with VEEAM trial and test

[CBlackmer]

Greetings all,

Veeam Newbie here, trying to set up a pilot in our environment.

I’ve reviewed the FAQs but was wondering if there are links to whitepapers/forum posts about “how to successfully set up your trial”. My current plan is to set up the trial software, create a VM to backup/blow away/restore, then switch with backing up one of the production systems and restoring individual files, but any guidance for planning and testing would be appreciated. As a general note, we are a small company so our environment is not complicated (single site, single domain, etc.).

We have an Active Directory (2003 Domain level, 2003/2008 servers) VMWare ESXi 4.0 environment with:
File servers
SQL and other application servers
An Exchange 2007 server
A Sharepoint server <-- excited about the prospect of the new Sharepoint granular restore product
SAN back ends
NAS with CIFS available

Current backup is agent-based backup with BE 2010 to appliance with "virtual disks" (contents get dumped to tape weekly). We also have an email archiving server so restoring individual Exchange messages is generally covered. This has been working well for individual file restores but we’d like to be able to back up the app servers (Exchange and SQL-based) to be able to recreate them quickly in case of failure. We are also bumping against the limit of our virtual disks.

As a specific question – would setting up a VM server/workstation for the “backup control” software be ok for the trial? We only have a few physical machines. The current Backup Exec console has only 2 GB RAM (not suitable), our current utility server (EVA, HP utilities) is something I don’t want to touch, and the other suitable physical machines are the VSphere server and our primary domain controller (which is not heavily used in our small environment, but still a DC). If it really should be on a physical machine, I wanted to check in about installing it on the DC for testing purposes. If we wanted to go live, we would probably get a new box to run it.

Any assistance would be much appreciated. Many thanks in advance!

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Charlotte,

I’ve reviewed the FAQs but was wondering if there are links to whitepapers/forum posts about “how to successfully set up your trial”.

Actually there is such document. See product's page to locate the Evaluator's Guide, should be a good doc to take a look at.

We have an Active Directory (2003 Domain level, 2003/2008 servers) VMWare ESXi 4.0 environment with:
File servers
SQL and other application servers
An Exchange 2007 server
A Sharepoint server <-- excited about the prospect of the new Sharepoint granular restore product
SAN back ends
NAS with CIFS available

When configuring backup/replication jobs for your VMs, make sure you enable "application-aware image processing" option in the job settings.

would setting up a VM server/workstation for the “backup control” software be ok for the trial? We only have a few physical machines.... If it really should be on a physical machine, I wanted to check in about installing it on the DC for testing purposes. If we wanted to go live, we would probably get a new box to run it.

Yes, it should be just fine, physical server is not required, Veeam B&R can be installed on either virtual or physical machine.

Thanks!

[CBlackmer]

Thank you, that's a terrific guide. Will the Sharepoint explorer be a part of the version 7?

[Vitaliy S.]

Yes, it will!

[CBlackmer]

Hooray! If we go VEEAM, that would be worth waiting for.