Running from Acronis

[Leslie Stroobant]

Hi,

I work IT in a small (medium?) company with about 130-ish employees.
Right now we have Acronis Error Generator as our backup software (at least I think that's what it's called, based on my experience with the program), which I'm looking to replace.

We're taking daily images of 11 windows clients and 4 virtual servers, but I'd like to do a bit more.
Veeam was recommended to me by a friend, so I'd like to know if I can use your products for what I'm trying to accomplish, and if so what the licensing would look like, and what the cost would be obviously.

Here's our situation.

Two physical servers , both HP Proliant G9, running VMWare ESXi 6.0
Two virtual machines on each host, so 4 machines with Windows Server 2012R2.
I'll take recommendations on how to back these up, you'll be able to better explain what an ideal situation would be.

40-ish workstations on windows 7 and 10.
Of these, I have 11 of them that I want to back up on a regular basis (daily or every few days) at least. I'd prefer to do more of them, but that will depend on budget.
The rest I'd like to have a less frequent backup for, perhaps once a month or once a quarter, if licensing doesn't "get in the way" (more on that below).

About 20 something pc's incorporated in production machines (CNC Laser, punching, milling etc.).
These computers are offline and I do not have admin privileges to them.
To back these up, I will need a bootable flash drive, boot from that and then take the backup to a portable drive.
Since these are offline production machines, nothing really changes on them over time. If I can take an annual image of their disks, that will suffice.

Assuming all the above is possible with one or another Veeam solution, I have a few questions about licenses and the practicalities.

First licenses: Is everything subscription based with recurring fees, or is the software single purchase with optional support contracts or the like?
Regardless, I obviously have no problem paying for the server backups and the 11 clients that I want daily backups for.

The rest of the workstations and especially the offline production machines that I only need very infrequent backups for however, I'd like to avoid having to pay full licenses for.
You're obviously not a charity company, you guys need to make money like everyone else, but I'm sure you can see that paying for a license for daily backups, and then paying the same price that I'd only like one backup a year for is quite something else.

Apart from the licenses, I'd like to know if I can manage everything from a central location - managing clients, schedules, set backup locations, backup retention time etc.
I'd rather not run all up and down the company if I can avoid it.

Best regards,
Leslie.

*Ps. I'm glad that I copied the entire text to clipboard before hitting submit. The forum had me log in again, and my entire post was gone.

[PTide]

Hi and welcome to the community!

First licenses: Is everything subscription based with recurring fees, or is the software single purchase with optional support contracts or the like?

There are several types of licenses:

1. Perpetual License (based on the number of CPU sockets in your virtualization host(s))

Products do not expire, support does. One year of basic support and maintenance is included with any new perpetual license purchased. Assuming that you have 2 sockets in each host you'll need to get license for 2 x 2 = 4 CPUs.

2. Subscription License (based on the number of CPU sockets in you virtualization hosts)

At the end of the license period, both the use of the product as well as support will be turned off. Customers can choose to purchase a new subscription license at the then-current rate or buy a new perpetual license.

There are also other types, for more details please visit this FAQ article.

To protect physical endpoints in a free mode you don't need a separate license for physical machines - the abovementioned license located on Veeam Backup and Replication (VBR) server will let physical machines to place backups onto Veeam repositories. However, if you want to use advanced features of Workstation/Server versions then you'll need to purchase a separate license for physical hosts, one per physical machine, because VBR does not allow mixing of free and paid physical backups within the same VBR instance.

Of these, I have 11 of them that I want to back up on a regular basis (daily or every few days) at least. I'd prefer to do more of them, but that will depend on budget.
The rest I'd like to have a less frequent backup for, perhaps once a month or once a quarter, if licensing doesn't "get in the way" (more on that below).

License does not put any restrictions on how often you perform backup, you can even backup the machines every 15 minutes.

Apart from the licenses, I'd like to know if I can manage everything from a central location - managing clients, schedules, set backup locations, backup retention time etc.

All these features will be introduced in the next version of VBR.

Thank you!

[Leslie Stroobant]

What about backup of the clients for which I have no admin privileges?
Does your software have a bootable media creator for such a purpose?

[Shestakov]

Two physical servers , both HP Proliant G9, running VMWare ESXi 6.0
Two virtual machines on each host, so 4 machines with Windows Server 2012R2.
I'll take recommendations on how to back these up, you'll be able to better explain what an ideal situation would be.

General recommendation is to follow 3-2-1-0 Rule. Basically you create backup job to make a backup and backup copy job or tape job to copy the backups. All requirements can be chosen in the jobs settings, easily, just give it a try.
Thanks!

[PTide]

Does your software have a bootable media creator for such a purpose?

Currently it's not supported, but we already have an extensive thread for this feature request, keep pushing

Thanks

[Leslie Stroobant]

Currently it's not supported, but we already have an extensive thread for this feature request, keep pushing

Thanks

Pity, that is something I need, and I can't wager on future developments.
I'll need to find a different solution then.

Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions, and good luck with the future of your product!