Veeam Backup vStorage/VCB and migration from BackupExec

[jamesr9]

I'm trialing Veeam at the moment and am so far very impressed.

However I have a couple of questions I'm hoping someone can answer
1. The documentation states that VCB should be used as the method for backing up vRDMs. Why is this? Our test vRDMs via vStorage appear to have worked correctly.
2. As we are hopefully migrating from BackupExec should we remove the BE VSS provider? Should the VMware tools VSS provider (and filesync driver) be installed?
3. Does the Veeam VSS install an agent on the VM?
4. A VM with multiple datastores only appears restore to a single datastore. I believe this is being fixed, is this to be included in v5.0?

Thanks in advance.

James

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello James,

1. That's seems to be a bug in documentation, you should definitely consider using vStorage API as it is a VCB successor technology.

2. You may uninstall it unless you face some issues with your Veeam backup jobs. But we do have customers who are using both products at the same time. If you're going to backup Windows VMs, we do recommend using Veeam VSS rather than VMware Tools VSS. You may do some search on the forums to view existing discussions (pros and cons) on using Veeam VSS vs. VMware Tools VSS.

3. No, we do not require installing agents on a VM.

4. Please have a look at this thread for the answer: Restore of Virtual Machines with Multiple Virtual Disks

Thank you!

[Gostev]

2. Yes I recall someone reporting on this forum before that Symantec VSS agent resulted in Veeam VSS freeze errors for VM. Uninstalling Symantec agent helped.

[larry]

I just switched from VCB and Backupexec to Veeam. Veeam is 1000 times better, faster and more relieable. I Installed a normal copy of backupexec on the veeam server to backup to tape. We planned to test for a couple of months but after 2 weeks in test we put it live. Daily backups using API are taking under 15 minutes, when using VCB they were taking 6 hours for some VMs. The weekly full backups take about the same time as the old System but now the tape can run in the day not effecting the users. Well my 2 cents.