Is Veeam 6 suitable for a SBS environment?

[davidkillingsworth]

I am new to VMware and I support several small offices (between 10 and 50 employees). I am trying to figure out what is the best backup and disaster recovery configuration for these small offices using VMware.

I have one bare metal physical server.

On that server we want to use ESXi 5.0 Hypervisor (not ESX 4.x).
I understand that I need the vSphere 5.0 Essentials Kit license to be able to use backup software.
I would like to run 3 VMs on this same physical server.

I would like to use the 1st VM to run Microsoft SBS 2011 on one of the VMs (Active Directory, Exchange, File Sharing).
I would like to use the 2nd VM as an anti-virus console, monitoring console, utility server, etc.
I would like to use the 3rd of the 3VMs as a backup server.


A) If I would like to use Veeam on the backup server, is Veeam suited for small business environments?
B) Is it a good practice to run Veeam on one of the VMs or does it need to be on it's own bare metal server?
C) Does Veeam backup the entire VM image, or can it backup and restore granular data, such as Exchange messages?
C) Do I need to purchase some sort of Microsoft SBS, Windows 2008, AD, and Exchange agent like I do with other backup software such as Backup Exec.
D) What storage media requirements are there with Veeam. My software vendor told me that it requires a SAN.
E) If a SAN is required, are there any recommendations for keeping the cost down since this is a small business environment? Any recommended devices/appliances?
F) If I have a physical server, can some of the disk space be set aside for the backups, like a virtual SAN, or is a separate physical storage device required/recommended?
F) How do we get backups offsite?
G) Are tape drives supported, or is replication to another location the recommended method?
H) If replication is the recommended method, is a standard business broadband 6MG download/500K upload enough to replicate to another site via VPN or some other service provider such as Amazon S3?
I) If replication is the recommended method, is there are a list of service providers that host backups. I mentioned Amazon S3 in the previous question, but surely if this is a trend, there are other companies providing this specific need.

I’m looking for simplicity and low cost since this is a small office, and the use of the servers that we need to backup are quite light and simple.

Thanks in advance for any help or suggestions?

[Gostev]

Hi David - welcome to the community - in future, kindly please review the sticky FAQ topic and search the forums before creating new topics, as all of your questions have already been answered before.

A. Yes.
B. Does not matter (see FAQ).
C. It backs up the entire image, but can restore individual items (see FAQ).
C. No (see FAQ).
D. See FAQ.
E. SAN is not required.
F. Yes.
F. Search this forum for "offsite".
G. Search this forum for "tape" and "offsite".
H. Yes, this should be adequate for your environment size.
I. There are many smaller providers providing Veeam backup and replication targets, you will need to research in your region yourself.