VEEAM BACKUP

Veeam Availability Suite v8 combines industry leading backup, restore and replication capabilities of
Veeam Backup & Replication with the advanced monitoring, reporting and capacity planning
functionality of Veeam ONE.Veeam Availability Suite v8 delivers everything you need to reliably
protect and manage your vSphere and Hyper-V environments.
Veeam Customers : Vodafone, American Standard Brands, Welchs, University of Florida, Tata
Global Beverages Limited, National Bank of Abu Dhabi, Hirslanden Private Hospital
Group, MacLean-Fogg Company
TOP INDUSTRIES
Government 14%
Financial Services Firm 14%
Healthcare Company 12%
Energy/Utilities Company 8%
Comms Service Provider 9%
Media Company 8%
Real Estate/Law Firm 8%
Ranking: 1st In Disaster Recovery Software
COMPANY SIZE:
Small Business 44%
Midsize Enterprise 38%
Large Enterprise 18%

Valuable Features (Customer reviews):

1) We Are Able To Restore VM Very Fast, With 0 Downtime. Could Have More APIs With
Storage From Different Vendors.
2) We Were Using Symantec Backup Exec 2010. We Moved Away From It In Favor Of Being
Able To Perform Total VM Backups.
3) Physical Servers Backup Could Be Improved But The Simplicity Of The Product Is Great.
4) Transparent And Easy To Use, Which Improves Usability And Manageability For The Daily
Operations A Backup/System Administrator Performs.
5) By Moving The Veeam Server To A Physical Server And Creating A Proxy Server On Each Of
The Hosts We Are Able To Leverage SAN Based Backup Which Is Very Fast.
6) Features with the most value are Instant VM Recovery, SQL Explorer and Exchange
Explorer.

7) It Has Provided Us With Much Needed High Availability For Our Retail Sites, Although It's
Not Exactly Ready For Very Large Scale And Complex Environments With More Than 1000
VMs
8) Application data recovery works great in our environment especially restoring MS Exchange
mailbox items. There are cases where emails or attachments which can back date to more
than 12 months old are needed by users.
9) The main feature we're currently using is the replication function that allows us to provide
high availability in all of our company's retail sites throughout Europe & Asia. Backup is also
a good tool, but we mainly use it in our HQ.
10) Ease of VM and File Restores. The ability to restore an entire VM and guest OS files is
invaluable.
11) As a backup solution, the de-duplication and direct-to-tape functions are very valuable. It
also has WAN acceleration, though I've yet to use that feature.

Improvements to My Organization:
1) Backup and recovery windows have been significantly improved. By using an adequate
number of backup proxies, more jobs can be executed simultaneously. Image replication for
DRP and Sure backup to verify data consistency have also met our audit criteria for data
protection objectives.
2) First of all, it has provided us with much needed HA for our retail sites. Until Veeam, the
servers from stores were backed up, and in case of disaster with the production hypervisor,
we would have faced a far too long restore time that would seriously impact the business.
Second, it allowed us to replace the older, slower, and much pricier backup solution in our
virtual environment.
3) We have been able to move away from file-based backups, and now have total VMs
protected.
4) In various ways, we are using an Active Directory OS-aware backup, and I can recover
deleted objects to AD.
5) When I need to duplicate a machine for test purposes, it is very easy to restore from a
backup.
6) With moving the Veeam server to a physical server and creating a Proxy server on each of
the hosts we are able to leverage SAN based backup which is very fast. Jobs are completed
overnight and never run in to the business hours

Room for Improvement:

We expect to see more integrations from the software company with storage vendors. Especially on
dedupe appliances and non unified storage arrays. This will help us to cut down the storage
investment cost and have more flexibility on hardware choices. Also, there are demands to protect
data on end user computers and devices. Hope to see more update in this area in near future.

It still doesn't feel like a fully mature solution because it's not exactly ready for very large scale
and complex environments with more than 1000 VMs.

Use of Solution:
I've been using it for five years.
Personally I've been using it for almost a year-and-a-half, but I'm part of a team that started
implementing it in our infrastructure three years ago. Currently, the product is providing availability to
almost 80% of our company's Windows & Linux virtual infrastructure and we're looking forward to the
day when it will be doing this 100%. I've been using it since v6. Currently, our environment is fully
updated to v8 with the latest patches, and we're looking forward to trying out v9 when it's
released and confirmed by the community as a stable version.

Deployment Issues:
1) We have had no issues with the deployment.
2) The only issues we encountered until v8 was the fact that we couldn't automate the patching
and upgrading of our environment. Starting with v8, Veeam optimized their silent install
procedure, and now we're working on automating the whole process of keeping the product
up to date with major releases and patches.
3) Besides this we've only experienced minor setbacks, such as proxy servers not being able to
upgrade or uninstall properly due to the older local installer/uninstaller kits being overwritten
in time by constant updates.
4) It was mostly a smooth transition, but I would caution against using Veeam to back up a SQL
2000 database though, if anyone still has SQL 2000 databases in production. SQL 2000
databases do not acquiesce when snapshots are taken, and the entire SQL database can
become corrupted. The SQL 2000 VM must be powered off before the VM backup. I learned
that the hard way.
5) There have been no issues or problems with the deployment of Veeam in our environment
even when we consolidated from 6 Veeam servers to 1 Veeam Server with 5 Proxy servers
(1 per host).

Stability Issues:
We have experienced slow backup performance, however it was been rectified in the latest release,
and they have added a feature for processing parallel jobs.

Scalability Issues:

1) With limited storage space available, we have to use reverse incremental backup to keep only
one set of full backup on the latest date. This helps us to manage the free space and make sure fast
recovery always available.
2)Anyone who's used Veeam in large or very large environments knows you can get a lot of errors
from it. In time, you learn how to mitigate most of them fast or even optimize the environment to not
get some of them at all.
Some design flaws, such as the fact that it automatically deletes replica's if it finds that the VM's disk
sizes have been changed, can be pretty frustrating sometimes. But overall, I think "It just works!"
3)The main issue we're still facing with scalability is the fact that the EM (Enterprise Manager) is not
designed to handle a very big number of Backup & Replication servers (some of which having
hundreds of jobs). As so, we've been recently forced to deploy an EM in each of our HQ locations so
that the Veeam infrastructure in the country is managed by it and not by a single unique EM server
like we had until now. Automatic upgrades and patches were also an issues, but, as stated above,
we seem to have found a solution thanks to the guys from Veeam

Technical Support:
1) The tech support is always there to help out but you need to take note of the time difference.
They don't seems to have dedicated resource to cover the APAC time zone from what I have
experienced.
2) Opening an incident to them is quite easy and fast, and their initial response times are pretty
decent.

Initial Setup:
Setup is straightforward, so just follow the wizard, but make sure you've got a plan for your storage
sizing and backup retention policy. The challenging part will always be the sizing and how you place
your backup proxy to make sure backup performance is top.

Implementation Team:
We performed an in-house setup. You need to make sure there is a proper planning especially if
snapshot backup is needed on storage array. This feature makes sure that no VM snapshot
committed to a virtual server can cause a ping drop, and this is crucial on sensitive servers. The
requirement to make it happen is likely to have the Veeam server running on a physical box with
direct connectivity to storage array.

Cost and Licensing Advice:

Worth the money especially if you have high consolidation ratio per physical host.

Other Solutions Considered:

I have tried a few other products, some of them are meant for multi-platform (virtual and physical), or
as a native backup solution. We ended up with Veeam as we are a fully virtualized environment and
the features and product capabilities have met our requirements.

Other Advice:
It suits all the needs for a fully virtualized environment; just make sure you have proper planning on
the storage sizing.