Veeam Backup for Azure vs. VMware Site Recovery Manager

When migrating from on Prim to AWS then to AZure the process was a little challenging because of some of the way we configured up front but once we went from AWS to Azure it was no looking back. We didn't have the extra storage to move things around like most companies to but it worked out great and we were also able to store more cold backups on Azure due to the low cost of cold storage.

Incentivized

SRM is a must-have tool if your business requires you to failover your VMs to a disaster recovery site and provide valid testing and real-time numbers. Our VP office is always amazed at how easily we are able to satisfy our annual testing and show actual results with time stamps and the sequence of each VM that is up and running. SRM may not be needed in a very small business that does not have the capacity nor the need to have their infrastructure off site in a form of a disaster recovery site.

Incentivized

• Reduce storage costs and minimizing the impact on network consuption.
• Veaam Backup for Azure provides application-aware backups for Microsoft SQL Server, ensuring that our data is backed up and available for recovery correctly.
• Replication: Veeam Backup for Azure helps us to replicate our workloads to another Azure region or on-premises environment for disaster recovery purposes and compliance needs.

Incentivized

• Easy to build a recovery plan
• Easy to test recovery plans
• Works with storage based replication or non storage based replication

• Documentation around service account permissions was a little sparse when we implemented it
• It's sometimes hard to get the reason behind a (rare) job failure without going into logs
• The UI around snapshots and backups could do with some clarity around the restore points that will be available

Incentivized

• I am not very pleased with the overall licensing cost. It's pretty expensive. Especially if you have a small number of VMs, you are paying a lot.
• We had a little struggle getting our support tickets resolved by VMWare support.

Incentivized

Plainly, the product just works. I don't have to babysit it.

Incentivized

- easy to set up - easy to protect critical servers in case of disaster

Incentivized

Still clunky compared to the on-prem version but getting better with every release. It does what it needs to do, and does it well. They are stuck with some limitations in the way Azure works so I don't know how much better they can make it but they've just added 365 backup management all from the same pane so it seems they're not done yet.

Incentivized

VMWare SRM is very easy to use and configure. You don't have to be a virtualization expert to learn SRM configuration and execution.

Incentivized

Great support team!

Incentivized

Sometimes we have to struggle explaining the problem and getting it resolved on priority. The overall quality of support team is not as good as it used to be in past.

Incentivized

Backup Exec was a very clunky application and took forever to backup to and restore from. We would backup to SSD external hard drives from a flash array, but the process still took forever to finish. Sending our data to the Azure blob storage via Veeam is a faster and more secure process than saving to the external hard drives with Backup Exec.

Incentivized

Veeam Backup & Replication is slower than VMWare SRM and doesn't suits our RTO (Recovery Time Objective).

Incentivized

• We have had fast recovery of documents when needed; sub 10 minutes from start of restore to complete and in the users hands
• Easily a value add for backing up files outside of the given Microsoft retention period; piece of mind
• Easy tool to use with minimal training required to use it and set up backups
• When you do change your cloud licensing it does require manual intervention to update backup data requirements. if the business makes changes then your backup person may not know to make these changes

Incentivized

• The biggest positive is that we have a data recovery solution that we can test and verify in a live condition. Prior to this we were only hoping we could recover from a disaster.
• We've been only running for 4 months and haven't had to use SRM.

Incentivized