Honest review of our transition to Veeam Data Platform
October 18, 2023

Honest review of our transition to Veeam Data Platform

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Veeam Backup & Replication

Overall Satisfaction with Veeam Data Platform

We currently use Veeam Data Platform for full VM backups. Our last product was a file level recovery product with no means of recovering a VM or server without installing an OS first. Veeam Data Platform has resolved that issue exceedingly well. We can recover full VMs within only a few minutes. We were also tasked with encrypting our backups, which was an easy task for Veeam Data Platform. We currently have another product for replicating VMs to an offsite datacenter, and plan to start testing the CDP and Replication parts of Veeam Data Platform to see if they can compete with our other product soon. Small test suggest that Veeam Data Platform does an excellent job with CDP and Replication, but maybe not quite as organized as our current product.

Pros

  • Uses custom storage and is not tied to any particular storage vendor.
  • Veeam Data Platform has the ability to dedupe and encrypt backups on custom storage, including ZFS.
  • Backup and recovery of entire VMs is very convenient.
  • Backing up VMs on multiple vCenters across multiple sites is seamless with Backup Enterprise Manager
  • The scalability on Veeam Data Platform is great. You can run everything on one server/VM in a small environment, or scale out more VMs to manage the workload the larger your environment is.
  • The Veeam Data Platform documentation on their website is very comprehensive. Sometimes overwhelming, but most things you need to know can be found there.

Cons

  • Veeam Data Platform could use a web interface for the Backup and Recovery product without having to install a separate application (Backup Enterprise Manager)
  • Being able to see some stats without the VeeamONE product, such as how much storage an individual VM is using.
  • The documentation is well done, but it is still difficult to discern which roles do which job. Such as the Veeam Proxies connect directly to the Hypervisor, and the Veeam Gateways mount the repositories if they are network shares.
  • Continuation from the last point, allowing individual ports through firewalls requires quite a lot of planning, the larger your environment is. If you have a small environment with only one Veeam Data Platform server, this is not an issue.
  • Getting an agent installed on semi supported versions of Linux for our bare metal servers can end up being a one by one process. Our Windows bare metal servers installed seamlessly. The different flavors of Linux has been a challenge.
  • Hopefully they are adding more granular ACLs for the VM Recovery. Currently, if someone needs to recovery an entire VM, they have to be given access to everything on the Virtual Backup and Replication server. If they need file level recovery, they can leverage the web applcation if you have installed Veeam Backup Enterprise Manager and they have local admin/root access to the machine they want to recover to.
  • Veeam Data Platform could use a proper High Availability for its own management servers. The current method to replace any of the Veeam Data Platform management servers is to create a new VM/server and restore the backup of the internal database (that you better keep up with). This is probably my biggest concern with the product. We are using the competing 3rd party product to replicate the Veeam Data Platform management servers to our HA and DR sites.

Do you think Veeam Data Platform delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Veeam Data Platform's feature set?

Yes

Did Veeam Data Platform live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Veeam Data Platform go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Veeam Data Platform again?

Yes

  • The ability to recover entire VMs from scratch, even if deleted as been great. It has allowed us the "courage" to move forward with VM OS upgrades and use Veeam Data Platform to recovery back if the upgrade goes sideways. Which has happened quite a few times.
  • VeeamONE has allowed us to gather reports and billing information on how much storage we are using per VM and can be broken down by week, month, year.
  • We also keep ransomware in mind, and Veeam Data Platform's constant improvements to battling ransomware is one of the major selling points to upper management.
  • The dedupe feature is something that we didn't have in our last product. Deduping alone is saving us a tremendous amount of storage. With our current retention period, our total storage usage is hovering around 150% of each VM. Multiple times less than our previous product. To note, this is using our custom storage that is not deduplicating on its own.
  • Veeam Data Platform works great for recovering full VMs within minutes. If it was a little faster, it could replace VM snapshots entirely. It is very easy to add/remove VMs to and from backups.
  • We use vmware tags that are assigned to a Veeam Data Platform job. Each schedule, Veeam Data Platform checks these tags and add/removes them from the job. VeeamONE has reports that have changes made in case a tag is accidently ran, as well as the job throwing a warning if a VM was backed up and is no longer backed up.
  • Veeam Data Platform was our best option for backing up to custom storage. We demoed many products, and we ranged from no support at all to they couldn't dedupe unless we used their storage appliance.
  • Using a Backup Copy job has been very useful for us. We run a Backup Copy job to copy our current backup changes to our DR site after each job is complete.
  • If you have a complicate High Availability and/or DR setup, managing the Veeam Backup and Replication server, along with VeeamONE and the Veeam Enterprise Manager server can be less than ideal in my opinion. I would prefer a more Active/Active or even Active/Passive approach that keep in sync with each other vs having to manually recreate the server in a

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