Veeam Nightmare

[DWarch]

http://vbscs.wordpress.com/2013/08/31/veeam-nightmare/

I am IT consultant for a few companies and all of them use different software packages for the same purposes of virtualization and backup. All of my clients insist on VBR7, they say it’s the best – but problem is they also have legacy physical servers which it doesn’t cover. Now I am facing nightmare of learning 4 different backup software suits (vRanger, Symantec’s BE, Acronis, AppAssure), which is not very convenient to say the least – and plus VBR.

I already browsed through 2 of them and now I am even more confused: processes are different, terms are different and I have already encountered issues with data recovery (we lost some critical customer data). I have to study remaining and I cannot imagine how much more lost will I get.

Of course, this problem will hopefully resolve itself once I get smarter with all of these softwares, but how long will this take and how many mistakes will I have to go through? =((( Does anyone have similar problems and how you guys manage this?

[MaximK10]

Sorry for the confusion and the extra workload. Here is something that should help you with the Veeam portion of it - Veeam University. This has interactive End User training videos for anyone who wants to master or just get an understanding of Veeam solutions.

[BackupGal]

Veeam is an awesome product for 100% virtualized environment, but there's certainly a trade-off when you throw a physical server in the mix and have to manage multiple solutions.

Have you checked out the Unitrends Partner Program or MSP Program?

[Disclaimer: I'm not in sales, but I do work for Unitrends]

Solution Highlights:

• Deploy as a physical appliance (desktop/rack) or virtual appliance (VMware or Hyper-V) -- or a combination of the two
• Protect virtual AND physical environments
• Heterogeneous protection (100+ versions of operating systems and applications)
• Instant recovery via failover virtualization
• Archive data to tertiary storage for long-term retention (archive to SAN, NAS, or tape!)
• Virtual appliance available in per TB or per resource (ie, socket) depending on what's more affordable for the environment
• 30-Day Unlimited Free Trial Available:  http://www.unitrends.com/products/software/download
• Free Edition Available (4VMs, Free Forever):  http://www.unitrends.com/products/software/download

[ch1ta]

Additionally, whenever a question regarding Veeam Backup and Replication arises. I usually use the Veeam Community Forum, which is quite a reliable and efficient source of knowledge; might be useful for you:

http://forums.veeam.com/

Cheers.

[DWarch]

Thanx, but no, thanx. I already have enuf on my plate learning these 5 softwares...

[Josh26]

If you think Veeam is a nightmare you've obviously not gotten as far as stinking any time into the stinking heap that is Backup Exec.

[BackupGal]

DWarch wrote:

Thanx, but no, thanx. I already have enuf on my plate learning these 5 softwares...

I hear ya.

If you change your mind, keep Unitrends in mind.  In many cases it can replace multiple point soutions for service providers since it can protect both virtual and physical environments, and 100+ versions of OS's and applications all through one interface (ie, Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, AIX, Solaris, iSeries, SQL, Exchange, Oracle, VMware, Hyper-V, and many others).

Cheers!

[LAYER8201110141]

Hello

Just happened to read this thread and thought I could give my opinion.

First of all I'm pretty much skeptic regarding Veeam and "Veeam" like products calling it a  backup software. First of all these products work generally great and is usually very simple to administrate and may be good enough for many users. To me, this kinds of software is not a backup software, I tend to call them "disaster recovery software for virtual environments with the possibility to restore". The reason for this is pretty simple. With "Veeam" like software you cannot backup a single file, which for me is one of the most basic tasks for a backup software.

But either way I do agree with BackupGal that Unitrends Enterprise Backup is the way to go. Or if you really just need close to the Veeam functionality you might want to look at Unitrends Virtual Backup version 8 (but then you are back with multiple software).

What I do like with Unitrends is that no 3rd party operating system or software is needed. Unitrends takes responsibility for the whole backup appliance.

Regards

Niklas

[AndThen]

I have been using Veeam for several years and their support has gotten much better.  I was very surprise on how easy it was to restore an exchange user mailbox and guest OS files.  I'm on 7.0 but yes their main focus is with virtual machines only.

Best

[Cyberfed27]

We use Veeam for all of our virtual machines and its a breeze. People love Veeam for a few reasons, #1 you can read the entire install/admin manual in less than an hour and fully understand and use the entire product and #2 it actually works exactly as described.

We use BEXEC for our physical servers. BEXEC is garbage and continues to get worse with every release. We only use BEXEC for data backups of physical machines.

No disrespect but as a "consultant" you put yourself in a position to be a jack of all trades. Time to start learning all of them.

[LAYER8201110141]

I do agree that Veeam is very easy to use but so is all similar products. In fact the most complicated/time consuming thing with Veeam is to setup the windows server :smileydevil:.

But if you consider the narrow support for backups that Veeam has I would not expect anything else than easy management. Also you cannot compare Backup Exec with Veeam. If you do then you need to take into account that Veeam cannot replace Backup Exec but Backup Exec can replace Veeam.  Slightly more complicated and painful but in fact it can tick more boxes than Veeam can.

Regards

Niklas