Associate
Free Veeam
- Thread starter MasterPlan1
- Start date
Soldato
Care to explain more?
I'm looking at it for a project and it seems to get a lot of love (especially when compared to Backup Exec!)
I'm looking at it for a project and it seems to get a lot of love (especially when compared to Backup Exec!)
You couldn't pay me to use Veeam.
One of the most over-rated POS software I've ever had the misfortune to use.
Go on...
Permabanned
- Joined
- 5 Jan 2008
- Posts
- 4,123
Valid for 12 months as well.
Have installed, configured, and maintained Veeam at many sites across the UK.
Whilst it is ridiculously easy to set up, it does a damned good job of falling over on a regular basis. In a home environment that's not as much of a problem, but for an enterprise product it is unforgivable. Some of the issues:
- Up until a couple of releases ago it was absolute pot luck as to whether a DC replica would come up cleanly. It was further pot luck as to whether DSRM would bring it up. (Fixed in 6.5)
- I've seen countless live servers performance drop off the scales because of failed Veeam snapshots.
- Upgrading ESX can result in duplicate hosts that cannot be removed without editing the SQL db. (Fixed in 6.5)
- Deleting replicas in the wrong way resulted in orphaned replica entries that could only be resolved via hefty SQL db edits. (Fixed in 6.5)
- Countless different errors for failures on replica jobs... the majority of which Veeam support will blame everything else apart from Veeam for.
- Had countless VM's fail to properly remove snapshots resulting in said VMs needing reconverting to consolidate them. Veeam is too stupid to realise this.
The list goes on and on and on.
It does have its good points too, especially with 6.5 - the file restore functionality hammers BEs into the ground, and the speed of jobs is absolutely superb.
I also find that the product is generally mis-sold as a DR solution, which it quite clearly is not. If you want a cheap DR solution, use Site Recovery Manager - it's better, and much less of a risk to production environments.
The main use for it for me is going to be taking backups of my WIP lab VMs and shipping them to my laptop so I can work on them whilst away... and pretty much anyone can use it, I doubt they're checking to see if you have VCP\MCITP, and if you don't revoke the licence.
Permabanned
Any of you tried vranger apparently that is quite good for replication?
Soldato
Potential concern with vRanger is that Quest are part of Dell now. Dell also own AppAssure, so they might well want to drop one of them to save costs...
Associate
Having installed, configured, and maintained Veeam at many sites across the UK myself I'm keen to see what other solutions you've seen that would work better for VMware production environments. (I spoke to someone using Veeam for Hyper-V and they weren't impressed!)
We have used Backup Exec in the past and it did a far worse job of tidying up it's snapshots than Veeam, I have seen the occasional snapshot issue but that was down to snapshot corruption rather than Veeams lack of attempt to remove it.
The replication wasn't that great with 5.x but seems greatly improved with 6.x and I have a number of customers using it with no problems. I'll typically use storage replication for the larger customers so Veeam replication tends to be relegated to SMB customers with a once-per-day offsite schedule.
Have you had any hands on with VMwares own replication tied into SRM?
Permabanned
We just deployed acronis vmprotect at one of our sites and that was creating snapshots in 10-20 mins on to Teralytes backup solution. We had arcserve backup at the site but that was going much slower. The new CA product is the d2d and that is meant to be as fast as the vmprotect but did not test it as my colleague had a personal preference for the Acronis.
Associate
Does acronis vmprotect allow you to run scripts pre/post job? I still have many customers who want to write the backups to tape or removable disk and currently use scripts to kick off these jobs on a third party product such as Backup Exec.
Permabanned
I am not 100% sure because my colleague has been dealign with vmprotect, but i asked him and he said it probably has script feature but it can't do direct to tape like lto5. At that site we have sata disks as backup medium so we can do backup direct to that. teralyte backup.
Associate
- Joined
- 3 Oct 2007
- Posts
- 795
We use vizioncore>Quest>Dell vRanger, and it gets the job done.
My only major gripe is that it's still dangerously inconsistent if you choose to exclude individual disks from a VM's backup, and they still haven't fixed it despite a lengthy forum thread and a feature request, and being assured by a staffer that it was being addressed way back in V4.x.
The other thing that has started to ring alarm bells (other than the acquisition by Dell) is that in v6 they have started dabbling in physical server backups. They should really focus the product on what it was created for, I worry that spreading the feature set too thinly means the core functions are getting neglected.
When I get a free couple of days (sometime in 2014 at my current work load) I am going to evaluate veeam as a replacement.
My only major gripe is that it's still dangerously inconsistent if you choose to exclude individual disks from a VM's backup, and they still haven't fixed it despite a lengthy forum thread and a feature request, and being assured by a staffer that it was being addressed way back in V4.x.
The other thing that has started to ring alarm bells (other than the acquisition by Dell) is that in v6 they have started dabbling in physical server backups. They should really focus the product on what it was created for, I worry that spreading the feature set too thinly means the core functions are getting neglected.
When I get a free couple of days (sometime in 2014 at my current work load) I am going to evaluate veeam as a replacement.
I plan on moving my companies backups to running straight from NBU with some dedupe on the VMs, as I much prefer everything to be in one place as opposed to separate break off products which makes for a nightmare on the morning checks... and had previously run Veeam here, but ditched it as it was a PITA to look after (at the time) 7 different backup systems (4 NBU env, SureSync, Veeam x2) ... and I now have it down to 3, with the hope to make it 2 next year.
I've not touched vRanger since it was vizioncore about 3-4yrs ago and it was hideously bad, I then got my manager to buy the BE plugin which worked way better than vRanger.
I've not touched vRanger since it was vizioncore about 3-4yrs ago and it was hideously bad, I then got my manager to buy the BE plugin which worked way better than vRanger.