Sean Wallbridge
Well, Dear Reader, I have a confession to make. I’m in love! There, I’ve said it. It’s out in the open. And the object of my affections is Veeam.
I did promise sometime back that I would write on our experiences with Veeam and I have to say that they have been overwhelmingly positive. For those those of you out there that don’t have the big tool chests available when you give VMware or Microsoft large cheques, the much smaller cheque you give Veeam can begin to look truly like a positive “steal”. Let me explain …
Veeam provides a very powerful set of backup and replication tools for both VMware and Microsoft for a cost that is far, far below what you would expect. We (itgroove) have been using =it ourselves as well as do a number of our customers. We are a nine person company; many of our customers fit in the 5 – 60 person range so none of us, itgroove or customer, have monster budgets. That is just the reality of being in a small city marketplace and Victoria is both beautiful and small. So it truly is a “good thing” when we find a product that works as well as Veeam does for a cost that can fit into the smaller budgets we normally have to deal with.
Why is Veeam the current object of my affections? Well, as I have already stated, it is in the sweet spot, cost-wise. So long as you have licensed vSPhere (Essentials will do just fine) then you have the pre-req’s (Hyper-V requires you to have appropriate Windows licensing). Therefore, the overall cost is not ridiculous when compared to the cash layout for the physical server or servers and the cost of the virtualization licenses. Next, it is fast and I do mean fast. We have one customer that backs up their virtualised terminal server every hour and the backup is completed in mere minutes thanks to Veeam’s reverse incremental capability. Our own backups motor along quite nicely and it’s the same story at all of our customers that use Veeam. It’s easy to use, the new GUI is quite intuitive and laid out like many Microsoft management tools. It is dynamite at recovery, the 5 Minute recovery feature is a godsend when all hell is breaking lose, and the regular recovery tools make it easy to perform full VM recoveries. I regularly use Veeam recovery to “move” VM’s around inside customer environments when other “fast move” tools are not available or the VMware tools are just too slow.
So, yes, I love Veeam. It does what it says it’s going to do, it does it quickly and efficiently and it has truly made my life a bit easier. If you have vSphere or Hyper-V environments then you really, really need to check it out. Maybe you’ll fall in love, too!