Singing Veeam's Praises!

[Duke]

Hey all,

 

I've probably mentioned Veeam (a virtual machine backup tool for VMware and Hyper-V) before but just wanted to let everyone know how awesome it is - especially when you're used to the pains of Backup Exec!

 

The scenario I've just had to deal with:

 

• Someone deleted an assignment on our VLE which it turns out they need, normally not an issue as the VLE regularly backs up all its courses itself
  
• The VLE runs checks against each backup and marks them as OK or failed (all my backups are being marked as OK)
  
• I go to restore the course from a backup and find out it's horribly corrupt - the zip cannot be opened by any tool and even after trying to repair it it's still corrupt inside
  
• Panic
  
• The VLE host is a virtual machine and gets backed-up by Veeam
  
• Launch an 'Instant Recovery' of the virtual machine in Veeam from the last backup before the assignment was deleted and tell it not to connect to the VM network
  
• Boot up up the VM (instant recovery only takes a couple of minutes) and it loads fine except for services which require network access
  
• Edit the hosts file to make sure the internal and external addresses point to the virtual machine's IP address
  
• Network-dependent services (i.e. Apache) now boot
  
• Browse to the assignment on the VLE and grab the data I need
  

 

 

Overall, very happy with how smoothly Veaam works, definitely worth looking at if you're a VMware or Hyper-V environment!

 

Chris

Edited May 31, 2012 by Duke

[woodham]

Hi thinking of going this route for our hyper-v setup if you dont mind what sort of price are you paying for the veeam licences (ball park figure will be fine)

 

thanks

 

Andy

[Duke]

Hi thinking of going this route for our hyper-v setup if you dont mind what sort of price are you paying for the veeam licences (ball park figure will be fine)

 

I'm using it with VMware so I'm not sure if their Hyper-V prices are any different, but when I purchased the Enterprise version about a year ago I was paying between £360-£390 per CPU (of the host). In my environment of 3 ESXi hosts which have dual sockets, that'd be six licenses total (assuming I want to backup VMs from all three hosts).

 

It's not cheap, but in my experience it's far cheaper and better than Backup Exec.

 

Chris

[Ashm]

It's not cheap, but in my experience it's far cheaper and better than Backup Exec.

I'd agree to that!

 

I don't miss having to use the bloatware that is Backup Exec. 'Instant Recovery' is a pretty awesome feature.

 

We purchased the Veeam Essentials bundle to complement our VMware Essentials Plus licensing. I think it worked out to around £1,000 and covers 3 hosts with 6 CPU's altogether.

[beagle]

Have to agree with comments here. We rolled our Policy Central Server back 5 days as we ran out off hard drive space. All done during the school day with no effort. Imagine doing that with physical servers.

Hardest thing was deleting the "live" server so we could restore it all cleanly. So disaster Recovery tested as well ... win win

[synaesthesia]

Here here - cracking bit of software. Just about to put ours to the test with all the new virtualised guff here, although may need some more licenses and certainly need more storage!

[gshaw]

Saves a fortune in support costs vs Backup Exec as well!

[bossman]

@Duke:

 

Xenserver 6.0 has automatic VM backups via snapshots as part of the advanced licensing which we purchased as part of the HA, had a very similar case except it was the Sims MIS VM, did exactly what you have done and recovered certain files which one of the SLT team deleted and didn't tell anyone.

 

Absolutely magic

 

Still have BE 2012 for the student work servers which also works very well but I am looking at Assure backups for virtual and physical all in one pane backups.

[woodham]

we will have 5 dual cpu hosts so im guessing £1500 ish got a call in to our partner to see what they can do

[m25man]

Im going to chip in my 2p worth here. Not yet a Veeam convert having been hard core BE user for so long however...

 

I have been quite a fan of Symantec BESR (now system recovery) which if purchased in the "Virtual Edition" allowed you to install the agent on as many VM's per host server as you needed and works brilliantly with the ability to mount recovery points in a flash and drag and drop files back with vitually no effort and run scheduled conversions of backups to VHD's ready for instant recovery use.

 

However, greed seems to have got the better of Symantec and there are features of the new BE2012 V-RAY edition that look quite useful but to migrate from their own BESR product is not an option, no preferential cost or upgrade path as its considered a completely different product and they will not budge on this.

 

I tried the old we will switch to Veeam trick and they sent me a copy of an internal sales battlecard that more or less says that Symantec is much better than Veeam because they can backup VM Host Servers and CSV's across clusters from a single console and Veeam can't in fact they claim that the vast majority of Veeam clients still use Backup Exec to achieve archive storage.

 

Now, with Symantec BE at around £600 (Edu Pricing) per physical host and per occupied CPU socket even given that this includes of all the agents included for SQL and Exchange to do granular restores, I guess that is around £1200 per average Dual Hex core Virtual Host Server?

Assuming that most of our systems are 3 Node Clusters thats £3600 per Server Farm even at Edu Pricing!

 

If I were upgrading from Veeam to BE2012 I would be entitled to almost 40% discount on a competetive upgrade plan but coming from one of Symantecs own parrallel products you are not entitled to anything

 

Its enough to make me want to jump to Veeam out of sheer contempt for their arrogance, I can live without backing the Host servers up, thats why you have 3 nodes so you can cope with a failure every now and again as long as the VM's are safe and easily accessible and mounted/converted when really needed I dont see why I should care.

 

But, whilst Veeam does seem to tick all of the right boxes when it comes to DR and Resilience of a Virtual Server Farm, to create archived copies of Users data and such like still requires a secondary method of backup does it not?

 

With Veeam priced per source server CPU socket Im having trouble seeing how this solution is any better than the over priced and over complicated Symantec solution? Especially if secondary methods are needed to cover all bases when using Veeam.

 

Dont get me wrong I would dearly love to kick Symantec into touch but Im struggling to find the advantages of either products at the moment and the longer I put things off the closer Server 8 and Hyper-V 3.0 get with a whole load of new features that will probably make both solutions seem somewhat of a waste of time.

Managing Hyper-V Replica from PowerShell - Matthijs's blog - Site Home - TechNet Blogs

 

So, I have reached the point where I think I will try and hold on with what I have for now and see how thing change with Hyper-V3 as it seems to me all these guys want to do is milk the educational cash cow and Im sorry but our udders are dry.

[alttab]

what about DPM as an alternative to veeam and BE for schools ?

 

presumably it plays nice with hyper-v, pretty cheap also. thoughts ?

[synaesthesia]

Physical socket pricing is quite competitive when these days you barely need more than a dual socket processor. Doesn't matter how many cores or threads you're running