NISMO1968

We got multiple sporadic backup crashes after updating to U4 so we rolled back. Other guys are experiencing the same / similar issues. https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/2188933-veeam-backup-failures-after-update-4

Enable virtualization (Hyper-V role, KVM etc), virtualize your workload and use Veeam. Azure SRM is another option but it's more expensive one as well.

Lack of Veeam support. Our biggest issue yet. Second one is probably gonna be non-functional S2D.

You may take a look at OpenIndiana + Napp-It if you can afford to waste a machine for SAN/NAS unit. -nismo

Microsoft iSCSI target does not support HA so it's always single point of failure. You can put it into failover cluster but it requres external shared storage (SAS or FC). Resulting setup is VERY expensive and very slow. Here's an example: Microsoft iSCSI Target Cluster – Building Walkthrough « TechOnTip Weblog (check how long I/O path is, and you can actually REMOVE microsoft keeping switched fabric SAS only) Comparing free StarWind and MS, StarWind has caching and dedupe and MS has none: StarWind iSCSI vs. Microsoft iSCSI - Part 1 -nismo

We've tested beta in September 2011. Core and whole infrastructure is the same. -nismo

VEEM is definitely #1 in VM backup! -nismo

Take a look at Native SAN for Hyper-V from referenced StarWind. In case of using it you don't need any external SAN at all (pretty much the same concept you'd find in Xen, KVM and ESX with VSA add-on). You can do the same with DataCore's SANsym.... (long and clumsy name) but they are waaaay more expensive -nismo