Easy to use and future proof!

We use Veeam to backup our physical storage/website servers and planning to expand it also to VMs. Being able to create bootable media for the restore process is a big plus in case of hardware failure and using Veeam Backup & Replication will help also to restore physical servers into VMs. The Managementment application allows it with a very easy-to-use interface to manage backup jobs and monitor their progress and failures. In addition to the "on-demand" monitoring, we also integrated the Veeam job results into our check_mk based monitoring to have instant notifications in case a backup job didn't complete successfully. With the ongoing development of Veeam, they also rolled out a lot of interesting features with the latest V11 to backup databases (Oracle / MS SQL).

Have 3 physical servers in our main office and are planning to replace them with VMs. It will remove the need of supporting and maintaining multiple physical servers in favor of a clustered VM host. This will reduce also the number of care packs and space required to place the server in the rack and air condition to cool the servers.

The IT department saw a couple of YouTube guides that explained the ease of all workloads we are using within the company. To test the application we set up a server and some clients and simulated disaster scenarios as HDD failure and swapping from different hardware configurations. Restoring the backups to a VM was a very easy process and that certainly impacted the move towards the product.

During our tests when we decided if we use the product we restored to AWS and Azure and it was really easy to achieve. In the future, we plan to use it in our main workflow and move away from physical servers in favor of VMs in the cloud. In addition to the tests, we are taking the next steps to set up our workflows for cloud use.

We have tried it with a QNAP NAS device and it was very easy to set up with the guides provided (very good documentation on the web and also YouTube guides are available). It is not our main use case and we plan to move away from physical devices to reduce the number of servers in general.

Interoperability with different hypervisors would be the key thing that needs investigation. Proxmox and Citrix should be considered as potential working platforms for the operation environment and test cases to select products that can offer easy swaps without changing the background environment for backups and restore procedures as new software causes always issues in the setup and support within the teams.

Premium support wasn’t needed as the product works out of the box stable and without any major downtimes. Therefore additional premium support wasn’t needed and even the normal support wasn’t contacted much aside the initial setup process which is normal for establishing an environment and also build knowledge in the administering team.

During the initial setup process we had issues running the test installation process on a bit older operating system and the support provided us with additional patches so we could still test the software before we deployed it on the main infrastructure that had the latest version of the operating system.