back to article Veeam lobs backup bombs, with Cisco lighting the fuse

Veeam's making waves again, with two new initiatives sure to get backup software rivals – and tin-makers – a little riled. Software rivals have to figure out how to contend with the new free endpoint backup tool the company flagged last October and released today. The tool's pitched at anyone who wants to back up a Windows PC …

  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Its free...

    But we're just increase the cost of the virtual backup by 20%

  2. Lee D Silver badge

    If you have Veeam, it means you probably have a virtualised server environment with some kind of network storage to push it to.

    At that point, endpoint backup is worthless. You almost certainly are using the storage for data, replicated via DFS, you're backing up the VM's of the servers too to the same location, and you probably have client-deployment from network. As such, the clients are nothing more than fat terminals into your real system where the data and applications are stored. And everything else is in your network profile.

    Not quite sure who this is targeting, as the places that have VM's backed up to network-accessible Veeam repositories almost certainly don't care about data on the client because it's all on the network anyway. And re-imaging the setup probably takes 20 minutes, if you have a brain, and uses built-in server tools.

    1. Marc 25
      Alien

      I disagree with you Lee D

      There are good reasons a Veeam B&R customer may want this product knocking around.

      Our environment is 99% virtualised but not every system suits being virtualized in everyone's environment.

      For example, best practice suggests that you should keep one AD/DNS server (with the vSphere Client installed) as a physical box in case of Sh*t-fan moments. Additionally some business have systems that they're afraid the virtualise yet, and probably for good reason. You can only really virtualise MS SQL if you have the IOPS in you SAN to cope with that load. Budget isn't always there for that.

      However, whacking those backups (of the physical boxes) into the Veeam repo means you perform file level restores, recover to a VM (whilst you wait for new hardware) or even run up "demo" clones of system for testing virtualisation, software updates etc, etc.

      What this product does is provide Sysadmin's with a lot of extra options. Personally however, I'd prefer centralised management via the Veeam B&R console then installing it manually, I'm sure that will come in Veeam 9 though.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        +1 for Veeam Endpoint

        Even in a small organisation like my first Veeam-using client, who have one physical server for their data VMs (filestore, LOB database, Exchange), and a second physical server for system management VMs, endpoint backup is great for backing up their non-standard-configuration PCs and notebooks, which number, despite my best efforts, too high a proportion of the 75+ total.

      2. StopHandle

        You are exactly right, while the product is positioned for personal laptops running Windows, there are many ways you can use it for physical servers.

        One product video on the Veeam page shows how you can backup an Exchange or Active Directory server and recover emails/items with Veeam Explorers, that come with Backup free version.

        So it seems like combining Endpoint scheduling and Backup free you get a free solution for backing up physical boxes. I haven't tested it this way, though

      3. K

        "best practice suggests that you should keep one AD/DNS server (with the vSphere Client installed)"

        Or rather than waste tin on a single usage, you'll get extra mileage from having a standalone ESXi host with some local storage..

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Oh God ... I'm a shill

    I've used many a B&R product - Acronis, BEX, Net Backup, Legato, Bacula just to name a few on sites big and small and then I came across Veeam with the crazy name just as virty started to get useful.

    It has a habit of just working ... and working ... and working. It's pretty easy to set up provided your infra suits it and it generally does nowadays. Yes you can cock it up in amusing ways - I have just fixed a replication that would take forever for one VM (whoops, it was the only one I used for the proxy on site A). The point is the job still worked, it fell back to a rather naff speed because it was all being driven from site B over the WAN link but _it_still_worked_ .

    The amount of time I've personally wasted on Acronis alone in the past paid for the Veeam license in savings for several customers ...

    Cheers

    Jon

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Oh God ... I'm a shill

      Lucky you.

      Compared to the 10-15 years using BackupExec across multiple clients sites, in the four months I've been using Veeam, on a single physical data server, I have had far more problems. Multiple independent support cases, multiple hotfixes, considerable periods of non-operational backups.

      I'm now in a situation where of my two backup routines, one has been broken since before 24 March when I opened a case which is still open and has had no effective response; on the other, I opened a case a couple of weeks back, the conclusion of which was a hotfix - which broke something else, and I'm now told that can't be fixed until a new release "later this month". So, no working backups at all. No apology, no workarounds, no working with me even to cobble something together.

      7.9 millions VMs protected, they trumpet. "Protected" ?!

      And no, there is no suggestion that my setup is to blame. It's about as vanilla as you can get.

      Not happy. Not happy at all.

      YMMV? - Clearly, everyone else's mileage is varying !

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