Veeam-first infrastructure, what am I missing?

Hi ​@BackupBytesTim,

there are many IT systems outside of the STANDARDs VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Nutanix, ProxMox environments that Veeam cannot work for, but they are niche systems, maybe less than 20%.

In my small experience I have never needed to ‘build an environment around Veeam’ but dropped Veeam into the customer's environment. 

I work well with Veeam because it works, it does its job, backup & restore, and it does it well, simply.
 

Hi, 

i am working with other 4 most used backup softwares. 

What Veeam is extra here and you will appreciate is cloud connect. Me as behalf of service provider is very good feature, because you can create same conditions as are for public clouds.

You can install VBR and with license switch to Cloud Connect (new tab in VBR console), where you can assign repositories and make it immutable and even that you can share across multiple customers. So you can copy backups to your central repository over https protocol, where customers will see cloud as repository. And with service provider console you can provide multitenant environment, which can integrate veeam one, but other vendors like grafana …..

This is one of pros of Veeam...

I’m seeing what you’re both listing as features of Veeam, but without listing what you’re comparing to my first thought is just “Acronis has the same functionality” so I assume you’re not comparing to Acronis when suggesting these are ways in which you prefer Veeam. 

My experience between Veeam and Acronis is that Acronis is much less quirky, never needed to tweak settings to make something work, it “just works” with the most basic of settings in place. I like that Acronis has a centralized management interface with one web console for everything, no separate VSPC and VBR console and Agent interface. Acronis also has features that are important in situations backing up over the internet, like resuming interrupted backups, where Veeam will just delete whatever was transferred and start over with a new increment (or new full if that’s what it was doing).

Veeam does seem better in some environments, backing up certain hypervisors that Acronis might not support (though Acronis also supports some that Veeam does not), and Veeam does have that feature to back up Hyper-V over the network, in my experience that’s not always been a very practical implementation for most of my customers, but it is something Acronis won’t do (Acronis only backs up Hyper-V from the Hyper-V host, which I can understand some admins not being fond of). 

They both offer multi-tenancy support, numerous backup storage locations, verification options, reporting features, and disaster-recovery (failover to VM in remote location). So from my perspective, none of those features make Veeam better, they’re good to have, but not unique to Veeam. 

My overall view of Veeam in my years of using it is that it does have some functionality that other things may not have, but it really doesn’t seem to have that one outstanding feature that would make it definitively better. I want to like Veeam, mainly because of things like the responsiveness from the dev team, so I’m always on the lookout for ways in which the actual Veeam software is better than the competition.

Hi BackupBytesTim,

i think your direction is wrong. It should cover all your needs instead to look, which product all feature have. I was not working with Acronis, so i cannot compare ...

For example: Veeam does not have resume of corrupted backup, but it has wan accelerators, which i use if backup is running due geo-redundancy.

You need to to count as well on support, kb, support page (known solvd issues), community, ... 

I was working  11 years with one product and as software was fine, but if something was wrong, support was terrible, DR it took always few days, if something happened with master server, ...

I definitely agree with having different softwares/service for different situations. Acronis is generally my  “go to” solution for most customers, but also most of our customers are small businesses. So they have less reliable internet and are not so concerned with having a long backup history. 

One of the main things for us is that Acronis is more an “all in one” tool, with one agent that does all backups, XDR security, and management functions such as remote desktop and PowerShell scripts. So this has been helpful for us, especially because for the majority of our customers we are NOT an MSP, and only provide backup services.

There are definitely some situations where I would suggest Veeam, but there are too many parts that seem to not be optimized for small businesses. So a lot of it is for sure our customer-base and doesn’t apply to everyone. Acronis is also more expensive, so a large enterprise I can see would more readily want Veeam as an option due to cost savings, for a small business with just a few computers, $10 or $20 a month is not usually an expense they concern themselves with so using the more expensive Acronis option for the benefits it has to them is an easy choice. 

Now if we were a full MSP, I would definitely recommend Veeam more quickly, though probably still only for some situations. 

I’ll say Veeam’s R&D team definitely responds quickly on the R&D forums, unfortunately Veeam and Acronis support I have to rate about the same. They’ll both be quick to respond with links to the documentation or some canned message about antivirus exceptions and such, but if you need to actually troubleshoot something, it gets complicated and I’ve always had to get cases escalated to a different person with both companies. 

So there are definitely trade-offs and both Acronis and Veeam are better for certain situations, for most of our customers Acronis definitely seems the better choice, and is overall more convenient for us a service provider as well due to the less complex installation process, single application design, and integrated system management functionality. Veeam does have some features that would be useful if we had particular situations, such as the WAN accelerator functionality you mentioned, and backup of object storage services like S3. 

In my view, it's not so much about building your infrastructure around Veeam, but recognizing that it gives you the flexibility and power to adapt your backup strategy to nearly any challenge.