Need backup solution to replace Veeam
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@dustinb3403 said in Need backup solution to replace Veeam:
@scottalanmiller regardless of the backup portion, completely forklifting an environment from one hypervisor to another is often just as impossible.
or, you know, quite easy, lol.
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@scottalanmiller said in Need backup solution to replace Veeam:
@dustinb3403 said in Need backup solution to replace Veeam:
@scottalanmiller regardless of the backup portion, completely forklifting an environment from one hypervisor to another is often just as impossible.
or, you know, quite easy, lol.
Sure, but the ask wasn't to replace the entire hypervisor stack, but for recommendations of different backup solutions.
I get that migrating a VM away from one hypervisor can be easy to do, but he clearly would need to get buy in from the powers that be before making any type of change, including to the backup solution it seems.
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@dustinb3403 said in Need backup solution to replace Veeam:
Now to ask are you only looking for paid solutions or are you open to all options?
All options as long as they offer support. Last thing I want is to end up where I am right now, but without support.
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@marcinozga said in Need backup solution to replace Veeam:
@dustinb3403 said in Need backup solution to replace Veeam:
Now to ask are you only looking for paid solutions or are you open to all options?
All options as long as they offer support. Last thing I want is to end up where I am right now, but without support.
So are you not using a paid version of Veeam?
Support wasn't what I asked, because "getting support" could mean, "sorry we haven't seen that issue before, but good luck" from a free backup solution.
Or it could be GitHub/email type only support or something more.
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@dustinb3403 said in Need backup solution to replace Veeam:
@marcinozga said in Need backup solution to replace Veeam:
@dustinb3403 said in Need backup solution to replace Veeam:
Now to ask are you only looking for paid solutions or are you open to all options?
All options as long as they offer support. Last thing I want is to end up where I am right now, but without support.
So are you not using a paid version of Veeam?
Support wasn't what I asked, because "getting support" could mean, "sorry we haven't seen that issue before, but good luck" from a free backup solution.
Or it could be GitHub/email type only support or something more.
I am using paid version. I'm talking about real support, where I can call a number and get an engineer on the other end that knows his stuff and speaks English without some weird accent.
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@marcinozga said in Need backup solution to replace Veeam:
where I can call a number and get an engineer on the other end that knows his stuff and speaks English without some weird accent.
I doubt you'd get that with any backup solution, call centers are expensive. Calling an engineer is even more expensive.
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To ask, have you had your case escalated with Veeam? If their T1 people can't help you, they are pretty good about getting you to someone who knows where to dig for details.
Without more info on your setup though, it sounds like an IOPS issue.
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@dustinb3403 said in Need backup solution to replace Veeam:
To ask, have you had your case escalated with Veeam? If their T1 people can't help you, they are pretty good about getting you to someone who knows where to dig for details.
Without more info on your setup though, it sounds like an IOPS issue.
Yes.
It's not an environment issue, I have more resources to throw at Veeam that it could handle. 32 cores, 64G Ram, NVMe drives, 10Gbit dedicated ethernet, yet it still chokes at restores. Just to be clear, data transfer once restore starts is fine, just getting to that point is close to impossible. -
@marcinozga said in Need backup solution to replace Veeam:
@dustinb3403 said in Need backup solution to replace Veeam:
@marcinozga said in Need backup solution to replace Veeam:
@dustinb3403 said in Need backup solution to replace Veeam:
Now to ask are you only looking for paid solutions or are you open to all options?
All options as long as they offer support. Last thing I want is to end up where I am right now, but without support.
So are you not using a paid version of Veeam?
Support wasn't what I asked, because "getting support" could mean, "sorry we haven't seen that issue before, but good luck" from a free backup solution.
Or it could be GitHub/email type only support or something more.
I am using paid version. I'm talking about real support, where I can call a number and get an engineer on the other end that knows his stuff and speaks English without some weird accent.
Given that no one makes these products in the US and even most US call centers have strong accents (the majority of US-based techs are not native speakers anyway) that's not very realistic. This isn't a field where that would happen.
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@marcinozga said in Need backup solution to replace Veeam:
@dustinb3403 said in Need backup solution to replace Veeam:
To ask, have you had your case escalated with Veeam? If their T1 people can't help you, they are pretty good about getting you to someone who knows where to dig for details.
Without more info on your setup though, it sounds like an IOPS issue.
Yes.
It's not an environment issue, I have more resources to throw at Veeam that it could handle. 32 cores, 64G Ram, NVMe drives, 10Gbit dedicated ethernet, yet it still chokes at restores. Just to be clear, data transfer once restore starts is fine, just getting to that point is close to impossible.Yeah, should be extremely fast. It should not be having a huge delay. It does need to do some data reconstruction if these aren't direct fulls, but it should still be pretty fast.
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I'm almost inclined to say it's Windows issue and Veeam resistance to releasing Linux version, or Linux based virtual appliance. I use Veeam agent for Linux and never had any issues there.
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@marcinozga said in Need backup solution to replace Veeam:
I'm almost inclined to say it's Windows issue and Veeam resistance to releasing Linux version, or Linux based virtual appliance. I use Veeam agent for Linux and never had any issues there.
Yes, that they depend on Windows to do all of the heavy lifting really sucks as it causes the cost to be that much higher and so many of the issues to be things that they cannot fix directly.
The Linux agent, or the Windows agent, both work totally differently than the "agentless" agent. I'm sure if you use the Windows agent that it will be fine, too.
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I rarely use "agentless" agents as I find them to be overly heavy. I know that VMware pushes them hard (because it makes people feel like they need to stay on Vmware) and supposedly they can have some nice efficiencies. But it also encourages heavy "backup bloat" IMHO and encourages a lazy process rather than an efficient one. Some shops are well suited to it, some are not.
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@scottalanmiller said in Need backup solution to replace Veeam:
"agentless" agents
You mean agentless backups, things that run at the hypervisor level rather than having a specific piece of software (an agent) installed on each guest?
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@dustinb3403 said in Need backup solution to replace Veeam:
@scottalanmiller said in Need backup solution to replace Veeam:
"agentless" agents
You mean agentless backups, things that run at the hypervisor level rather than having a specific piece of software (an agent) installed on each guest?
Sort of. I mean the ones that use a hypervisor-deployed agent instead of the backup-deployed agent. No working backups are actually agentless, that's a marketing scam. "Agentless" still require agents to make sure that applications have quiesced and that's why "agentless" aren't reliable unless their agents support every application running on top of them.
On Windows, for example, they use an agent to tell SQL Server to quiesce. It's not agentless or else the database would potentially be corrupt. That's why those tools are only usable when you are willing to be loose about restores working or you use very specificly supported applications or you build your own agent communications to work around them.
Hence why they scare me... 99% of people who deploy them don't know how they work and put their businesses at big risk because they assume that since they are called "agentless" as a marketing term that they can do magic and get backups that logically are impossible.
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A truly agentless backup is just an uncoordinated snapshot. You can do that, it'll work over 50% of the time. But it is very risky.
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@marcinozga We demo'd Unitrends about 2-3 years ago for our one VmWare ESXI server. Was OK speed wise for backups and restores. Licensing seems expensive compared to Veeam so we did not go that route.
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Veeam used to make their own agent. But now uses Microsoft's own agents that they make specifically for this. So there isn't a Veeam agent anymore, but VMware makes one and Microsoft makes one.
In a situation like this one, the generic agent that needs to be installed on the guest (not the host) is called VMware Tools. If you don't deploy that, then you get the totally reckless straight snapshot behaviour from an "agentless" backup mechanism.
Even using the tools isn't fully safe unless you manually verify every workload. For example, most of my workloads aren't supported by the VMware Tools agent, and therefore, not by Veeam. I don't actually know any business bigger than a few people where the "agentless agent" fully supports their workloads.
But everyone does it because.... it's not ITs risk when the business loses data. They will just point fingers at the vendor and claim that they didn't understand how backups worked and their management will almost always believe that it is "too complex" for IT pros to have understood and accept that they didn't do their due diligence.
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I moved from Veeam free to Nakivo free (we only have less than 1tb)
But seems good speed wise, not actually benchmarked it.But I like it at the moment.
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@scottalanmiller said in Need backup solution to replace Veeam:
I like ProxMox, the backup mechanism is built in and free.
Built in and free only for full backups to local storage (of course you can mount something to appear local).
ProxMox Backup Server is a separate product the you install separately, and has its own subscription apart from the ProxMox Virtual Environment subscription.
But that is what you need to get incremental backups.
I just set one up tonight actually. I setup PVE on Sunday night. Migrated VM's on Monday. Yesterday I setup replication to the second host. Today I just setup the Backup Server.
