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Hi All

We dont have a massive set up at present (2 physical servers, 19 VM- two of the vm running sql server, and about 5tb of NAS data) but we have still outgrown our old unitrends appliance and backup/restore procedures are fragmented at the moment with some manual processes.

A few years ago i tried to get this updated (i looked mostly at unitrends), and when it came to the crunch was told the budget was not available by my director. But now i have been told i definitely have the funding.

We are also likely to expand in the near future. Total data is around 9tb. All the VM and physical servers are windows.

I want one single solution, traditionally i have had onsite backups with offsite replication (that may now be outdated thinking)

I have mailed unitrends asking for pricing for a higher capacity appliance but they have not responded and i am looking at alternatives. I am hoping for recommendations.

So far i have looked at Veamm (i think i could get away with the ‘essentials’ universal licences but i am not sure if backing up a vm and the sql databases on it separately classes as one workload) and backup exec

I am aware there are completely cloud based solutions, i am not sure how well they perform in reality for performance however as i have used a unitrends appliance for so long, so would appreciate hearing peoples experiences.

Cheers.

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Here are my two cents:

  • Purchase another 4-bay NAS. Not sure which one you currently use, but QNAP and Synology are popular

  • Install two 20TB drives in two of the bays with mirroring, leaving the remaining two empty for the future.

  • Install Syncrify Server on it, which works across the Internet. It also works with SQL databases.

  • You can use Vaeem to create local images and move them to this NAS using Syncrify.

  • Back up your data to this new NAS.

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Veeam Essentials will cover the VM and SQL. It includes agentlessly recover individual items from backups of applications such as Microsoft Exchange, SharePoint, SQL, Active Directory, Oracle and more. See How Veeam Compares to Other Small Business Solutions

The big selling point is not locking yourself into one storage platform. Roll your own or use a Veeam Connect Partner.

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Yep essentially that is what we have but with the undesirable manual aspects, backups go to a nas and the appliance and its then replicated to online storage.

Will take a look at syncrify cheers.

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Thanks Denis

In the workload licencing model, if for example i am protecting a vm, but making separate database backups on that VM will that count as a single workload?

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Before choosing any product or solution I would do some analysis first. I would look at how much data I have ; how often it changes ; what data do regularly restore ; what’s the life of my data ; what are my SLAs?

Once oyu know the answer to these then you can work on finding a solution that fits your budget.

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I’m sure you’ll get lots of different opinions but I’d say that only you know your requirements and there are as many solutions as there are business requirements.

With that being said, you won’t go wrong with Veeam, many people, including me, rely on it and with a virtualised estate it’s the obvious answer. We back up locally and then export to a second site so haven’t gone down the cloud route, the same as you. Some will call that old thinking but it works.

I have generally found that cloud trades simplicity for cost, you need to look at your data and it’s growth rates and calculate whether the cost of cloud storage compares to local storage over it’s life time. You’ll also need to look in to your rate of data change and how many restores you have needed to make in the past. I think it’s also worth mentioning data security, not really in the way you might initially think about it but with cloud you are at the mercy of the cloud provider, if they suddenly go out of business or your work flow suddenly changes can you quickly and easily get you data back. Restoring a single small file is a totally different case to doing full VM restores an 10s of servers.

This works both ways of course, because if you suddenly need to add a bunch of extra storage then cloud will be the easiest method.

Having said all that I think Veeam will give you a great deal of flexibility. Cost is always something that needs considering, just make sure you identify all the costs that aren’t so obvious and think through a number of DR scenarios and make sure any solution provider can explain exactly how they would tackle it and you should also think what you’d do in all those situations, procuring new Hardware to run those recovered VMs, and store all your backed up data.

I’m sure you’ve probably heard most of what I’ve said already but maybe there is something here you can use.

Good Luck

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With Veeam Essential VUL, it will backup the VM with application aware settings, so you get both. You really can’t just back up the app only AFAIK. In the beginning, I had a setup where by I configured my SQL instance to backup natively every two hours. Then, nightly, I backed up my VM without that application aware setting because I had SQL do the backups and then just captured them in native SQL file format as part of a normal backup.

Now, I just let Veeam handle it since I’ve gotten more use to the Explorers. Since you are backing up incrementally, whether forward or backward, doing both shouldn’t be an issue. In fact, doing so may improve your RTO. If you need to backup more than once a day, just schedule accordingly.

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I just made the jump to Veeam and so far so good.

I’m able to back up my VMs, file shares, then bounce the backups to removable disks and our self-hosted /private S3 buckets (TreuNAS) located in a colocation.

So far so good. the crazy part is how well the VMs compress, backups go really quickly after the initial seed. Ful disclosure I paid for the subscription, $3-4k per year includes support, and is a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of starting from scratch is my systems go down.

I looked at Unitrends and while it seems great, it is very much a closed service. you can’t leverage as many different storage types (yes they do S3 but not out of the box for “S3 compatible” services) and the whole time in the eval, they kept pushing their hardware. So I went with Veeam.

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You are always going to want local backup, so don’t do anything 100% cloud based unless your whole environment is in the cloud.

For DR failover, I would say cloud is the only way to go. If you have local failover with your current solution you can do the same with Veeam, but you have to get a server capable of running the workloads. There is a lot more flexibility with Veeam, but also means you need to know a little more, or work with a Veeam partner that has Veeam Certified Engineers, etc.

And yes, Veeam is a good choice - it just works.

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As others have said, Hybrid options are safest IMO. Veeam is solid and flexible, with good disaster recovery. I am a little iffy on the mirrored drives as cloud and hardware failure simultaneously is so extremely unlikely. It would be waste of a multi-terabyte drive (again IMHO). I would have at least two spare drives on hand (drive failure is not too unusual) pre-formatted to your system needs for speed. Also you might want a trained DR team (or person) that has direct access to whichever cloud backup you are using so they can familiarize themselves with the vendor techs as this can greatly speed up the process. I understand you are probably hearing a lot of stuff you already know so thank you for bearing with us.

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Or they could go with a Veeam Cloud Connect Service Provider 100% focused on backup/DR that has 5 Veeam Certified Engineers and 2 Veeam Architects on staff?

@Managecast_Technologies_Inc

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If your concern is budget or sales rep or vendor lock - especially few years from now I’ll recommend an open source solution.
With your requirements (hybrid, VMs, sql, 5TB) bareos.org / bareos.com could be your choice if you don’t mind an initial configuration ‘by hand’ on cli.
The webUI is getting better with every release.

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I wouldn’t do a cloud-only backup solution. You’ll have very slow restore times and there’s no option to spin up an in-place VM from a local backup. Veeam is great.

If budget is your biggest concern, consider stuffing a server with drives and installing Linux for on-site backup. Then you’d just need to setup a copy job to the cloud.

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Thanks for all the responses guys, and thanks for confirming what my gut tells me that onsite backup with replication to cloud as a failsafe is still the way to continue (that is what i have now, initial back ups to NAS then incremental upload to cloud). I asked because we recently bought another company and i am inheriting oversight for the acquired companies IT (they currently use an IT consultancy firm). When i asked the consultancy about the current backups they were doing cloud only - to cove data protection.

Understood on just doing an application aware backup for the sql VM, that will be a change as i have always backed up the sql separately.

Budget is as always a concern of course, but with recent expansion there is funding and we need something reliable that once set up requires minimal intervention on my part so that i can focus on other business areas.

I am seeing a lot of recommendations for veeam so i think i will download the trial, thanks.

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We tried using Unitrends VM appliance when I had to backup a VMWare cluster of 200ish server and around 90TB of data. The appliance struggled to backup their core SQL servers, one SQL server was 10TB in size and Unitrends took 2 days to complete 1 nightly backup. At the time I was a consultant for a MSP and the client got Unitrends. I at the time was very well versed in Veeam, I been using Veeam since version 7. I would highly recommend Veeam, where ever I go if there is a sub-par backup solution I rip it out and install Veeam. The other nice thing is Veeam is a very hands off backup solution as well there is no needing to baby the software.

But for you I recommend Veeam, You really can’t do separate SQL backup apart from the VM itself. But if your SQL server is small enough you just back up the SQL server every hour or so. At the one place I was backing up the 10TB SQL server every two hours. The backups took about 20 to 30 minutes to complete but no one ever noticed any performance issues when I was backing up that massive SQL server.

The other option is use native SQL backups to take frequent backups of SQL, then use Veeam to backup the SQL server. You could mix this and maybe have native SQL backing up every 30 minutes, where Veeam might backup the SQL server every 2 hours.

The essentials license should be good for you I am running that as well, and I am currently backing up 20 VMs. The other nice thing is with the essentials license is you can also use Veeam One as well.

Veeam also allows you to have immutable backup, it will require its own server running Linux to get immutable backup but it is worth it. We do that as well A, because we had the hardware to do so, and B it allowed us to check a box for our cyber insurance.

The only thing I have not used Veeam for is NAS backup. From what I remember is the NAS backup is per TB. If your NAS support mirroring or cloud backup on its own I would look at those solutions to backup the NAS.

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One other thing with Veeam is you can use the community edition of Veeam Backup and Replication for 10 workloads. That can give you the ability to take Veeam for a test drive with no strings attached.

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Not sure anyone was recommending cloud only, as we always recommend local backup as well to meet the 3-2-1 rule of backup. If the local backup is destroyed we can quick ship data via FedEx Custom Critical, buy a hard drive a plane ticket, or maybe even drive it to you. Or if you are doing DRaaS with us we can spin up a VM and recovery is time to boot.

Does the OP do local DR (VM spin up) locally only? Great for ransomware recovery, but not so great for a lot of other situations like power outages. So do you get offsite DR too? Sure! But, I find that people have a hard time finding the time to test their DR recovery and then having to test a local AND an offsite DR solution is even tougher (though some do it). So, many of our clients will have a local backup copy and then DRaaS and Immutable Backup with us offsite.

I agree, Veeam is great.

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Backup and DR are two completely different topics \ beasts… They provide different functions and protect from different scenarios.

There is some overlap between them but generally I divide them as follows

Backup = Long Term Retention & Archive

DR = ability to be up and running on alternate equipment and site within a set period of time. Usually an hour or two.

For Backup I like Veeam as the others have said above. Veeam can be uses for DR, but Veeam by itself doesn’t provide DR.

For DR I like MS Azure Site Recovery. You only pay for storage (and one windows server license for the onsite replication server) unless you need to fail over. If you have to fail over it can get pricey depending on your work loads. But if you are in that situation the cost will be negligible compared to the benefit of being able to run your business.

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First, apologies to the OP for this, but I think it’s important.

Supa, I know you used to work at an MSP and see you pretty much daily push Starwinds. Maybe you just love it and it has absolutely nothing to do with the work you do, but I think it’s important for the community to understand if you have some conflicting interests on what you recommend. Spiceworks has green guys like me and when there are “green guys in disguise” it hurts not only people like me, but the entire community. Maybe you can clear up any confusion here by divulging who you work for and whether you/your company is affiliated /partnered with Starwinds?

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