Commvault

We are ditching symantec and arcserve and implementing commvault.

we are backing up mos tof our vm's as vm backups via vsa.

i like the agnets level backups for our ad (ca restore users, sid's etc) and alo mail level backups,can restore individaual emails, etc.

reports are also awesome.

You indicate most of your vms.  Are some just not requiring backups or does commvault not work for some reason?

Have you used any other software for VM backups?  Why do you feel this is superior?

Is there anything you've found you do not like?

Yes we have BE 12.5 now and have had some issues with the queue times for support and all the agent licensing options so reviewing our entire backup strategy.  We will have some stand alone servers to backup and some VM machines to backup and I heard about Commvault and Veeam so was looking at Commvault given it's one solution that would do all.

It is a different strategy and a complete overhaul on our backups, but I want to compare it to Symantec and get feedback on what people in the industry are using and preferences.

We backup to tape now almost 3 TB and it takes all weekend to do a full backup so we do incremental during the week.  I'm looking to do backups to disk but backup performance and times is a big driver along with:
1. Support
2. Ease of Backup/Restore
3. Reliability
In no specific order.

Now you mention it being more expensive I have heard both ways so can you enlighten me what your experience was?  

We are only Windows.

I understood that the price of all CommVault components combined (CommServe, MediaAgent and iDataAgents) was higher - but that's I suppose more anecdotal. Never heard that BE was more expensive.
Do let us know what you find out regarding the price.

Thank you for all of the information.  With Veeam I haven't figured if I'd backup to disk and then replicate or backup to disk and than pull to tape with Symantec.  However as you mentioned if Veeam does a full backup and then gets a corrupt file can you go back before the corruption and do a restore?

Is Veeam network intensive as you indicate requesting an nfr.  Can you explain more on this?

No, what i meant was how much data will u backup. if they are huge vm's then it will depend how much throughput it can achive in your enviornment.

cheers

Got it thanks!

You are running Veeam though?  For how long?  What is the thing you like least?  Overall you are very satisfied?

we have had veeam for over 1.5 years now. we love it. however we are doing two backups. one is active replication to another datastor and another to shared server which has heaps of san luns presented to it.

replica's are 15mins apart, adn backups are every night.

this is dueo the fact the business want's to

For nightly backups how much data are you backing up and what disk size do you have?  Are you using dedup, compression and doing full backups nightly?

we have over 5 2TB luns presented and was done by projects teams. we have ample free space to accomodate this. sorry i can't view the data on the luns atm.

@honmapog you mention that BE can do a monolithic VM backup of an Exchange VM and allow you to restore one individual email from that backup.  Is Commvault unable to individual email restores?

Also with Commvault they are recommending we poll all data across the WAN which currently we do backups at each site using BE.  This would make backups exponentially larger.  Does anyone have any experience with this or any recommendations?

CommVault does not do Granular recovery of Exchange email. So if you want to restore individual email, you will need to back up as individual email using the Exchange Mailbox iDataAgent.
Of course this backup will have to be in addition to a full Exchange database backup with the Exchange Database iDataAgent. This is the backup that will truncate your transaction logs.
Of course you could always drop the individual email backup and restore Exchange databases to the Recovery Storage Group if you ever need to restore an email that is no longer available through "Deleted Items Retention".
 
One extra piece of advise. Backup Exec GRT is complex technology, and sometimes does go wrong. If you're thinking of using it, I would trial it first and make sure it works in your environment.

It sounds like you have used both products, which do you use now and for backup speeds and recovery reliability which would you recommend or would you keep virtual it's own backup with Veeam and then use BE or Commvault.  

I'm open to all opinions of best method people are using.  I'll trial, but want to get an idea what is working best for others.

In the end it will come to your RPO, RTO is, and what $$ u can spend

Currently we do nightly incremental as there isn't enough time outside of business hours to do a full backup.  Thus our RPO is accepted by all facilities that we backup once a day.  Improved would be better but not at the loss of bandwidth, etc so it is acceptable.  RTO we have a goal of 30 minutes and $$ is what will give us this at a minimum at the lowest cost.  The main objective at this point is if I can get a full backup nightly v.s. incremental and possibly moving to disk before tape can accomplish this alone, but if one application is better in this regard I'd like to test that one first.  

However I am also curious given Veeam's reviews if people are more likely to go with a all encompassing solution or have one for VM and one for File server

Try them out and see what fits your bill the best.

cheers
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