Veeam Backup & Replication 7 - total disaster 8-(((

[DWarch]

As you might know, VBR7 was launched late this August and since then many hundreds of customers were posting numerous bug reports on Veeam's forums. I, myself, happen to be their customer and I decided to track the most critical bugs before I migrate my clients to a new version. So, this is my list, please, add what you think are other critical bugs, that I didn't mention.

http://forums.veeam.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=17224 - Critical issue and poor handling by support: it is a known issue in the old version of this software and you can see that posts in this thread date back to 2009. One might've expected that they'll deal with this issue in the new version, but, unfortunately, it is still present. Very dissapointing.

As for Veeam tech support, one thing I noticed is that they were flooded so badly with bug reports this August-September that the only answer one could've gotten from them was: "Please, go read about this in the Knowledge Base on our website". I've seen tons of replies like this on their support forums. Not very helpful, obviously, if you have a pressing issue and need a solution right away.

http://forums.veeam.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=17872 - Complaints on BS called "WAN accelerator": they've added a new useless gizmo that became a problem in itself causing new complaints. Why add new buggy useless feature?

http://forums.veeam.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=17887 - Poor Performance on File verification and againg support send the customer back to User Guide. Yeah, right

http://forums.veeam.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=17597 - Random errors are usual thing for a new complex software, but with VBR7 one just gets too many which is frustrating. You get the error, go to their tech support forum and there they say to review the docs again. OOOOOOOOOOk!

http://forums.veeam.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=17898 - Dropped support for still quite popular W2K3 x64 (this can be expanded to a problem with upgrade at Customer's site, who wants to backup to tape, etc)

These are the most critical bugs and issues, as I see it.

If you noticed other critical issues, please, comment, add you feedback here or in my blog:

http://vbscs.wordpress.com/2013/09/13/veeam-backup-replication-7-total-disaster/

[a_p_]

Discussion moved from VMware vSphere Hypervisor to Backup & Recovery

[ldelloca]

Nice FUD indeed, more than half of your supposed "bugs" are users that configured the product in a wrong way, or they did not read the user guide to understand how it works, as in the example of WAN accelaration. I agree there is a total disaster here, but is not the software you are talking about.

Oh, and by the way, Windows 2003 is 10 years old and already declared End Of Life by Microsoft in less than two years, sound weird to you at some point a vendor decided to drop support for it?

Luca.

[rick-vanover]

Hey DWarch - sounds like you have a few things going on. I've also glanced through your blogposts. Give me a call at [phone] or email me at [e-mail] and I'll get this sorted for you.  (I'm unavailable for the next 8 hours from this post however)

[Josh26]

Have you EVER used any competing product? I'm honestly asking because you seem incredibly offended by "issues" that frankly come with the territory.

In the interests of openness: I've never used Veeam - so I'm impartial on this.

I've reviewed every one of your "bugs" however, and frankly the product looks like a dream compared to some of the competitors if this is the worst you can do. Are you really upset that a backup vendor dropped support for an OS that isn't even supported by Microsoft any more? Surely the bigger issue is whether they support Windows 2012 (they do.. the major competitor does not).

Get back to me when there are multiple known bugs wherein backups "verify" as "successful", but are unrecoverable, and KB articles stating "this may be fixed in a future version". Or when a bug that just disables all backups when a DST change occurs has been present in all versions of the product since the year 2000. And when your official support mechanism is to send a tweet...

[DWarch]

Josh26, hi, very interesting line in your reply:

"the product looks like a dream compared to some of the competitors".

Can you be more specific? What competitors are you writing about?

I use some competitor products, I wrote about it here:

Veeam Nightmare | VBSCS

[DWarch]

I am doing my own research and those are not the bugs the I caught, rather they were caught by someone else, but I decided to bring attention to the most critical ones, which is important as there are so many of them, BTW just how many bugs are there in the VBR7, Rick? Do you guys keep count? I mean, it is an ordeal to rollout the new software version, but how do you guys yourself determine which are the most critical bugs and is there a list of them?

[rick-vanover]

We've made a sticky of known issues: [KNOWN ISSUES] 7.0 : Issues, Patches and Hot Fixes | view topic

Give me a call or email as noted above.

[DWarch]

Anton Gostev, The guy behind Veeam Backup & Replication, Director of Product Management at Veeam Software answered me in my blog about these VBR7 bugs that I collected: http://goo.gl/B2Ukcx

[DWarch]

Veeam reclassified critical bugs of VBR7 into non-critical?

I argue about that with Veeam's VP A.Gostev, an architect of VBR7

(several pages) very interesting

http://vbscs.wordpress.com/2013/09/20/veeam-reclassified-critical-vbr7-bugs-into-non-critical