vSphere backup - Veeam vs Nakivo

Notice: Page may contain affiliate links for which we may earn a small commission through services like Amazon Affiliates or Skimlinks.

Stril

Member
Sep 26, 2017
191
12
18
41
Hi!

What are you using to backup your VMWare infrastructure?

Currently, I am veering between Veeam and Nakivo.

Veeam is great as Enterprise or Enterprise Plus, but WAY too expensive for me, so I have to compare Veeam Standard with Nakivo Enterprise (currently 6 hosts with 1 socket each).

Additional, Veeams new "instance-licensing" is just a pain, and I fear, that they will only sell instance-licenses in the near future...

What can you recommend?

Regards,
Stril
 

sth

Active Member
Oct 29, 2015
379
91
28
Veeam NFR. Its been reliable and saved my bacon twice.
Would be interested to see pricing comparison data if you have it.
 

Stril

Member
Sep 26, 2017
191
12
18
41
Hi!

Pricing is:

- Veeam Essentials Standard with 3 years support: 3500 EUR
- Veeam Essentials Enterprise with 3 years support: 7000 EUR

- Nakivo Enterprise Essentials with 3 years support 2100 EUR
 
  • Like
Reactions: sth

Stril

Member
Sep 26, 2017
191
12
18
41
Hi!

Archiware Pure looks great and will hopefully be an alternative in the near future, but currently it lacks some important functions like instant-recover.
 

dswartz

Active Member
Jul 14, 2011
610
79
28
Hi!

What are you using to backup your VMWare infrastructure?

Currently, I am veering between Veeam and Nakivo.

Veeam is great as Enterprise or Enterprise Plus, but WAY too expensive for me, so I have to compare Veeam Standard with Nakivo Enterprise (currently 6 hosts with 1 socket each).

Additional, Veeams new "instance-licensing" is just a pain, and I fear, that they will only sell instance-licenses in the near future...

What can you recommend?

Regards,
Stril
Veeam now has free CE edition as long as you only back up 10 instances.
 
  • Like
Reactions: BennyT

pricklypunter

Well-Known Member
Nov 10, 2015
1,708
515
113
Canada
+1 to Veam CE :)

This got me out of a tricky situation and saved my ass one day when I moved my firewall from one datastore disk to another. The copy got hooped along the way for some reason, but Veam got me going again.
 

BoredSysadmin

Not affiliated with Maxell
Mar 2, 2019
1,050
437
83
The first question should be where do you want to back up to? The second is do you really care about running VM (minus the database or other data files) if you could script build it in short time? Could you switch some apps to containers if versions already available?

I know this will be out of your wheelhouse, but at work, we use Rubrik for backups and while it's not ideal, they had a great support team and product is constantly improving.

p.s: R.I.P. VDP
 

BennyT

Active Member
Dec 1, 2018
166
46
28
Another vote for Veeam Community Edition (doesn't work with free edition ESXi, but works great with licensed ESXi even via VMUG Advantage). Veeam CE allows up to 10 VM backup jobs. If 10 VM Backup jobs are not enough, i think you can disable a backup job if it is seldom used to free up the counter for creating backup jobs. I think you can delete seldome used backup jobs entirely to free up for another VM. The actual backups remain on the backup repository even after you delete or disable a backup job, so those don't go away. Or use veamZip, which allows for unlimited full backups.

*correction: the 10 count is based on # of VM to be backed up, not based on count of backup jobs. ie. 3 backup jobs for a single vm counts as just 1 of the 10 count, not 3 of the 10 count.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: nikalai

dswartz

Active Member
Jul 14, 2011
610
79
28
Do you mean 10 backed up VMs? I didn't think the number of jobs per-se was relevant?
 

BennyT

Active Member
Dec 1, 2018
166
46
28
@dswartz, I'm unsure. I'll test by creating an additonal backup job for same VM that is already scheduled for backup to see if that changes the counter. I currently have one backup job per VM. I'll reply back in a few minutes after checking.

@dswartz you are correct. It is based on count of VMs, not on # of jobs. I can have two backup jobs for same VM and it counts as just one in the counter to 10.
 
Last edited:
  • Like
Reactions: nikalai

markarr

Active Member
Oct 31, 2013
421
122
43
If you dont use much space then you could look at Unitrends, they have a version that you can backup 1TB for free. That is the total size of the vms not the total usage of the backups, no limit on # of vms.
 

Stril

Member
Sep 26, 2017
191
12
18
41
Hi!

My question is about business-use with currently 6 CPUs and about 70 VMs, about 16 TB, so the free versions are not an option at all.

Is anybody of you using Nakivo for a longer time?
 

leonroy

Member
Oct 6, 2015
69
14
8
42
Been using Nakivo for coming on 3 years now on vSphere 6, 6.5+. Simple vSphere cluster with two ESXi hosts, two FreeNAS datastores, vSphere server.

Nakivo for us has been about £250 per annum with email support which is excellent on the few occasions we’ve had to use it.

The product is light weight and fast and has been totally rock solid, not one crash, recovering VMs always works, no stray snapshots left lingering etc.

We originally pointed it to a NFS share but are now using it with CIFS. Both have worked fine.

Can’t really fault it but then I haven’t used Veeam. Nakivo have an evaluation version so easy way to verify, it takes 30 minutes to an hour to setup. It also works with single ESXi hosts with no vSphere (you’ll of course need the paid ESXi license).
 

crept

New Member
May 17, 2016
18
1
3
40
We've been using Altaro VM backup to back up a 3 node cluster. Pricing was great, around $1,100 per host and 3 year support (special pricing coming from Veeam.) So far it's saved my ass twice restoring a pfSense VM and Server 2019 VM. Tested out restoring from Azure and that worked out well. Tried calling support and I can get someone to help on the line in under 2 min. Not bad. We'll see what happens 2 years down the road.
 
  • Like
Reactions: BennyT

LaMerk

Member
Jun 13, 2017
38
7
8
33
Veeam is one of the best solutions for backups, I am using it for a while and when something going wrong it always working as expected.
I faced only a few issues with Veeam, but they support always was helpful and assist me.