Enhanced Evaluation - Preparation

After having agreed and discussed the points in the Workshop Example section, proceed with the enhanced POC to demonstrate that Veeam Availability Suite can work in customer's environment with excellent speed.

Typically, the enhanced POC is carried out under the following conditions:

• The environment is close to the production environment, with all firewalls in place.
• Involved storage systems are similar to the production storage systems.
• Veeam storage integration is used whenever possible.
• To demonstrate the good working load balancing and scalability, 100-200 VMs are backed up/replicated.
• All major applications are backed up to test all restore scenarios.

Preparation steps

1. Prepare for the POC planning with the Veeam User Guide and this document.
2. Complete a POC document including all your designs and plans, including chosen servers for the tests and why they are important. Set a criteria for success on each machine and what is tested.

3. Check out the necessary firewall ports and help the customer with the internal firewall change requests. Refer to the corresponding sections in the User Guide and this document.

   Tip: Perform firewall planning very carefully: if something is misconfigured, this may block the entire POC. In most cases, it is not easy to detect problems and introduce firewall changes, when the POC is already running. However, it is a good idea to ask the customer to have the firewall administrator at hand in case you need an urgent change.

4. Create a separate vCenter Server account for Veeam ONE (read-only + datastore browsing + CIM) so that you are able to track what users do.
5. If you want to use the storage integration feature, check out the corresponding chapter in this guide, set up the storage and the SAN network together with the storage administrators. Limit the scope of storage system rescan to the volumes used in the POC.
6. If you want to use SureBackup, make sure that a virtualized Domain Controller is present if needed (e.g. for Microsoft Exchange).
7. Let the customer prepare all used antivirus systems upfront so that you do not run into trouble. Check the "Antivirus" section of this guide and Veeam KB1999.
8. Ask the customer to prepare a decent performing storage system for the POC. Avoid low-end NAS appliances for enhanced evaluations.
9. Let the customer prepare all operating systems and database installations. Set up Veeam Backup & Replication and backup infrastructure components together with the customer and place the folders correctly.
10. Ensure that the document relating to all the testing is accurate and up to date including all success criteria for each machine being tested. This will keep control for POC, each test and a schedule can be built around the testing avoiding random testing of features.