Symantec Backup Exec 2010 first impressions

Now it may be too early to say, but so far I'm actually impressed with BE 2010 (Trial edition of course). Normally I'm pretty skeptical about new releases but after a colleague of mine told me that it fixed his backup issues with a 2008 x64 R2 Hyper-V machine I decided to give it a look over. He had that dreaded "Snapshot provider error (0xE000FED1): A failure occurred querying the Writer status." error. I set up a couple of test x64 servers in the lab with copies of the real VMs and loaded up BE 2010 and set it for some Disk to Disk tests. While I did get some GRT related errors even though I wasn't using GRT at the time, it still backed up the server images themselves.
As far as installation goes, the UI continues to improve with each release and it's pretty straightforward. Upgrading an existing BE 12.5 install was a breeze. The remote installation process has undergone a major makeover and now makes it easier to roll out multiple agents with different options selected. And to boot, it lists all the previously rolled out agents in the console. The management console is a bit more refined looking and they've integrated a lot of new little icons into the selection windows.

They've also added a few new agents that will be interesting to try (as soon as I get the budget). The DeDuplication agent could be useful for reducing backup sizes and the new Exchange archiving agent has potential as well.

As always, I recommend fully testing out any new software product in a test environment prior to rolling it out into production...