This posting is ~4 years years old. You should keep this in mind. IT is a short living business. This information might be outdated.
Vembu Technologies was founded in 2002, and with 60.000 customers and more than 4000 partners, Vembu is a leading provider with a comprehensive portfolio of software products and cloud services to small and medium businesses.
In December 2018, Vembu announced the fourth major release of their BDR Suite. Vembu BDR Suite 4.0.1 is now out for production setups with enhanced performance and bug fixes. Vembu BDR Suite v4.0.1 is an intermediate patch update that addresses the customers reported issues and other support issues on the previous build of v4.0. Vembu BDR Suite v4.0.1 also features a large number of enhancements and significant of those are listed below.
Vembu Technologies/ Vembu BDR Essentials/ Copyright by Vembu Technologies
What’s new?
Beside of bug fixes, BDR Suite v4.0.1 also includes some new enhancements. In my opinion, the most significant enhancements are:
Significant performance improvement in Quick VM Recovery on VMware environments
Rescan option is introduced in Hyper-V Manager Servers page, which allows you to install Vembu Integration Service on the newly added node of the Hyper-V cluster (or if it’s not available on the existing node)
Backups configured through BDR Server console will run in parallel (Default parallel backup count is set to 5 and it is configurable)
Ability to add new Hyper-V hosts or choose existing hosts while performing Live Recovery to Hyper-V host
Interested in trying Vembu BDR suite? Try the 30-day free trial now! For any questions, simply send an e-mail to vembu-support@vembu.com or follow them on Twitter.
If you are a small or mid-sized businesses, check out the Vembu BDR Essentials package!
This posting is ~4 years years old. You should keep this in mind. IT is a short living business. This information might be outdated.
When it comes to disaster recovery (DR), dedicated offsite infrastructure is a must. If you follow the 3-2-1 backup rule, then you should have at least three copies of your data, on two different media, and one copy should be offsite.
But an offsite copy of your data can be expensive… You have to setup storage and networking in a suitable colocation. And even if you have an offsite copy of your data, you must be able to recover the data. This could be fun in case of terabytes of data and an offsite copy on tape.
A offsite copy in a cloud is much more interesting. No need to provide hardware, software, licenses. Just provide internet-connectivity, book a suitable plan, and you are ready to go.
Replication to Cloud using Vembu CloudDR
Vembu offers a cloud-based disaster recovery plan through its own cloud services, which is hosted in Amazon Web Services (AWS). This product is designed for businesses, who can’t afford, or who are not willing, to setup a dedicated offsite infrastructure for disaster recovery.
The data, which is backuped by the Vembu BDR server, is replicated to the Vembu Cloud. In case of any disaster, the backup data can be directly restored from the cloud at anytime and anywhere. The replication is managed and monitored using the CloudDR portal.
Before you can enable the offsite replication, you have to register your Vembu BDR server with your Vembu Portal account. You can either go to onlinebackup.vembu.com, or you can go to portal.vembu.com and sign up.
Vembu Technologies/ Vembu CloudDR/ Copyright by Vembu Technologies
After configuring schedule, retention and bandwidth usage, Vembu CloudDR is ready to go.
The end is near – time for recovery
CloudDR offers two types of recovery:
Image Based Recovery
Application Based Recovery
In case of an image based recovery, you can either download a VMDK or VHD(X) image, or you can do a file level recovery. In this case you can restore single files from inside of a chosen image.
You can even download a VHD(X) image of a VMware backup, which allows you some kind of V2V or P2V restores.
In case of a application based recovery, you can recover single application items from
Microsoft Exchange
Microsoft SharePoint
Microsoft SQL Server, or
MySQL
Depending on the type of restore, you will get an encrypted and password protected ZIP file with documents, or even MDF/ LDF files. These files can than be used to restore the lost data.
Summary
Vembu CloudDR is a pretty interesting add-on for Vembu customers. It’s easy to setup, has an attractive price tag and therefore consequently addresses the SMB customers.
This posting is ~4 years years old. You should keep this in mind. IT is a short living business. This information might be outdated.
It is pretty common that vendors offer their products in special editions for SMB customers. VMware offers VMware vSphere Essentials and Essentials Plus, Veeam offers Veeam Backup Essentials, and Vembu has Vembu BDR Essentials.
Now Vembu has extended their Vembu BDR Essentials package significantly to address the needs of mid-sized businesses.
Vembu Technologies/ Vembu BDR Essentials/ Copyright by Vembu Technologies
Affordable backup for SMB customers
Most SMB virtualization deployments consists of two or three hosts, which makes 4 or 6 used CPU sockets. Because of this, Vembu BDR Essentials supportes up to 6 sockets or 50 VMs. Yes, 6 sockets OR 50 VMs. Vembu has no rised this limit to 10 Sockets OR 100 VMs! This allows customers to use up to five 2-socket hosts or 100 VMs with less than 10 sockets.
Feature Highlights
Vembu BDR Essentials support all important features:
Agentless VMBackup to backup VMs
Continuous Data Protection with support for RPOs of less than 15 minutes
Quick VM Recovery to get failed VMs up and running in minutes
Vembu Universal Explorer to restore individual items from Microsoft applications like Exchange, SharePoint, SQL and Active Directory
Replication of VMs Vembu OffsiteDR and Vembu CloudDR
Needless to say that Vembu BDR Essentials support VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V. If necessary, customer can upgrade to the Standard or Enterprise edition.
This posting is ~4 years years old. You should keep this in mind. IT is a short living business. This information might be outdated.
Vembu Technologies was founded in 2002, and with 60.000 customers and more than 4000 partners, Vembu is a leading provider with a comprehensive portfolio of software products and cloud services to small and medium businesses.
Backup is important. There is no reason to have no backup. According to an infographic published by Clutch Research at the World Backup Day 2017, 60% of all SMBs that lost all their data will shutdown within 6 months after the data loss. Pretty bad, isn’t it?
When I talk to SMB customers, most of them complain about the costs of backups. You need software, you need the hardware, and depending on the type of used hardware, you need media. And you should have a second copy of your data. In my opinion, tape is dead for SMB customers. HPE for example, offers pretty smart disk-based backup solutions, like the HPE StoreOnce.
Vembu is giving away an Amazon gift cards through a lucky draw for those readers, that take part of a short Survey
Vembu Technologies/ Vembu BDR/ Copyright by Vembu Technologies
Vembu BDR Suite provides a 30-day free trial with no restriction. This gives you the chance to intensively test Vembu BDR Suite prior purchase.
The free edition let you choose between unlimited VMs, that are covered with limited functionality, or unlimited functionality for up to 3 VMs. Check out this comparison of free, standard and enterprise edition. Check out this comparison of free, standard and enterprise edition.
This posting is ~4 years years old. You should keep this in mind. IT is a short living business. This information might be outdated.
Vembu Technologies was founded in 2002, and with 60.000 customers and more than 4000 partners, Vembu is a leading provider with a comprehensive portfolio of software products and cloud services to small and medium businesses.
Last week, Vembu has announced the availability of Vembu BDR Suite v4.0! Vembu’s new release is all about maintaining business continuity and ensuring high availability. Apart from new features, this release features significant enhancements and bug fixes that are geared towards performance improvement.
Vembu Technologies/ Vembu BDR Essentials/ Copyright by Vembu Technologies
The Vembu BDR Suite
The Vembu BDR Suite is an one stop solution to all your backup and disaster recovery needs. That is what Vembu says about their own product. The BDR Suite covers
Backup and replication of VMs running on VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V
Backup and bare-metal recovery for physical servers and workstations (Windows Server and Desktop)
File and application backups of Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Active Directory, Microsoft Outlook, and MySQL
Creating of backup copies and transfer of them to a DR site
Vembu BDR Suite v4.0 has got some pretty nice new features. IMHO, there are four highlights:
Hyper-V Failover Cluster Support for Backup & Recovery
Shared VHDX Backup
Hyper-V Checksum Based Incremental, and the
Credential Manager
There is a significat chance that you use a Hyper-V Failover Cluster if you have more than one Hyper-V host. With v4.0 Vembu added support for backup and recovery for the VMs residing in a Hyper-V Failover Cluster. Even if the VMs running on Hyper-V cluster move from one host to another, the backups will continue to run without any interruption.
A feature, that I’m really missing in VMware and Veeam, is the support for the backup shared VHDX files. v4.0 added support for this.
Vembu BDR Suite v4.0 also added support bot performing incremental backups with Hyper-V. They call it Checksum based incremental method, but it is in fact Change Block Tracking. An important feature for Hyper-V customers!
The Vembu Credential Manager allows you to store the necessary credentials at one place, use it everywhere inside the Vembu BDR Suite v4.0.
But there are also other, very nice enhancements.
Handling new disk addition for VMware ESXi and Hyper-V, which allows the backup of newly added disks at the next backup. In prioir releases, newly added disks were only backuped during the next full backup.
Reconnection for VMware ESXi and Hyper-V jobs in case of a dropped network connection
Application-wware processing for Hyper-V VMs can now enabled on a per-VM basis
API for VM list with Storage utilization report which allows you to generate detailed reports whenever you need one
This posting is ~5 years years old. You should keep this in mind. IT is a short living business. This information might be outdated.
Vembu was founded in 2002 and has over 60,000 customers worldwide. One of their core products is the Vembu BDR Suite, which is an one stop solution to all your Backup and DR needs. I wrote a longer blog post about the Vembu BDR Suite.
One part of this suite is Vembu VMBackup, which is a data protection solution that is designed to backup VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines secure and simple way. The offered features are compareable to Veeam Backup & Replication.
The core component of Vembu VMBackup is the Vembu BDR Backup server, which can be deployed in two ways:
On-premises Deployment
Hybrid Deployment
virnuls/ pixabay.com/ Creative Commons CC0
On-premises Deployment
In this deployment setup, customers deploy the product in their local environment. I think this is the most typical deployment type, where you install VMBackup on a physical server, in a VM or deployed as virtual appliance. Backup data is transferred over LAN or SAN, and is written to the storage repositories. The Vembu BDR server acts as a centralized management point, where user can configure and manage backup and replication jobs.
In a simple deployment, the Vembu BDR Backup Server will act as backup proxy and management server instance. It is perfect for a small number of VMs with less simultaneous backup traffic and for VMBackup evaluation. The typical SMB environment.
If you seperate the management server from the backup proxy, the deployment changes to a distributed deployment. If necessary, multiple backup proxies can be deployed on physical hosts or in virtual machines. Customers can also deploy multiple BDR backups servers, which allows load balancing across a cluster of BDR backup servers. Pretty cool for bigger and/ or distributed environments. It allows customers to scale their backup solution over time.
On-Premises Deployment/ Vembu Technologies/ Copyright by Vembu Technologies
Hybrid Deployment
Backup is good, but having a backup copy offsite is better. Vembu OffsiteDR allows customers to create a copy of their backup data and transfer it to a DR location over LAN/ WAN. OffsiteDR instantly transfers backup data from a BDR Backup Server to an OffsiteDR server. Customers can restore failed VMs or missing files and application data in their DR site, or they can rebuild a failed BDR Backup Server from an OffsiteDR server.
Vembu Technologies/ OffsiteDR/ Copyright by Vembu Technologies
If customers don’t have a DR site, they can use Vembu CloudDR push a backup copy to the Vembu cloud. The data stored in the Vembu Cloud can easily be restored at anytime and to any location. Vembu uses AWS across all continents to asure the availability of their cloud services.
Vembu Technologies/ CloudDR/ Copyright by Vembu Technologies
Customers have the choice
It is obvious that customers have the freedom of choice how they deploy Vembu VMBackup.I like the virtual appliance approach, which eliminates the need for additional Windows Server licenses. More and more vendors tend to offer appliances for their products, just think about VMware vCenter Server Appliance, vRealize Orchestrator etc. So why not offer a backup server appliance? I wish other vendors would adopt this…
Another nice feature is the scale-out capability of Vembu. Start small and grow over time. Perfect for SMBs that want to start small and grow over time.
This posting is ~5 years years old. You should keep this in mind. IT is a short living business. This information might be outdated.
It is common that vendors offer their products in special editions for SMB customers. VMware offers VMware vSphere Essentials and Essentials Plus, Veeam offers Veeam Backup Essentials, and now Vembu has published Vembu BDR Essentials.
Vembu Technologies/ Vembu BDR Essentials/ Copyright by Vembu Technologies
Backup is important. There is no reason to have no backup. According to an infographic published by Clutch Research at the World Backup Day 2017, 60% of all SMBs that lost all their data will shutdown within 6 months after the data loss. Pretty bad, isn’t it?
When I talk to SMB customers, most of them complain about the costs of backups. You need software, you need the hardware, and depending on the type of used hardware, you need media. And you should have a second copy of your data. In my opinion, tape is dead for SMB customers. HPE for example, offers pretty smart disk-based backup solutions, like the HPE StoreOnce. But hardware is nothing without software. And at this point, Vembu BDR Essentials comes into play.
Affordable backup for SMB customers
Most SMB virtualization deployments consists of two or three hosts, which makes 4 or 6 used CPU sockets. Because of this, Vembu BDR Essentials supportes up to 6 socketsor 50 VMs. But why does Vembu limit the number of sockets and VMs? You might missed the OR. Customers have to choice which limit they want to accept. Customers are limited at the host-level (max 6 sockets), but not limited in the amount of VMs, or they can use more than 6 sockets, but then they are limited to 50 VMs.
Feature Highlights
Vembu BDR Essentials support all important features:
Agentless VMBackup to backup VMs
Continuous Data Protection with support for RPOs of less than 15 minutes
Quick VM Recovery to get failed VMs up and running in minutes
Vembu Universal Explorer to restore individual items from Microsoft applications like Exchange, SharePoint, SQL and Active Directory
Replication of VMs Vembu OffsiteDR and Vembu CloudDR
Needless to say that Vembu BDR Essentials support VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V. If necessary, customer can upgrade to the Standard or Enterprise edition.
Now the fun part – the pricing. Customers can save up to 50% compared to the Vembzu BDR Suite.
Vembu Technologies/ Vembu BDR Essentials Pricing/ Copyright by Vembu Technologies
The licenses for Vembu BDR Essentials are available in two models:
Subscription, and
Perpetual
Subscription licenses are available for 1, 2, 3 and 5 years. The perpetual licenses is valid for 10 years from the date of purchase. The subscription licensing has the benefit, that it included 24×7 technical support. If you purchase the perpetual license, the Annual Maintenance Cost (AMC) for first year is free. From the second year, it is 20% of the license cost, and it is available for 1, 2 or 3 years.
There is no excuse for not having a backup
With Vembu BDR Essentials, there is no more excuse for not having a competitive backup protecting your business! The pricing fits any SMB customer, regardless of their size or business. The rich feature set is competitive to other vendors, and both leading hypervisors are supported.
A pretty nice product. Try it for free! Vembu also offers a free edition that might fit small environments. The free edition let you choose between unlimited VMs, that are covered with limited functionality, or unlimited functionality for up to 3 VMs. Check out this comparison of free, standard and enterprise edition.
This posting is ~5 years years old. You should keep this in mind. IT is a short living business. This information might be outdated.
I have worked with a lot of backup software products during my career, but for the last years I have primarily worked with MicroFocus Data Protector (former HP OmniBack, HP Data Protector, or HPE Data Protector), and Veeam Backup & Replication. Data Protector was a great solution for traditional server environments, or when UNIX (HP-UX, AIX, Solaris etc.) compatibility was required. Features like Zero Downtime Backups, LAN-free or Direct SAN backups were available for many years. But their code quality has suffered severely in the recent years. The product no longer seemed like a one-stop shop. Some months ago, HPE sold its software division to MicroFocus and started to sell Veeam Backup & Replication through its channel. Some months prior selling the complete software division, HPE acquired Trilead, which is many of us well known because of their VM Explorer. Sad but true: Data Protector is dead to me.
I think I don’t have to say much about Veeam. Veeam is unbeaten when it comes down to virtualized server environments, and they constantly add features and extend their product portfolio. Think about their solutions Office 365, or Veeam Agent for Windows and Linux.
Why Vembu?
It is always good to have more than product in the portfolio, just because to give customers the choice between different products. If your only tool is a hammer, everthing looks like a nail. That is why I took a closer look at Vembu. I became aware of Vembu, because they asked to place an ad on vcloudnine. This was a year ago. So it was obvious to take a look at their products. Furthermore, Vembu and its products were mentioned many times in my Twitter timeline. Two good reasons to take a look at them!
Vembu Technologies was founded in 2002, and with 60.000 customers and more than 4000 partners, Vembu is a leading provider with a comprehensive portfolio of software products and cloud services to small and medium businesses. We are not talking about a newcomer!
The Vembu BDR Suite
The Vembu BDR Suite is an one stop solution to all your backup and disaster recovery needs. That is what Vembu says about their own product. The BDR Suite covers
Backup and replication of VMs running on VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V
Backup and bare-metal recovery for physical servers and workstations (Windows Server and Desktop)
File and application backups of Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Active Directory, Microsoft Outlook, and MySQL
Creating of backup copies and transfer of them to a DR site
Let’s have a more detailed look at the Vembu BDR Suite. This is a picture of the overall architecture.
Vembu Technologies/ Vembu BDR Suite architecture/ Copyright by Vembu Technologies
VMBackup
VMBackup provides fast, efficient and agentless backup for VMs hosted on VMware ESXi and on Microsoft Hyper-V. It also provides the capability to replicate virtual machines from one ESXi host to another ESXi (VMreplication). You might guess it – This feature is only available for VMware ESXi. In case of Microsoft Hyper-V, you have to use the built-in Hyper-V replication. The failover and failback of replicated VMs is managed by the BDR Backup Server. VMBackup offers instant VM recovery, recovery of single files and folder from image-level backups, and recovery of application items from Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft SharePoint, and Microsoft Active Directory. The functionality is similar to what you know from other products, like Veeam Backup & Replication, or MicroFocus Data Protector. VMBackup is licensed per socket, and it is available in a Standard (~ 150 $ per socket) and an Enterprise (~ 250 $ per socket) edition.
ImageBackup
ImageBackup addresses something, that might be extinct for some of us: Physical servers, like physical database or file servers. It can take image backups of Windows servers and workstations. This allows customers to restore the entire server or workstation from scratch to the same, or to new hardware. ImageBackup utilizes the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) to create a consistent backup of a physical machine. Customers can restore a backup to the bare-metal, restore single files and folders, as well as application items from Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft SharePoint, and Microsoft Active Directory. If necessary, the can be restored to a supported hypervisor. With other words: P2V migration. ImageBackup is licensed per host, or per application server if you wish to take backups of applications like Microsoft Exchange or SQL server. ImageBackup for servers costs ~ 150 $, and it is free for workstations.
NetworkBackup
NetworkBackup addresses the backup of files, folders and application data from Windows, Mac and Linux clients. It is designed to protect business data across file servers, application servers, workstations and other endpoints. It does not take an image backup, but full and incremental backups. The feature set and use case of NetworkBackup is similar to “traditional” backup software like MicroFocus Data Protector or ARCServe. NetworkBackup offers intelligent scheduling policies, bandwidth management and flexible retention polices. Clients are not always onsite, to address this, NetworkBackup can store its data in the Vembu Cloud (Vembu Cloud Services). NetworkBackup is licensed per file server (~ 60 $ per server), application server (~ 150 $), or workstation (free).
OffsiteDR
OffsiteDR creates and transfers backup copies to a DR site. Data is immediately transferred when it arrives at the backup server. The Data is encrypted in-flight using industry-standard AES 256 encryption. WAN optimization is included, which means that data is compressed, encrypted and deduplicated before being replicated to the OffsiteDR server. The recovery of VMs and files can directly be done from the OffsiteDR server. So there is no need to setup a new backup server in case of a disaster recovery. OffsiteDR covers different recovery screnarios, like instantly recover machines directly from the Vembu OffsiteDR server, bare-metal restore using the Vembu Recovery CD, or restore the virtual machine as on a VMware ESXi or Microsoft Hyper-V server directly from the Vembu OffsiteDR server. OffsiteDR is an add-on to VMBackup, and it is licensed per CPU socket (~ 90 $).
Universal Explorer
The Universal Explorer is used to restore items from various Microsoft applications, like Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint, or Active Directory. An item can be an email, a mailbox, complete databases, user or group objects etc. These items are sourced from image-level backups of physical and virtual machines. You might see some similarities to Veeam Explorer. Both products are comparable.
Recovery CD
The Vembu Recovery CD can be used to recover physical or virtual maschines. Drivers for the target platform will be injected during the restore. This is pretty handy in case of P2P and V2P migrations.
Licensing & Editions
Vembu offers a subscription and a perpetual license model. The subscription model can be purchased on a monthly or yearly basis, such as 1, 2, 3 or 5 years. It includes 24/ 7 standard technical support, updates and upgrades throughout the licensed period. The perpetual licensing model allows you to purchase and use the Vembu BDR suite by paying a single fee. This includes free maintenance and support for the first year.
With 60.000 customers and 4000 partners, Vembu is not a newcomer in the backup business. The product portfolio is quite comprehensive. The Vembu BDR Suite offers industry standard features to a very sweet price. I can’t see any feature, that a SMB customer might require, which is not available. In sum, the Vembu BDR suite seems to me to be a very good alternative to the top dogs in the backup business, especially if we are talkin about SMB customers.
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