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.

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.

Visit the pricing page for more detailed information. A Vembu BDR Suite edition comparison is also available.

Final thoughts

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.