Vembu quick vm recovery

Vembu 3.9.0 – What’s New?

Vembu have released 3.9.0 of their Vembu BDR Suite, extending it’s features and capabilities. Let’s take a look at what’s new:

Tape backup support – The technology that has more lives than a cat – tape is added to the feature list. The feature which Vembu are calling Native Tape Backup allows backup jobs to be copied to tape. This allows all the benefits of tape to be achieved, cheap long term storage of backups, easy offsiting and enablement of the 3-2-1 backup rule. The 3-2-1 backup best practice suggests that you have three copies of your data in two different media and one offsite location. Tape clearly assists with the objectives of an offsite copy and a different type of media

Vembu Tape backup

Quick VM Recovery – The Quick VM Recovery allows you to instantly start up a virtual machines from backups. This allows for very low RTO’s and in turn allows for greater testing of restores. This feature was previously available in Vembu for VMware only, the 3.9.0 release introduces quick recovery for Hyper-V

Vembu quick vm recovery

Backup-level Encryption – This feature allows the encryption of backup data between the client and backup server. Each backup jobs is secured with a password and can only be restored or accessed by using the password.

Pre-post Backup Scripts – Some times there is the need to run a script before or after a backup job to enable applications to be in a consistent state ready for backups. These scripts can now be added directly into the backup job . This simplifies the process by creating one place for all necessary configuration of a backup job.

Vembu pre post backup script

Auto Authorization at Offsite – This ensures that only authorised Vembu servers can connect with the offsite DR server using a shared key

Event Viewer Integration – This allows events generated by the Vembu application to be added to the Windows event log

If you would like to investigate further you can download a free trial

 

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Vembu BDR

Vembu Freebie Offer

Vembu cloud and VM backup aficionados have come out with an interesting free offer that I wanted to share. If Vembu is new to you, check out my previous post in which I summarised Vembu products. The post goes into this into detail, but in summary Vembu covers a wide range of backup scenarios including:

  • VMware VM’s
  • Hyper-V VM’s
  • Physical windows machines
  • Office 365
  • Google Apps (G-Suite)
  • Cloud backup of AWS and Azure VM’s

They say you can’t get anything for free but Vembu’s latest offer challenges this assumption. But like in Deal or No Deal you get a choice. You either go for free backup of everything with limited features. Or you go for backup of a limited number of the virtual machines with all the features enabled.

Whichever option you choose, you can benefit from agentless backups, storage pooling, file level recovery and encryption. The features limited to 3 VM’s include low RPO 15 minutes backups, CBT and quick recovery.

Choices I hear you say, you can see here the differences between the product versions in this table.

Getting hold of it is simple you can download Vembu here. When you first download it you will be on a 30 day trial in which you will get all features for an unlimited number of VM’s. Since the only actual difference between the full and free edition is a licence at the end of the 30 day trial you can choose which way you go, licence to go fully featured or enjoy the free goodness.

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Vembu releases BDR Suite 3.8

Vembu has just released the 3.8 version of their BDR Suite. Let’s start at the beginning with a bit of background. The company was actually founded back in 2002 based out of Chennai India but also with offices in the US. Their core product is the Vembu BDR Suite which is able to backup:

  • VMware VM’s
  • Hyper-V VM’s
  • Physical windows machines
  • Office 365
  • Google Apps (G-Suite)
  • Cloud backup of AWS and Azure VM’s

The first thing that struck me with this product it’s maturity in terms of number of of items that can be backed up and also the scope of features available within the product. All management is controlled through a clean looking central console which is accessed via a web browser

VM based backups are agentless, capable of producing application aware backups and allow enable granular restore. High availability is key to all backup solutions and Vembu supports this with quick VM recovery and VM replication. VM replication allows the agentless replication of a VM to a target to allow near zero RTO. Vembu is available for a 30 day trial

Vembu have actually gone to the effort of creating their own file system which they call VembuHIVE, which keeps the backup files compressed, encrypted and has built in error correction.

What’s new?

Hopefully that gives you a flavour for what Vembu BDR is all about, so let’s look at what’s new in the latest 3.8 release.

OffsiteDR Seed – When first setting up offsite copies one of the key challenges can be the initial data sync which can take a significant amount of time and cause congestion on network links. OffsiteDR seed allows the data to be transferred using an offline method to overcome these challenges

Disk Image Backup in BDR – Previously agent based backups i.e. backups of physical machines had to be configured and managed via a separate server, this can now be done via the central BDR server

Storage Pooling – This feature allows a number of different storage targets to be pooled together to create what appears to be a single backup target. Useful for example if your current target has become full and there is not physical capacity for expansion

Auto Authorization – this is a security feature to ensure the backup data is not sent to an unknown server. Authorization of the backup servers is achieved by the generation of unique keys by the BDR server

 

 

 

 

 

I wanted to cover Vembu backup product which once I started reading up on it I realised was like a swiss army knife of backup products covering many aspects of backup.

 

Richard ArnoldLeave a comment