About Vembu
Founded in 2004, Vembu is a provider of a portfolio of software products and cloud services to small and medium businesses. Vembu offers the Vembu BDR Suite that can be used as a solution for the complete data center. It is an “all in one solution” that combines:
- Vembu VMBackup – Backup & Replication for VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V environments
- Vembu ImageBackup – Backup Windows Servers and Workstations deployed in physical environments
- Vembu NetworkBackup – Backup files/folders from Windows, Linux & Mac machines and also backup applications like MS Exchange, SQL, SharePoint, AD, Outlook and MySQL etc.
- Vembu OnlineBackup – Backup file/folders and applications like MS Exchange, SQL, SharePoint, AD, Outlook and etc. directly to Vembu Cloud
- Vembu SaaSBackup – Backup & Recovery Solution for SaaS Applications like Office 365 and Google Apps
Vembu VMBackup
Let’s have a look at Vembu VMBackup in this review. VMBackup is designed to backup and replicate the virtual machines by taking the snapshots of the VM images at the host (hypervisor) level. Vembu has developed it’s own proprietary driver to backup the Hyper-V VMs.
Installation
You must download Vembu BDR Suite v3.7.0. So you have a single executable to run:
Accept the license
You can customize some settings during the installation process
Vembu uses PostGreSQL. You can change the installation location to suit your needs:
Choose where Vembu will be installed
Here, you can choose between two modes:
- Local drive – Your storage repository will be located on the Vembu machine
- Network drive – You can add a shared folder (NFS or CIFS) as your storage repository
You can modify which ports will be used. In my example, I enabled HTTPS, so it means Vembu web interface will be avilable on 6061 port number:
You can change the default login and password. In a production environment, I advise you to not use “Admin” as the default login.
Click “Install”
Now, wait a few seconds
Click “Finish” to close the wizard
Vembu has been installed successfully! You are able to connect to the web interface via the following URL: https://<FQDN_Vembu_Server>:6061/
Configuration
If you try to add your first Hyper-V host from scratch, it will fail! So before configuring Vembu, you must change Vembu BDR service to run under domain user account. By default, this service is running under local system account. This change is required to install Vembu Integration Service on the Hyper-V host.
Navigate to services.msc and go to the properties:
Restart the service and log on to the web interface. You must configure the TimeZone, and the Vembu BDR Unique ID.
Next, add your Hyper-V host
Wait a few seconds while Vembu Integration Service is installed. Take a look at the services
Integration service is deployed on your Hyper-V host and installed into C:\Program Files\Vembu\VembuIntegrationService.
Vembu Integration Services performs the backup of the VMs and uses Hyper-V checkpoints. After the checkpoint is done, backup data is compressed and copied to the backup repository.
Backup job
Configuring a backup job is really straightforward
Restore job
Now I can easily restore my VM with a restore job. Here, I want to perform a restore at file level
Finally, I can browse the restored virtual machine
Conclusion
Vembu BDR Suite v3.7.0 is the latest version of Vembu’s backup software. This version has many new features:
- Stability and Performance Enhancements
- VMware vSphere 6.5 Support
- New User Interface
- Agentless Microsoft Hyper-V Backup with Changed Block Tracking Incremental
- Automatic Backups Verification
- …
In my opinion, Vembu VMBackup is a good backup software. Based on my lab environment, it works well. The web interface is developed in HTML5 and is very well structured, which is nice. Vembu is a bit younger than other solutions in the backup software market but has implemented all the features which are now common in other backup software.
I work on a daily basis with Veeam Software, and I also work with Nakivo Backup solution for my lab environments. I found that Hyper-V host integration was not very easy in my environment but it will be ok for small and medium deployments.
To finish, the use of Vembu BDR was done without any issues (except a network connectivity issue, due to firewall restrictions on my Hyper-V host).
More information here
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