Vembu BDR Suite v5.0 GA Product Overview [sponsored]

10. October 2021 Partners 0

Vembu just announced the General Availability of their flagship product Vembu BDR Suite v5.0. Vembu did a massive overhaul of their already comprehensive data protection solution with v5.0, and added a wide range of new features. Let’s start by listing the new features…

New features

  • Hyper-V VM Replication
  • Instant Boot Live Migration
  • Parallel VM Processing
  • Rotated Drives as Backup Repository
  • Grandfather-Father-Son Retention
  • Synthetic Full Backup
  • Backup Job template
  • Multi-host Backup Support
  • Application Item-level Recovery from web GUI
  • Microsoft 365 SharePoint Online Backup
  • Microsoft 365 Teams Backup
  • Backup for Google Workspace
  • Backup for AWS

Covering all these new features in a single blogpost is next to impossible. Being a VMware vExpert, I am going to dive a little deeper in some of the VMware specific features. In future blogposts I’ll cover some of the new cloud features, such as Backup for AWS. I have to point out it’s pretty impressive how many different types of endpoints Vembu BDR Suite v5.0 supports in a single data protection solution. If you are looking for a complete overview of the new features and enhancements, check out the Release Notes, or better yet download a full-featured 30-day trial and see for yourself.

Product Overview

Installation

Vembu BDR Suite v5.0 is available as a Windows 64-bit installer. The installation of the Vembu BDR Backup Server is pretty straightforward using the installation wizard. I was running a previous beta release which I had to uninstall first. I had to use the “VembuBDRSuiteCleanupTool.exe” referenced in KB115127 to remove the beta release. After that, the installation was smooth:

Getting Started

The steps required to finish the configuration are shown by the Getting Started wizard:

Backup Repository

First up is to configure the Backup Repository where we will store our backup data. Vembu BDR Suite v5.0 currently supports Block Storage with Object Storage coming in the next release. For Block Storage we can choose between a Simple, Scale Out or Disk Rotation Repository Type. I’m using the Scale Out filesystem:

Data Sources

Next, I connected Vembu BDR Suite to my vSphere 7.0 homelab environment and configured it as a Data Source:

Configure Backup

After connecting to vCenter Server, we can create our first backup job. The Host/VM topology is collected and we can select the VMs we would like to protect:

Vembu BDR Suite v5.0 supports Application Aware backups for Windows and Oracle platforms. See the Supported Platforms Guide to see which platforms are supported. Vembu BDR Suite v5.0 also supports VMware Quiescing to ensure crash-consistent backups. At the Settings tab, we see the the GFS Retention options to ensure backup copies can be stored safely following the GFS scheme. Let’s run the backup job:

Restore options

After successfully protecting our test VM called ‘database01’, let’s take a look at the restore options:

One of the most interesting recovery options is the ‘Instant Boot VM’ option. This allows you to boot your VM instantly from the Backup Repository. This means you don’t have to restore the VM first to your primary storage tier before you can recover. This is especially useful when you need to inspect multiple point in time recovery point quickly (in a Ransomware recovery scenario for example)

The Backup Repository is presented to vSphere as an NFS mount and the VM can be started instantly:

Once you have found the correct point in time recovery for that specific VM, you can Live Migrate it to primary storage:

Another interesting restore option is Vembu Virtual Drive in which the Backup Repository is presented to the Backup Server as a “Virtual Drive”. This allows backup admins to locally mount the backup data and browse through it.

Of course, Vembu BDR Suite v5.0 also supports Full VM recovery, Disk Level Recovery and File Level Recovery (for Windows NTFS).

In conclusion

I’m really impressed with the v5.0 release of Vembu BDR Suite. I haven’t even touched the surface yet of this release. There is so much more to cover from a features perspective. It provides a complete Data Protection & Disaster Recovery solution for data centers, cloud and SaaS. I’m really looking forward to the upcoming releases and the direction Vembu is taking this product!

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