BDRSuite Backup & Replication Reviews

I'm using the backup from Vembu for my home lab where I have ESXi. I'm backing up VMware servers. That's all I use it for.  I have Oracle Databases running in these VM machines and I do testing, patches, upgrades, etc. I want to be able to back them up and, if need be, restore them so that I don't have to rebuild them.

I'm running it in a Windows Server in a VM machine. I have ESXi 6.7 running on a Dell PowerEdge R720 and I have a Windows 10 VM running in that. And in that I have the Vembu BDR running as my backup server.

It helps me with restores. I can repeat a test multiple times: Do the test, the restore, and then test again. It saves me time because I don't have to rebuild the VMs every time; rather, I just do a restore. I would estimate it's saving me four to eight hours every time I have to do a restore.

I also had a disk crash and the restore was important because I didn't have to rebuild it. So it helps with data recovery as well.

It gives me peace of mind because I don't have to do the rebuilds. In a home lab, documentation is not usually at the forefront of your thoughts. You are just trying to get it built and tested. Having the ability to back it up and restore without having to remember all the options were that you had installed and what was the data like before, it gives me peace of mind that I have the restore.

The two features that I use are the backup and the restore.

The only thing with room for improvement, as everybody says, since I'm in a home lab, would be the price for the CPU; the cost. If I were to add another CPU, I would start to get into an expense where I would question, "Do I really want to continue backing this stuff up?" But from what I could tell, this was definitely the least expensive option to go with.

I have been using it for about eight months. I bought my first license in April and then I had to buy another one because I added another ESXi server. I have two licenses and they're both for five years. My intention is to be using it for five years and I won't be switching out.

I'm on the most recent version because I just upgraded when it came out.

It has been very stable. There haven't been any issues.

I have it licensed on two CPUs, one CPU in each machine, and it has not had a problem with the 40 VMs that I have.

The only way I would be increasing usage would be if the cost would allow me to add it to another machine. The other machine I'd like to add it to has two CPUs in it, so I would be doubling my license cost. Right now, that's not an option.

For the issues that I've had, the tech support has been very good. I've had no complaints and they've been very responsive. I've only had three or four issues, and they have all been resolved. That has been a very good experience.

The last reason I had to contact support was for a restore that I needed to do. I also moved ESXi servers, so I had to have some assistance because the backup was done on one ESXi server and then I moved it to another ESXi server. I needed to do the restore and tech support assisted with that.

There has never been a situation where I had tiered tech support, where the first person I got didn't know and handed me off to the next person who handed me off to the next person.

Veeam was what I was using before I went to Vembu. 

The wording, when you start Googling this stuff, gets kind of questionable because it says "unlimited free VMs." That really isn't true. You can only do a couple before you can't do anything with it. Veeam was the one I was using first. But when I hit my third VM, it wasn't working anymore. You could only actually do three and you would have to roll out one before you could roll in one. 

The initial set up was very easy. It was just like installing anything on Windows 10. It took about 15 minutes.

The first time around I did it myself. I did move it from one VM machine to another VM machine and I had assistance with that from Vembu, and that assistance was very helpful. That was part of standard tech support.

As far as competitors' prices go, Vembu was definitely better than all the competitors I found.

I would guess it has saved me 30 to 50 percent. The problem is that I'm a single-person home lab, so I have no idea what kind of licensing things happen for a corporation which is looking to buy 500 CPUs. If you were to do that and you were to look at the cost per CPU versus my cost per CPU, theirs might be 50 percent less than what I'm paying.

Veeam was one of the solutions within a list of solutions I evaluated. Cost was definitely one of the big differences, but I didn't use Veeam long enough to go down that path. When I hit the third VM, which was within the day that I started using it, I stopped using it.

Make sure you plan out your backup server for the long-term. When I did this I moved my backup server. When I moved it from one machine to another machine and the IP address changed, there were some headaches. I had to get the knowledge documents and I had to get tech support involved to help me outside of the knowledge document. So try to plan out, for as long as you can plan out, that this is the server, it isn't changing, etc.

It has worked as expected. It's straightforward for backing up and it's straightforward for doing the restores. Other than the navigation and what buttons to push, there's really no learning curve here.

I'm not using the encryption. If the deduplication is in use, it must be so by default because I have not done anything with it.

For what I need it to do, and compared to the other products that are out there, this is the most cost-efficient and best solution for my needs.

We use it for providing backups and recovery. We have a file server with a little over seven terabytes of data. The content changes quite a bit and we needed an easy tool to work with that would give us the ability to restore in a variety of ways: at the individual file level, folder level, and whole volume level, if necessary. This tool does that for us.

We're in telecom and wireless. We do installations and maintenance of towers and equipment for microwave and cellular. We do that mostly in the United States, occasionally in other places in the world. We'll have 400 people out in the field providing data to us that we have to put in a repository, that's the file server, that shows work prior to us initiating our work assignment from our customer, during the process, and at completion. That way, the customer doesn't have to go to remote places to verify. Sometimes, we can address an intermittent problem and say it's fixed and, of course, it comes back the next day because it really wasn't fixed. So, it's hard for our customer to know when something is done.

So we take a lot of images of our work, associated with projects, and those are uploaded by the field people every day. We provide the backup necessary to our customer. We'll receive ten or 20 gigabytes of images daily, which go into the repository. They have to be tracked and recorded, put into the reports associated with the projects and the status of those projects, and then provided to our customers.

That's what we do on a daily basis. We're a 24/7 shop, so what we do has to minimize downtime, so that the tools are available to the people, especially if they're in the field. They'll VPN in and provide reports and images necessary to show the work has been performed.

The nice thing about Vembu is that when it's running - as it does incrementals daily - we don't see a negative hit on the performance of the server it runs on. I can also pause it, should that happen, but I've never had to do that. 

It generates daily reports. I look at them seven days a week, even though I only work five days a week, because I want to make sure that everything's working fine. From a productivity standpoint, it has not hindered anyone and it keeps me very well informed that our backups are being completed. It gives me the data that I need to know, that makes me feel comfortable: Yes, that makes sense for that day, that much data being added to our repository, etc.

It has made my job, making sure we have a backup and being able to count on using it, a lot easier. As far as impacting the user community that uses the file server that's being addressed for backup purposes, it has not impacted them in any negative way whatsoever.

Finally, it helps us deliver an enterprise-level data protection solution and reduce budgets at a price that - and we don't want to encourage them to change their pricing - is a great value.

The dashboard is very easy to use, setting up the backup is very intuitive. Since that's our primary purpose in using it, it made it easy, when I was doing evaluations a year ago, to choose the product.

If I want to back up to this past Friday, and reinstall the file server to that state, I can choose a point in time and issue the command to back up and I don't need to go in and restore the last full backup and then apply iteratively, sequentially, all the incrementals, as I've had to do in some other software in the past. It's nice that I can pick a point in time and tell it I want to go to that state and it's transparent to me. It happens in the background for me.

It's very easy to use, very quick and efficient. From a backup standpoint, it has provided us the tools we need on a daily basis to know that it's working properly and with almost no manual maintenance work from us to verify it. It just comes to us. It's been very positive, helping us address that need efficiently.

In the beginning, when we had some hiccups, I would chalk that up more to a learning curve for the product. Once we understood how it operated - where we thought it was doing something a certain way and it was not - it was easy to understand, once it was pointed out.

The times when we've had problems, they've not been repeated problems, they've been addressed, and it was more learning curve issues. With any software there is a learning curve. Not all backup software operates exactly the same way, so some things were a little bit different. But once we understood why and how they worked, it made sense. It was sometimes a different approach, but not a problem for us.

There is no problem with the product's stability. We get our nightly reports on schedule. We've never had the application fail, and better, the application doesn't interfere with anyone else's application. It's been everything and more than what we had hoped for.

I can only speak for our environment where we've used it - and I know it has so much more capabilities, because when we go in through the dashboard and the wizard to create backups, we see where we could use it and how we could use it. But in our environment, whether we had seven-and-a-half terabytes or 15, I wouldn't have to change anything.

The other thing that I like is that it has software to provide a distributed copy to another site. It's a very economical add-on to the suite. But because it's terabytes, and with it going across the Internet to do the initial cloning of that, it has a feature where you bring in your other servers, set it up, establish your initial clone there, and you put the server out and then you only have to keep track of the changes, which is much easier to do. We have a 100-megabit connection to the internet, but even there, if you're going to have to keep terabytes worth of data synced, it would be really hard. In this case, we only have to keep track of the delta once the initial distributed backup has been made.

It has a lot of capabilities. We just started getting into the distributed backup and, from a scalability perspective, I've not seen any issues in our use of it. And especially in the beginning, we monitored the resource usage to make sure that we didn't see a degradation on the server to the user. That was not a problem.

I could easily see us doubling what we're backing up without any issues and problems and with no additional tuning necessary.

The other thing that stands out, while it isn't a feature per se, is support. Any time we have a question, whether we call or email them, we get an amazing response. We're not a Fortune 500 company, we're smaller, we don't have a large number of licenses yet. But we get quick response and follow-up to make sure that the issue has been properly addressed, as though we were a Fortune 500 company. I'm amazed by the level of support they provide.

Last time I contacted them was because the volume that we put our backups on became full, and I wasn't sure what the best way was to address the problem. They gave me directions on how to address the problem, but more importantly, on how to avoid the problem in the future.

Around October of 2018, I did escalate an issue regarding backups but that was the only time that I can remember having to do so. Like everything else, it went extremely well. The follow-up and the level of detail, hands-on, were great. I've been in IT for 40 years and it's not something I'm used to seeing. It has been a nice surprise.

The oldest previous solution we had was Windows Server Backup.

Once we put Vembu on the production server, we ran a full backup that evening. That's probably one of the nicest things about the backup. Not that companies don't have seven-plus terabytes of data to backup - that's large, but there are certainly many that have much more than that - but backing up that much data in Windows Backup is an impossible task. So the ability to address the data in the way that Vembu does, versus the way Windows Backup does, we had to use a Vembu-type product. There was no choice. Seven-and-a-half terabytes in Windows Backup, on a server level, would've taken weeks, which is not acceptable.

We needed a solution that was doable. Some of the solutions that we were using took an unreasonable amount of time to back up the data. Even when they were running on the same server and the pool was on the same server that they were backing up to, it was not acceptable. We needed something that was more efficient in the way it addressed reading the file structure. Vembu provided that. Then we had the additional functionalities that we wanted to be able to restore the way I mentioned, plus the support. I can't say enough about the support Vembu. I just don't have any other positive experiences that are as nice as what they provide.

Nothing was complex regarding the initial setup. We could do backups on day one with the software. It wasn't a question of just doing the backups but of trying to do them so it provided us the greatest amount of flexibility and that we were using our pool space as efficiently as we could. That took a little bit of investigating and communication with support. But once we understood it, it was not a problem.

On the initial install, there were some things that I thought were going to happen a little differently. We thought we wouldn't eat up the size of our pool, our repository, for backups as quickly because of compression. But when you think about it, that's not a Vembu issue. That's just a practical result of the fact that jpegs already come compressed, so you're not going to get much compression. We underestimated the amount of space we needed.

Installing it takes just a couple of hours. It's easy to do. There was no negative impact on anything else running on it. It was simple. We did a backup the same day we installed it, in a test environment, so we could do whatever we wanted. We could do restores, do incrementals, combine incrementals to weeklies, etc. And we didn't have any problem doing any of those things. We'd have a question, periodically, but we would get a response the same day, which was always nice.

In terms of staff for deployment, I'll divide that into two pieces. One was a more thorough test of our environment, versus not the high-level tests that we did during the evaluations. We did that over a two-week period of time with a quarter to a half of a person.

Regarding the implementation strategy we developed, there was an assessment of what our needs were, tailored to our specific situation. Once we did that, we evaluated what products we might be able to use. We then considered support and maintenance issues and would the products be able to function within our requirements, timeframes, and give us the backup capabilities at the levels that we wanted: file, folder, and volume. This process allowed us to come up with a shortlist of three products and do a little bit deeper testing with them and decide on which one we thought was the best. 

We haven't done an analysis of how much money we have saved by switching to Vembu. We did a post-implementation assessment that made sure all of our requirements were met. Part of that is financial, but I can divulge the savings that it provided.

I've worked for extremely large companies as well as startup companies. In our environment - out of this office we have 400 field people - we're a relatively small business. If I was backing up multiple file servers, much more data than we are, it wouldn't take much more time with Vembu. There's an inherent amount of time to install and get to know a product, and then to use it. If it's pretty intuitive with good support, it can be really easy. Vembu has turned out to be really easy. The amount of budget associated with supporting is way under what we expected. That's a good thing and that's because of the support that they provide, instead of us having to do things like we have to do with some of our other applications.

For example, we've used our accounting system for a long time here, and people are used to it; creatures of habit, like most. But the amount of support that it takes, despite it being here for decades, means that any time we make a change it's way more involved. There's an element of risk that we don't care for. It's not what we like. There's an unpredictability about it. We have not seen that with the Vembu product.

It's an amazing value. Their licensing structure is easy to understand and it's very fair. We don't have any problem with it.

We looked at different tools and tested them ourselves. We had our own requirements list of what we needed to do, and it was all tailored to our environment. The evaluation occurred over a month of elapsed time and probably involved a person to person-and-a-half in that period of time.

Quite honestly, we could have gone with other products, but the support level from Vembu was unparalleled. Today, a lot of companies want to refer you to a forum, a community, and they don't want to talk. They don't want to provide people who know the product and know your situation. It's hard to find an example in a forum that is exactly like what you're trying to address. Vembu, consistently over the month, as well as the second-level evaluation, was always there to provide support and answer questions. It was a deciding factor, absolutely. They had the functionality, but they provided the real people for support, which just made a world of difference for us.

Some of the companies that we were using and evaluating, when we told them what we ended up choosing, just out of courtesy, in some cases they either didn't know who they were or acted like they didn't know who they were. 

It was an easy decision, when it came to the end, to choose Vembu.

It has to meet your needs. But for most people, for backups of large amounts of data, I would strongly encourage you to use it, and not be hesitant to contact the support desk if you have a question. Don't just install it with the intent that your first use is going to be your final setup because there are ways to tune it to make it more efficient on space usage for the pool where you put your backups. The help is there. That's the good thing. With most other products, you're not going to get the same response. Use the help and you're probably going to be quite happy with it.

I would encourage you to count on support, run your tests, play with it, and you'll be pleasantly surprised and happy with the results.

Of the software that I license, I feel I get more value from this than any others. I just can't think of anything that I'm looking for that Vembu BDR isn't already addressing. I've got no wish list for them.

Everything I need is being addressed by the product and then some. I wish them great success and I want them to be around a long time. I don't want to have to go and replace this. This is a good product. It does what we need and I'm not seeing anything that I wish it had.

I like the compression, encryption, and deduplication features, although in our case, we don't get much compression because a lot of our material is already compressed. There just isn't an opportunity to see a big reduction. But the tools allow us to have every feature we want, including being able to restore from the backups. Of course, we don't have to do full backups very often, because of the way it has been set up.

Encryption today is, obviously, given privacy issues and confidentiality, very important. In our particular case, it's an added plus but it wasn't a real high criterion because the data that we have is not considered highly confidential. In fact, if it was put out in the public domain, it would not cause our customer or ourselves a problem. It's nice to have, but it wasn't something that was as critical to us as it might be to a lot of others.

We don't use it to back up our virtual environments. We keep things very discreet here. We don't run a VM type of environment. Servers are by function. Hardware has become so incredibly cheap. I understand the savings, the value with VM and having a virtual environment for different things. But to us, hardware is just incredibly inexpensive. If we have something in our accounting system that needs to be addressed, an upgrade or the like, we like having it on its own server and discreet from everything else. It also inherently provides easier access control for those systems that are more critical, in terms of the type of information on them.

Regarding staff for maintenance of the solution, we're talking fractions. We just look at our reports daily just to make sure that they are giving us the information we need, indicating that backups were successful and that the expected amount of data that was backed up. We know how much data comes in every day approximately. We can confirm that it's been done properly. It's just minutes a day. I don't think it needs a full day per month of attention. The maintenance is extremely low.

We have other environments that we need to address in a different way than we are today. The company is old enough that, like most entities, it is a creature of habit. So changing the way we do things is a little slow sometimes. But I can see us using this in several other environments, other than what we initially targeted. I can't tell you when that will happen but I believe that it will happen because of the experience we've had.

The end-users don't use it, per se, because they have no touch with it. It's IT that uses it. Nobody has a problem with it. We have a small group of six IT people in this main building. We try to get different people exposed to it. They vary from application support, mostly in the accounting area, and then, because we do a lot of VPN, we have network people who handle network security. We have failover network with multiple ISPs so networking becomes a big issue, plus the security side. Percentage-wise, there are more people involved in network and security than in many companies. Yet those people are still required to be able to support the applications we have, including Vembu. Nobody's had a problem doing that.

I'd love to try it in a virtual environment. We just don't do that here. We're a Windows Server shop, so I've not tried it in other operating systems, like Unix and Linux.

For my needs, I'd give Vembu a nine out of ten, and that's only because I'm hesitant to say anything is perfect.

Everything could be improved. For example, if you were to have a custom backup solution created, it might be a ten if they achieved everything you listed regarding what you need. But it's not practical to do that for an individual or a small company. I've been responsible for a lot of development people and developing applications. It's somewhat subjective on where you place buttons and how efficient they are.

Once you get used to a product, if it wasn't made for you, and it's working and meeting all your needs, without having negative side effects, you got to give it a high score. It's the only fair thing to do. The only way for me to get to a ten is to say that it's perfect, that it laid out all its buttons and features just as I would. If I had written it, maybe that would be the case, but by the time I had written it and gotten it done, I'd be retired. 

It's a great product. Amazing support. It's a very good value for our environment, no question. We will not change. This is a good product that does everything we want and more.

We use it for replication to our disaster recovery sites for the storage we have on-prem. We needed our critical infrastructure and our critical applications backed up. We needed to have something we can restore from when we have an issue.

Our environment is hybrid. We have some of our servers on-prem, some on Azure, and some on AWS.

With Hyper-V it helps to ensure high availability. Before I started using Vembu, if I wanted to back up my Hyper-V what I would normally do is go to the folder where I have the VM and copy the hard disk, the VM image. With that I would be able to restore easily. With Vembu, with just the click of a button, it does my backup. I've done a series of restores to test what I'm backing up because that's the essence of a backup — to see how it comes back — and it comes out fine. In VMware you don't just copy your image, but for VMware Vembu also does a perfect job.

Vembu has also ensured that the disaster recovery aspect of our business is well taken care of. It is very critical to the business to have a tested backup. Vembu has helped us a lot in that way. We have restored from Vembu backups several times.

It has saved us a lot of money, but it's not quantifiable. If you have an issue that would cost a whole lot of money but you have a proper backup solution so you don't have to spend that money, you just restore. It might have saved us millions, in Nigerian money.

It saves us time because I just schedule the backups the way I want them and that's it. I don't have to worry about my backups. I'm certain that my data has been backed up. It saves a whole lot of man-hours.

The backup is very reliable for both VMware and Hyper-V.

In terms of the compression, Vembu's product is quite good compared to what I've seen from other products. 

The encryption is okay. That security feature is fine. You have the option of either encrypting the backup or not. I don't use it in all cases, but I will use it if I'm backing up something and it will be taken outside of our environment. For example, if I'm backing up a VM to an external tape drive or hard drive, I will use that option, to give it another level of security.

They keep on improving and I can't see anything that they need to add for now.

We have been using Vembu for the past four years.

This year was the first time I had an issue with it. I don't know how the issue started. I called their support team and they told me what to do. I tried it but I then decided to simply do a fresh installation.

Vembu is very scalable because it gives you everything you could want. Our environment is medium-sized.

We definitely have plans to expand our usage of it. When you get value from a product you love to do more with it.

I love Vembu's customer care. If you have any issues or questions, they respond and their response time is quick. Their technical support is good. I would rate it at eight out of 10. I had a conversation with them last night. I sent them an email and they immediately responded.

Prior to using Vembu I tried Acronis. That is what we were using before we dropped it for Vembu. The main difference I see between Vembu and the other solutions we've tried is that with Vembu, you don't need anybody to tell you what to do. Once you have done the installation you just look at the user interface — it's very friendly — and you can do things yourself without resorting to help from anybody.

If I want to back up a VM or all the servers I have in vSphere, I just drop the password of vSphere and it will do everything automatically for you. You just tell it what you want to back up. Acronis doesn't work that way. The guys on my team found Acronis difficult to use. In terms of user-friendliness, Vembu does a better job. With the click of a button, you know what you need to do.

Acronis would time out most of the time. If you have a slight network-connectivity issue, it causes a problem.

I found Vembu by searching online for free backup solutions. I saw a lot of solutions but that is how I started with Vembu, with their free version. I saw that it solved my problems.

To install Vembu, the only thing that takes time is the download. But once you have downloaded it, within 30 minutes you are up and running. You schedule your backups and you go to sleep.

I was the only one involved in the setup.

There are two guys on my team who maintain it. They have administrative rights on Vembu, like me. They also have many other responsibilities besides Vembu. It doesn't take a lot of effort to maintain it. Once you're up and running you just check your backups and the status to make sure that everything is running. And if there is an issue, you check the log to see why you are having that issue.

I did not need a third-party to deploy Vembu. But when I used Acronis, I had to call their support. Acronis has a partner here in Nigeria that I worked with. The fact that I had to work with a partner with Acronis, and I didn't have to with Vembu, is a major difference.

The overall return on investment is quite good. It's good for the business. The margin is on the positive side.

The pricing of Vembu could be better. They have a good product, and I know good products cost money, but they need to find a balance.

I also looked at Veeam. I used Veeam for a while before Acronis. Veeam is a fantastic product. I think it is one of the best. It is in the same class with Vembu. I went with Vembu because it is very easy to use. It is easy to install. With the click of a button you can manage everything: add a VM and do your backup.

It gives me peace of mind. If your infrastructure backup is up and running and trusted, it gives you peace of mind.

I have recommended it to a number of people.

It's important to note that most backup solutions will tell you that you can download and use their solution for free. But the truth is that that is not the case for almost all of them. After some time, you will have to pay for a license to backup critical sources.

We were looking for a backup for Red Hat Virtualization. We don't need any advanced features from a backup solution yet. We don't have VMware or Hyper-V, we only have Red Hat Virtualization.

We are a service provider and we have many customers but we are only using this solution for one of our customers. They have a small environment with four servers.

It was very difficult to find a product that supports Red Hat Virtualization natively and to take a snapshot of the VM or a full backup or a dump from the machine. The option that Vembu proposed, to take the machine as an image, take it from the system, is also good. It has enhanced our backup system. Before, it was very difficult and we did it manually. Now, it's easy to take an image from Red Hat.

BDR Suite helps us deliver an enterprise-level data protection solution and reduce our budgets. It is about half of the cost of other products we looked at.

• It's easy to install.
• It's simple to configure.

They said they can support Red Hat Virtualization and we assumed that they support any compatible system but we found we need to do a network backup or a network image, which is not what it said on their website. I have had many discussions with them about where this component is. Initially, I was searching for a component which would back up Red Hat Virtualization. They said they support this in the same way they support Hyper-V and VMware. I haven't found the feature in their portal or in any of their software. They haven't made a special agent for it, in the way they did for Hyper-V.

When we were in negotiations and discussing this with their pre-sales, we said we haven't found any documents from them talking about how they support Red Hat Virtualization. At the end of the day they said, "No, we deal with Red Hat Virtualization in the same way that we take an image of a file through the network." It's not native in the solution itself. For VMware they have a special agent. But for Red Hat, it's just a network backup, the same as files. When I asked about a license to support Red Hat, they said you just take the network backup and it will do the same job.

For the moment, that is fine for us. We will take the image. But it is not what we expected from the product.

We started with it just before the [COVID-19] lockdown in April, but we haven't worked much with it yet.

We have yet to test the stability of the solution.

We have also not yet tested the scalability.

In the future we may increase usage if we find it's good for backup. We plan to take the DR solution from them.

We haven't had to contact technical support yet.

We have used many solutions in the past. We switched to Vembu because of the Red Hat Virtualization. Our old solutions don't support it.

The initial setup was straightforward. There were no difficulties and no advanced settings that you need to learn before you do the setup. We had it deployed within minutes.

We have an enterprise license. We found it very simple and straightforward. For our needs, the price of the backup system is not too much.

However, the prices are not clear in the portal. Not all the items are listed.

We checked out Veeam and Acronis but both were very expensive compared to Vembu.

I can recommend Vembu for those who need just file backup.

It's a straightforward solution. It was easy to install and deploy for many machines, taking backups from files and servers in the same way. They offer 10 GB for cloud that you can use for free.

We haven't tested its compression, encryption, or deduplication features yet. So far, just our system admin is using and maintaining the solution.

The primary intended target for it was VMware backup and utilizing it in a VMware environment. It is a production, Active Directory, file server type of environment.

I am using the current version.

It hasn't improved the way our company functions from an operational standpoint.

The compression, encryption, and deduplication features are fabulous and great stuff.

What would have been most valuable for me, would have been the convenience and ease of doing the VMware backups along with the ability to provide a low-level, file level, restore all capability without having to structure the detailed Windows Backups association. So, an ease of setup with a granularity of a restore all capability without having to use a standard Windows Backup. I would need to upgrade my VM environment for this to work currently.

I investigated Vembu probably for the first time a couple of years back. I evaluated it in just a quick and dirty manner without any real followup on it. Subsequent to that, I have been more actively utilizing it for about a year.

It seems to be stable. No concerns about that.

Two people are required for deployment and maintenance of this solution.

My impression of the scalability is good. My scalability requirement isn't what some others might be, but the solution appears to be fully scalable.

It is being used in probably 80 percent of our environment. It's not a large environment. We probably won't scale out to the remainder. Eventually, the environment will be drawn in to the point where it's probably 100 percent of the environment that will be covered under Vembu, then that environment will be relatively stable. It won't change past that.

There are just a couple of us actually utilizing it. We're relatively small, so there are really just a couple of users for admin in there. It's a support environment.

From both the sales and technical support standpoint, they have been great. They have helped out to the extent that they can, but it hasn't been enough. There are things that they can't do and it's going to have to happen on my side (in my production environment). It was not clear from the evaluation level, when we ran through evaluation on it, that this was going to be an issue when we got to production.

Previously, it was a bit different because our environment had been a hosted environment. There was a different tool being utilized by the hosted provider. Our implementation of Vembu was a standup as we brought something in-house.

The initial setup was straightforward.

There were issues with the implementation because of incompatibilities between the tool implementation and our current VMware installation. So, it was an implementation issue that doesn't allow me to use it for VMware backup in the manner in which we would want to use it. That wasn't clear from the evaluation stage nor was it clear from the first utilization of it because it worked in the environment that it was being evaluated in. Based on that, we went ahead and made the purchase of the full implementation. At that point, it became clear that there would be limitations in that implementation that could not be overcome without doing upgrades to the production environment.

The evaluation and deployment took a couple of months.

To get through the evaluation did require support from from them. They were supportive and did provide that support.

There was an implementation strategy with some specific needs that were fulfilled by Vembu. It was an implementation strategy that included a consolidation and transition at the same time. It was a bit of a complex strategy and Vembu fulfilled it. Vembu was the tool of choice because of its ability to do that and because of the features in the suite. What was disconcerting was that it was able to do that part of it, but then when we went to put it into full production, then we encountered these other difficulties that hadn't been planned for or counted on.

To continue to do backups, we fell back to Windows Backup mode. We are still using the tool, but not in the manner in which we would have wanted. The tool purchase doesn't cover all options of the tool, e.g., if I go in and buy it, I have to buy it licensed for VMware Backups, not Windows Backups. At this point, what had to happen was they had to allow it to operate in Windows Backup so I could continue to back up the VMs, but in a trial mode. The trial mode has been extended once, and now we're reaching the limit of that extension again. Because I still haven't been able to update the production VMware environment such that the tool will operate in it in the manner in which I want it to operate, I'm stuck having to go back again to say, "Sorry, I need to extend this trial on it again." Even though I've paid, I'm still only able to operate in a trial mode. So, it's been difficult for us. 

I've purchased and been licensed for one aspect of it, which is my preferred method, but the pricing and licensing will not work for the short-term and I can't draw back.

Yes, we did survey others. We didn't match up evaluations. We just didn't have a lot of resources for it. There was a desktop environment to a test evaluation.

We primarily went with Vembu for its flexibility and features.

You should never evaluate in your production environment, but make sure your evaluation is done as close as possible to your target.

We are not using it with Hyper-V.

I would rate this product in the high eights or nine (out of 10).

The primary use case is to be able to back up data outside of on-premise with the ability to restore as fast as possible. We also use Vembu NetworkBackup to selectively back up files on the file share along with our virtual machines. It gives us more control over what we can backup and restore, especially in the files.

We use this solution to back up our virtual environments. 

All the features are valuable for different reasons. 

The restoring of virtual machines and deduplication features are good. We save time by recreating or deduplicating a machine, as it done automatically. With one or two clicks, we can get something done. We are then pretty sure it is the same as it was before; it is a real duplicate. The deduplication features are useful for accelerating the transfers and when we have more than one version of a virtual machine or backup without taking up X time or space.

If we do a backup of a machine at some point and the server crashes, then we can restore this machine to a different server with the same settings and setup. We will just have to tweak one or two things, like the IP. Then, it is ready to go. This is not quite high availability. However, if we use the replication feature to make an exact copy of the machine, then we can tweak them to work together as active-active or active-passive. This can help us to save time because the deduplication is done automatically without errors and we have minimal changes to do.

I like also the feature where you back up a virtual machine, then it will run a startup and you can take a screenshot of the first few seconds of the bootup. This way, at a quick glance, we can determine the backup is bootable and whether the backup of the virtual machine will be functional or not. Sometimes testing the backup is something that we don't always do on a regular basis until we find out that something is broken. Then, we didn't know until it's too late. So, this feature is appreciated.

With the configuration of backups, there are a few things I would change with the UI. 

One thing that I reported with the backups: When there are accentuated characters in a path, then we can't restore documents into a folder. There is a bug with the restoration and restoring files with accentuated characters in the path. Hopefully, they have repaired this because otherwise we will restore files and find out that they are not there.

A little over a year.

It is pretty stable.

I have just two physical machines with five or six VMs each. It is not that big of a setup. From a scalability perspective, I don't know if it will be good or not, but I believe it will be.

There are three users of the solution: a VP of operations, someone who is a jack-of-all-trades, and myself. There is no one with a specific skill set for this. It is really easy to figure out.

The technical support has been good. They have been dedicated to resolving issues.

Vembu was the first solution of this type. This solution was recommended to us.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was easy to install. There are not too many options and it was ready to go almost out-of-the-box. We have a really simple setup so the deployment took an hour or two. 

We have seen ROI based on confidence and time saved. We save a few hundred dollars a year.

We have the enterprise version with two server licenses.

Take a look at the pricing and licensing closely. When we installed the BDR disaster recovery server, which is the duplication of the backup data on one server onto a second one where the backup data resides, it was not clear that this DR server needed two other licenses. These licenses were to back up the copy of the first backup server that had two licenses for the two physical host that it was backing up in the first place. Moving files around to a second DR server, why would I need an extra two licenses? I don't know if it's to make money, but it was not very obvious and I had to abort the project from there because I didn't plan to pay for extra licenses to copy data of the first two physical servers. I also didn't understand why it was needed. Hopefully, they will improve the explanation in the documentation for this.

I compared different vendors' functionalities, our requirements, and price. We chose this solution because it was cheaper and easier to use than Veeam and other solutions of this type. Though they are not easy to compare as they all have different licensing models.

Make sure you have a clear view of your architecture and how you will be implementing it. Decide upfront which site will receive the backup and which site will do the deduplication of the backup's redundancy. As mentioned, I started to do some backups on the second office site and wanted to move the backups on to third site for disaster recovery, but I figured out that it would be better to install the backup server on the third site and the deduplication on the second site. However, just exchanging their roles was not that easy because I was missing licensing and backups were already running. I would recommend to ask questions, figure out the licensing model, what needs to be installed where, and their best practices. For example, if I have to do things again, I would do things differently.

I would give the product a seven (out of 10).

We use it for backing up VMs.

We are using it with VMware and the benefit is that we have reliable backups.

It's pretty basic backup stuff. I set it up and it just runs.

The compression, encryption, and deduplication features all work fine.

The system died twice and it was apparently the result of corrupted disk sectors. I tried to work with tech support to fix it, but they essentially gave up. So twice, I had to rebuild our server. I don't know why that happened and tech support didn't seem particularly concerned about figuring it out. That's my only complaint.

We've been using Vembu BDR Suite for about a year.

It did completely die twice and couldn't be revived. If that happens again, we're probably going to look at another product. My only concern is the stability.

We're not likely to be adding too many more VMs anytime soon. So I don't have any way of judging the scalability. We might deploy it on another site. We'll see about that.

Technical support is good but the problem I have is that I often can't understand the technicians because they have extremely heavy accents, and that makes communication kind of difficult.

We were using VDP, which is a free application from ESX. But it's not very good, in fact it's awful, and it's no longer supported. We replaced it with Vembu and we're quite happy.

The initial setup is simple. It didn't take more than a day or so, including testing. I got a trial version and decided it did what we want it to do and then I just set it up.

The solution provides us with enterprise-level data protection.

The pricing is quite reasonable.

If you can't afford Veeam, which is very expensive, I would recommend Vembu.

Vembu is used by me and another system administrator. That's it. We manage it, but it only requires one person for deployment and maintenance. 

Our end-users don't know it's there.

I use it as a backup solution for our VMware system.

I get my backups done. If I don't get my backups done and something goes wrong, I lose my job. The benefit of using it is that I keep my job.

Vembu helps me deliver an enterprise-level data protection solution and reduce budgets.

The cost is one of the most valuable features.

The problem that I had getting this up and running was that when I put in a backup plan, and wanted to run that backup plan, that plan had to go onto the server that it's going to do the backup on, and it had to pass on credentials. It would be nice, when you create the credentials for logging on to the server, if it would immediately verify that those credentials work. What ended up happening is I'd have to wait until nighttime to really figure out whether those credentials were valid or not. That prompted me to call support.

We've been using Vembu, as a company, for about three months.

The stability has been okay.

The scalability is fine.

I'm the only one in our organization who uses the solution and I'm responsible for its maintenance.

The problem that I really had — and it was not the product — is that when I called in, the phone system is a negative five on a scale from one to ten, where one is the worst. They wanted me to leave a message. When there is a problem with the product and you call in, you want to talk to somebody or wait to talk to somebody, not leave a message. If our system is down and someone says to me, "What's going on? Our system is down. Our company's not running. What are you doing?" the conversation would go something like this:

"I'm waiting for a phone call back." 

"You're waiting for a what? A phone call back? You get on that phone and get those guys on the line." 

And he would use some other choice words before the word "phone."

Their response was quick, but I'd rather wait on hold. I'll listen to music. In that same scenario where someone asks me what is happening and I say, "Oh, I'm on hold. I'm waiting for support to respond to me," they would say, "Oh, okay. That's good. You've got it under control." It's all perception. Have you ever run a program and it just sits there and sits there and you have no idea how long it's going to take for the update to finish? A minute becomes an hour. It was like that. Their phone system is horrible, terrible.

The support itself was good. The technician was good. However, they all seem to be from India and language could be a problem, although I have not found that to be an issue so far. I would like to see more support from the U.S. I'd rather speak to someone from the U.S. than someone from another country. That's just a preference: "Made in the USA."

The initial setup was pretty easy. I'm going to reconfigure it to be loaded onto the actual VMware machine, but I just don't want to do that at this time. Right now it's running as a software product. I want to run it closer to the VM machine itself, as a fixture associated with it.

The deployment took about an hour. Our implementation strategy was simply to get it to work. We needed the backup.

I did it myself.

It does what it's supposed to do.

The pricing is fair.

I did some research and I looked at some reviews.

I bought it for doing a backup using VMware vSphere and just started with VMware. But I use another product with our legacy system, a product called Acronis. If I were to compare Vembu with Acronis Backup I would say it's comparable, but it's more cost-effective.

If you need phone support, don't buy the product.

I would rate Vembu, overall, as a five out of ten. It would be a ten if they fixed the phone system. I have to hammer that in.