Vembu BDR Suite

Data world, having backups of business critical data simply living on-premise is not enough. Organizations today must account for all possible disaster recovery scenarios including losing entire sites. If backups exist only in the same location as production data, there is a good chance backup data will be lost as well as production data – a worst case scenario! Organizations today need to plan for having backup data copied to an offsite or cloud location so that even in the event of a total site loss, data backups exists in other safe locations including an Offsite datacenter or even in the cloud.Disaster Recovery Multiple Recovery Options – Vembu OffsiteDR (image courtesy of Vembu)Vembu BDR Suite has organizations covered by providing both the OffsiteDR and CloudDR options for synchronizing backup data. OffsiteDR server component allows organizations to provision a synchronized copy of backup data that is loated in their own offsite DR datacenter. CloudDR allows organizations to utilize Vembu’s own cloud environment to house offsite copies of backup data. Both solutions afford organizations many flexible options for data recovery including:Instant Recovery from the OffsiteDR or CloudDR repositoryMounting image filesDownloading images in VHD, VHDX, VMDK, Flat-VMDK, and RAW filesLive restoring data to ESXi or Hyper-VThe data is safely sychronized from on-premise to Offsite storage using the latest AES 256 encryption algorithms. This ensures data is secure and customer data is safe from compromise as it traverses across networks.Learn about Multiple Recovery OptionsVembu BDR Suite is a great product that keeps getting better. I have been using and testing Vembu BDR Suite for a couple of years now and it is a great way to protect a VMware or Hyper-V environment. You won’t find a more versatile product on the market that can do as much as Vembu, all in one product from virtual to physical. Definitely a company and product to keep an eye on!If you would like to learn more about why multiple recovery options are needed and how Vembu BDR Suite can help organizations effectively meet the challenges that come with disaster recovery planning and implementation, be sure to signup for the Vembu multiple recovery options webinar to learn more. Sign up for the webinar here: check out a video overview here:

Step 3 - Upgrade your Vembu Client Agent (Vembu VMBackup, Vembu ImageBackup, and Vembu NetworkBackup)With every patch/build release of Vembu BDR suite, installation and configuration files will be provided as exe/bin and XML file formats respectively. Both the files should be copied to the same folder in Vembu BDR server machine and should be listed as shown in below picture: Note:The configuration file(XML) will contain the version and build details of the installation fileTo add 32-bit client build for Windows, the user needs to copy the respective 64-bit client and its associated XML file to the same folderLogin to Vembu BDR Backup Server web console. In the top menu, go to: "Management ? Software Updates" page and click the "Add builds" option.Now Select the location under the backup server where the build and configuration files are copied and click the 'List Build File(s)' option.This will list all build files present in the folder as shown below, enable checkbox alongside respective build you wish to update and click the 'Add Build Files' option. Note:Client proxies running older versions(v3.0, v3.1.0, v3.1.1, v3.1.2, and v3.1.3) cannot be upgraded directly to the latest version and should be upgraded at one version after another as follows:Older versions ? v3.5 ? v3.6 ? v3.7 ? v3.8 ? v3.9.1 ? v4.0 ? v4.2

Recovery OptionsCost-effectiveOn-premise and Cloud optionsVembu BDR Suite provides organizations with the capabilities to leverage multiple restore options and highlights the strengths of the above data protection requirements. Let’s take a look at five key recovery options and how Vembu BDR Suite allows organizations to utilize these recovery options effectively for disaster recovery.Instant RecoveryPermanent RecoveryFile Level RecoveryBare-metal RecoveryOffsite and Cloud RecoveryInstant RecoveryAs the name implies, instant recovery is a recovery of data and services as quickly as possible. Instant recovery typically allows getting “back up and running” in a quick manner and for a shorter time period. This allows the opportunity to restore access to the data or services which affords the time to resolve the underlying issue with the infrastructure that may have led to the need for recovery in the first place.Vembu BDR Suite allows organizations to do this with the Quick VM Recovery feature that allows organizations to instantly recover the business-critical VMs or physical machines on a hypervisor host. Vembu does this by reading data directly from the backup storage, creating virtual VMDK, VHD, VHDX and IMG disks and in doing so, uses no additional data in storage. An extremely powerful capability that Vembu utilizes is the ability to really be hypervisor agnostic here – VMware VMs can be recovered on Hyper-V and vice versa.Vembu Quick Recovery for virtual machinesThis allows businesses the flexibility to recover within minutes of a disaster to have data and services back online for customers. Instant recovery should be viewed as more of a temporary solution until underlying issues are resolved and data can be more permanently restored. How is permanent recovery carried out?Permanent RecoveryPermanent recovery is the more typical recovery scenario that might be thought of. Permanent recovery is also known as full VM recovery. This type of recovery restores the full virtual machine along with all persistent data that may be created after Instant Recovery. Permanent recovery can take quite a bit longer than Instant Recovery depending on the amount of data that needs to be restored. Vembu utilizes several performance enhancing features that drastically speed up the permanent recovery process including Direct SAN and Hot-add.In Direct SAN mode, Vembu is able to mount the iSCSI or FC SAN targets directly for data transfer which bypasses the need to copy data across the network. This results in much more efficient and higher performance data transfers.Hot-add provides the ability of a Vembu BDR server that is deployed as a VM in the ESXi environment to be able to Hot-add the empty disks and allow data to be restored directly to those disks mounted to the Vembu server itself. Afte the restore process is complete, the disks will then be reattached to

The recovered VMs. This provides much quicker data restore performance.Live VM Recovery using Vembu BDR SuiteFile Level Recovery and Application Level RecoveryFile Level Recovery or FLR is an extremely important aspect of disaster recovery. Typically File Level Recovery is utilized in very specific instances of disaster recovery that is related to more pointed recovery such as when an end user accidentally deletes a file or folder or may intentionally delete the folder by mistake. End users may also update or modify files in such a way that leads to unintentional data loss such as deleting rows from a spreadsheet, etc. Having the ability to mount restore points and recover specific files and folders allows organizations to recover from these more specific types of data loss that can at times render business operations either impaired or worse.Vembu BDR Suite’s efficient image-level backups provide Changed Block Tracking enabled restore points that efficiently capture changes with each backup iteration. Vembu allows easily performing granular file restores from these image-level backups without the need to restore the entire backup or virtual machine.Application Level Recovery provides the ability of restoring the ever critical “application items” that provide critical business functionality such as database applications. Being able to restore application level items assumes that you have the ability to properly backup applications in an “application aware” method. Backing up tranactionally sensitive systems such as databases in an application aware way is critical to ensuring data is consistent and no corruption is introduced into the backup. Database data often lives in memory and there can be pending file I/O operations. If backups are performed without properly flushing data this can lead to much longer restore operations (performing steps to bring these applications up to a consistent state) or even worse, corruption.Vembu BDR Suite allows performinga application aware backups that properly interact with applications such as Microsoft SQL Server to properly backup the application consistently. This allows performing application level restores such as restoring databases or even tables granularly.Bare Metal RecoveryVembu BDR Server provides protection that many other data protection solutions offering virtual solutions do not – physical servers, workstations, and laptops. Bare Metal Recovery or BMR allow restoring physical machines to a pristine state as they were before a disaster strikes. It is important to note that Vembu BDR Suite BMR restores not only data but also the operating system and any critical system partitions. Is Bare Metal Recovery in today’s world even needed?Even in today’s primarily virtual-centric world, physical servers are still ran for many proprietary applications that require specific hardware to be present or a specific performance profile. Vembu BDR Suite BMR allows backing up these physical workloads.Offsite and Cloud RecoveryIn today’s ever more sensitive

Azure or vice versa), or even down to on premises. Note that you have to run Vembu servers in VMs to accomplish this, unlike the built-in, platform-level backup (and replication) Azure offers. The software-as-a-service (SaaS) backups offer an easy-to-use web interface where you can restore data, down to the individual email level. Finally, Vembu has a backup solution for Linux (RedHat and Debian-based distros), Mac, kernel-based VM (KVM) virtualized servers, Acropolis/Nutanix VMs, OpenStack infrastructure, RedHat's own Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV), and even Citrix Xen servers. There's not much missing from that list of platforms and workloads—Vembu should have your backup needs covered.The Vembu BDR suite was easy to set up and configure. When there were issues, the UI directly hyperlinked the relevant KB article, which I found very useful. Vembu has been around for quite a few years now (founded in 2002). Their solution is technically innovative, comprehensive, and easy to use as well as cost effective. It should definitely be on your short list when considering a new backup strategy.