Vembu Backup & Disaster Recovery – Introduction

Introduction

So a while back Vembu asked me if I would like them to sponsor this blog. After some thought I decided to do so but for me that also meant I wanted to test their product. It implemented their product but was really busy with other project so I wasn’t able to write something about it until now.

Please remind me what is Vembu?

Vembu BDR is a suite of products aimed at the medium Enterprise and SMB markets. It offers on and off-premises backups, replication but for example also backups of your saas applications like Office 365 and Google G-suite (former Google apps).

Installation

The primary way of installing Vembu is by deploying a Windows server where you install the software. It is also possible to install it on a Linux host but that might require some more work. For me the most promising way to start was using the Linux appliance they offer when you ask for it. This basically is a Ubuntu LTS installation that comes with the software preinstalled. It has 8 vcpu’s configured and 16GB of ram which was a bit rich for me plus I ran into some problems with it later on (It couldn’t quiesce my backup snapshots because I couldn’t add AD credentials, this works perfectly with the windows installation). While you might spare a Windows license when using the Linux installation it seems like Vembu prefer the Windows installation themselves. The installation on Windows actually is really a straight forward next next finish installation, nothing fancy about it.

The Interface

The backup server offers a shortcut to the software on the desktop but assuming that firewalls are no issue you can connect to the server on port 6061 from any other system. This has to be doen using https though because using http will result in a 400 bad request error. The used certificate is of the self signed variety but on their knowledge base Vembu offers a simple guide to use a proper certificate.

Once you login with your credentials this is the dashboard that is shown, clean and simple.

Backup & replication

The menus under backup and replication might be a bit confusing, The vSphere or Hyper-V at top aren’t to see all jobs related to that but are to setup new backup or replication jobs. The List all jobs or List jobs buttons will show all configured jobs.

Actually it doesn’t show all configured backup jobs, it actually shows all backup jobs that run on this system. If you have physical or virtual machines using the agent then those jobs are only visible on the machine it runs on. For me this is proof that Vembu might not be a an enterprise product because for one or two it might be doable to manage them this way but for more I would prefer to have one GUI handling them all.

This shows the list of jobs while the one job I have us running

Clicking the green triangle shows the status for the running job

Recovery

What ? You expected anything else for this menu item then to do recover files and things?

Reports

Under reports you can find some very basic reports about jobs. Don’t expect to find any information on what failed exactly or anything

 

It is also possible to schedule email status reports besides the mail send when a job is finished.

It might also be wise to create a filter for information you actually would like to receive.

Management

Under management several settings and other things can be found. Like what storage to use for backups (NFS/CIFS/SMB), email server and cloud targets.

 

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