Vembu lauched a new version of their Vembu BDR Suite. In this blog post, Vembu BDR Suite v5.0 RC Released what is new. I will show some of the new features included in this new version.
It has been some time that I don’t write a review for Vembu. My last review was with version v4.0; from that version to this new v5.0 RC, many features have been added to Vembu BDR, like backups on Office 365, Backup on AWS, or Azure now Google Workspace.
What is new in this new Vembu BDR Suite v5.0RC
In this new version, Vembu has expanded their Vembu BDR Suite to Hybrid solutions. With support on Cloud infrastructure, everything is in-house in an on-premise environment and a third-party Cloud provider (like AWS, Azure, Google). With this, Vembu has extended its support portfolio to future workloads,
New Features
- Hyper-V VM Replication
After VMware VM Replication, in this new version, Vembu also added replication for Hyper-V VMs.
Now customers can replicate their Hyper-V VMs from one host to another. This can be done in your internal infrastructure but also any outside DR site. In a disaster recovery situation, customers can failover all of your VMs that you have replicated to your DR site. Failover can be complete recovery or just a few VMs that need to be replaced on your first site.
- Instant Boot Live Migration
What is Instant Boog Iive migration? It means that now you can boot and migrate your VMs directly from your Backup Infrastructure.
Using this option, customers can now reduce your RPO to seconds on your backup VMs. This task is done in the background while your VM is booted and ready to be used in your backup infrastructure with no downtime.
This option works in two steps. First, we need to Select Restore and use the Instant Boot VM. VM will be automatically booted and ready to be used.
We can select the Hypervisor Storage or use BDR Local Storage(backup repository) to allocated this Instant Boot VM.
After we have the VM booted from the Backup Infrastructure, we can do a live migration to our Production environment.
- Parallel VM Processing
With this new feature, we can now backup several jobs in parallel into a single host. Customers can customize the number of VMs/Disks that can run concurrent jobs, which can be done in a single job.
Example: We create one job to backup 5 VMs and 2 Disks and select that three tasks can run concurrently inside the same job. Parallel VM Processing will run tasks for 3 VMs(or disks) simultaneously in the same backup job.
- Rotated Drives as Backup Repository
In this feature, by rotating Drives in a Backup Repository, it is possible to use multiple external hard drives to store the backup data and swap them regularly.
This feature is not a Tabe Library rotated drive. Still, it works similarly, and the Backup Repository will never go out of space since there are extra disks to add to the Repository to allow the backups to continue.
Note: This option is not available for Office 365 Backups or Offsite Replication.
- Optimized Backup with Where-it-left-off
This feature is convenient to resume backups that were stopped or cancel. In simple a word, this feature is a resume, and the Backup will restart where it did stop.
- GFS (Grandfather-Father-Son) Retention
GFS is a backup that has been known since IT started planning to Backup their environment. This Daily, Weekly, Month, and Year Backup rule is set to have a Full backup in the last backup sequence (7th day, weekly, month, and Year backup). But during the daily backup rotation, incremental Backup is used.
In the Vmebu BDR Suite 5.0 RC, now we can use Daily Full Backups and Incremental for each of the GFS retentions.
- Synthetic Full Backup
This feature is basically to merge all incremental backups and Full Backups into a last Full Backup that exists in the Backup Repository, which means that the last Backup is always full. There is no need to perform a full backup of your incremental backups since this backup type will merge all backups into one Full Backup.
Example: You backup 7 days of the week, and you select the Synthetic Full Backup, let’s say Sunday. So on Sunday, you will have a Full Backup of all the Incremental backups and a final backup. With this, if you want, you don’t need to create another Weekly Backup job for your Week Ful Backup.
You can create Synthetic Full Backups Weekly or Monthly.
- Backup Job Template
We can now create Backups Job Templates for VMware, Hyper-V, or Windows(physical) with this feature. This is a way to quickly create a job without adding all the settings every time we create a Backup job.
For example, if you want to create Backup Jobs only to a particular Backup Repository, you can create a Template that only uses Backup Repository 01. Or, if you want to create a Backup Job only for databases, you can create on Template that always truncates the transitions logs using Application-Aware Processing or not.
It is a very helpful feature and will save time when setting your Backup Infrastructure.
- Multi-host Backup Support
Now we can backup VMs from different vCenter/ESXi or Hyper-V all in the same job. Without the need to create several jobs to backup VMs from other environments.
- Application Item-level Recovery from web GUI
BDR Suite 5.0 supports item level recovery for Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, SharePoint, and AD from BDR Backup Server web GUI. Any restore point can be selected, and individual items can be recovered within minutes.
You can now restore any object from AD, Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server, or SharePoint with a single click in the restore option.
- Microsoft 365 SharePoint Online Backup
Vembu Backup for Microsoft 365 now supports the Backup and recovery of the entire sites, web collections, individual files, folders, and entire document libraries of SharePoint Online.
- Microsoft 365 Teams Backup
Vembu BDR Suite v5.0 RC now supports Microsoft 365, and we can now backup and recover conversations, chats, planner, tasks, etc., of Microsoft 365 Teams.
- Backup for Google Workspace
Vembu BDR Suite v5.0 RC also includes Backup for Google Workspace with support for Backup of Mails, Google Drive, Contacts, Calendar, etc.,
- Backup for AWS
Vembu BDR already supported AWS in previous versions, but now Vembu BDR Suite 5.0 supports agentless and application-consistent Backup of AWS EC2 instances.
Besides the above features, Vembu BDR Suite v5.0 RC also includes some new enhancements and improvements.
Enhancements
- Restore can be initiated when Backup is in progress
- Now backup job and offsite copy job can be run parallelly
- Improved the backup job creation user experience
- Restore Hyper-V backup VMs with the original configuration
- Backup window settings at the backup job level
- Backup throttling support for Backup configured from BDR Backup Server
- File-level recovery support for dynamic disks
- Option to disable compression and encryption in storing the backup data at the storage repository
Final thoughts about Vembu BDR Suite v5.0 RC Released what is new.
I have followed and test Vembu BDR for some time now(around 7 years), and the product has been improved a lot, particularly in the last 2/3 years. With this new major release Vembu BDR Suite v5.0 RC, Vembu did a great job again. Add excellent features to make it easier for customers to use the product and added some essential systems support.
We all know that Cloud is the future, and Backup as Service or DR sites in the Cloud will be more and more used in the future, so Vembu started to prepare for the future technology and systems that more enterprise organizations will use in the future.
Vembu renewed most of the web interface and improved the performance in this version. Now is easier to look around and select the options to perform the needed tasks to add new systems, perform backup and restore.
One thing only that I would like to mention in the new interface, in the VM Restore option, we need to do too many clicks, and this option should be 1-2 clicks to restore or show the option to restore a VM completely.
Vembu should simplify this option, for example, VM replication is just one click, and we are in the area to perform the settings for the replication, so a normal VM Restore should be similar.
Other Products and Services provided by Vembu.
All details about the new version can find it HERE.
- Release notes: https://www.bdrsuite.com/vembu-bdr-suite-release-notes/
- Download page: https://www.bdrsuite.com/vembu-bdr-suite-download/
Other Products and Services provided by Vembu.
Check also the Free versions and what is included in each one.
- Free VMware Backup with Vembu BDR Suite
- Free Hyper-V Backup with Vembu BDR Suite
- Free Vembu Backup for AWS
- Free Backup for Microsoft 365
- Free Backup for Google Workspace
- Free Backup for Endpoints
- Free Backup for Windows Workstation
Share this article if you think it is worth sharing. If you have any questions or comments, comment here, or contact me on Twitter.
Leave A Comment
You must be logged in to post a comment.