In my blog post “Vembu BDR Suite 5.5 released” I gave an overview of the Vembu BDR Suite, the new features and enhancements in version 5.5, the Vembu BDR Suite Editions and the Licensing and Pricing of the Vembu BDR Suite.

I followed up with blog posts on “Vembu Backup for Endpoints” and “Vembu BDR Suite for Microsoft 365”

In this blog post I will focus a little bit more on Vembu Backup and Replication for VMware, one of the solutions of the Vembu BDR Suite.

This blog post will focus on the Backup functionality and not on the Replication functionality.

Key Features of Vembu Backup and Replication for VMware

Backup

Agentless VMware ESXi Backup & vCenter VM Backup
Incremental backup using VMware Changed Block Tracking
Application-Aware VMware vSphere backup
Backup job template for faster backup configuration
Faster backup using Direct SAN and Hot-Add transport modes
Native tape backup support
VembuHIVE – for efficient backup storage
- Vembu BDR backup server uses its own patented cloud file system – VembuHIVE for efficient storage management. VembuHIVE is a virtualized file system overlaid on top of your existing file system with utilities that mimic other OS file systems

Recovery

Instant Boot VM with live VM migration
Instantly recover the backup by booting it as a VM on an ESXi/Hyper-V/KVM host
Migrate Instant Boot VMs from a disaster recovery host to your production infrastructure without any downtime while retaining all of the changes you’ve made to the VMs.
Instant & Granular File-Level Recovery
Instantly recover the individual files and folder from the backed up VMs without actually restoring the entire VM
Granular application item recovery
VM disk-level recovery
Cross-platform & Cross hypervisor migration

Replication

Network Mapping between source and destination ESXi
Re-Ip to reconfigure IP address of the replica VMs
Failover to switch the operation to replica VMs
Failover the replicated VMs on the secondary site during a disaster
Failback to migrate the replicate VMs to different ESXi host
Failback the replicated VMs to the source host or different host
Granularly recover files & folders from replicated VMs

Management

Centralized monitoring of VMware Backup & Replication
Email notifications for instant alerts
Encryption using AES- 256 bit encryption algorithm
Compression & Deduplication for data reduction
Offsite backup replication to your Datacenter
Cloud replication to Vembu Cloud

A recorded webinar of Vembu regarding VMware Backup and Replication for VMware is available on Youtube:

Editions

Vembu Backup and Replication for VMware comes in three (3) Editions:

Free
Standard
Enterprise

The Free and Standard Editions are limited to “Backup” and not “Replication”.

Pricing is offered as subscription license or perpetual license. There is both a CPU socket level pricing as a VM level pricing available.

General Configuration of Vembu Backup and Recovery for VMware

The process to start backing up your VMware environment consists of 3 parts

Setup BDR Suite Backup Server
- See my previous blogpost on Vembu BDDR Suite for Endpoints
Setup a BDR Suite Backup Repository
- See my previous blogpost on Vembu BDDR Suite for Endpoints
- Configuring on-premises storage as a backup repository for VMware might not feasible as the amount of data to be backed up is potentially quite high. Therefore it might be a good option to choose for a cloud storage solution like Amazon S3, Google Cloud Storage, Wasabi, …
Adding Data Sources
- The steps to follow are the following:
- Open the management console of BDRSuite
- Go to “VMware/Hyper-V/Windows/Linux” in the top menu bar
- Go to Data Sources – Add VMware vSphere – ESXi & vCenter
- Choose “Add ESXi & vCenter Server”
- Fill out the details of your ESXi / vCenter Server
- The added Data Source(s) will now be visible in the BDR Suite Console (in the below screenshot I added two different vCenter servers)

Backup and Restore

Backup

The process to set up a backup job is really simple

Open the management console of BDRSuite
Go to “VMware/Hyper-V/Windows/Linux” in the top menu bar
Go to Backup
Provide a backup name, choose a Backup repository and optionally provide a Job Description and click “Next: Select Hosts/VMs to Backup”
Select the VMs you want to backup and click “Next: Exclusions”
From you previous selection you define exclusions and click on “Next “Guest processing”
- Certain VMs
- Certain Disks from VMs
Define the guest processing options (Per VM or for all the VMs) and select “Next VMware Quiescing”
- Options that can be defined:
  - Application Aware Processing & Log Truncation
  - Oracle Archived Logs
  - File Exclusion
Enable or Disable Guest Quiescing and click “Next: Schedule”
Define the Backup job schedule and click “Next: Settings”
- Incremental Backup Schedule
- Synthetic Backup Schedule
Define other settings and click “Next: Review”
- Other settings that can be defined
  - Retention method
  - Encryption
  - Other
The last step shows you an overview of your choices and you can Save your backup job. You can select to “Run this backup immediately after saving”
You will now be redirected to the “List of backup Jobs” where you can see the status of the backup
Once the backup is finished you can see a detailed report in the section Reports – Recent Job Schedule

Restore

Open the management console of BDRSuite
Go to “VMware/Hyper-V/Windows/Linux” in the top menu bar
Click Recovery
As you can see in the above screenshot there are multiple recovery options to choose from
For this blog post I will limit myself to “Restore Backup Data”.
After choosing “Restore Backup Data”, choose the backup job you want to recover from and click “Restore”
You will be presented with a new window where you can choose the VM you want to restore and the type of restore you want to do
For the purpose of the blog I choose “File Level Recovery”
Next steps are to choose the
- Restore Version (Date/Time)
- Restore Options
  - Which folders/files to restore
  - The restore destination
  - Compression/Encryption
Review your selection and hit the restore button. The restore starts immediately
In the reports selection you can see the result of the restore