Likelihood to Recommend Do you have VMWare? Yes I can back it up. Do you have Hyper-V? Yes I can back it up. That in itself should speak for itself. Altaro has really given a great deal into their software, not only making it easy to use, BUT also a really good and reliable product where you can support your workloads hassle-free, and super lightweight
Read full review First of all Web UI makes it so much easier to manage, with few clicks you can schedule a backup, you can see the progress and you can instantly recover it. There is a multiple environment support which is great for hybrid environments. Pricing is more reasonable than other high priced backup solutions
Read full review Pros Fast and simple setup. I didn't need to read through ANY documentation to set up and have a backup running. Easy and cost-effective licensing. I didn't need to count CPU's or VM's or other random facts to work out my licensing. Just how many hosts, and then one of 3 feature levels of which two have unlimited VM licensing. Hosts x Feature Set = Cost. Easy Restores. Backing up is one thing, but restoring and having confidence in the restore is another. It just works, simple and effective. Help is easy to find if you need it. From within the app, it gives you options of email, phone, and live chat, which is usually available even with odd time zones in play. Read full review Seed an offsite backup. A simple checkbox to seed a large backup prior to backing it up to our datacenter. Previously with another well knows backup provider this was convoluted and time-consuming. Backup Speed. Vembu BDR is fast and allows me to schedule multiple jobs within time constraints that prohibit some backup products from working. DR - Vembu BDR provides an option to mirror your backups to an offsite datacenter without taxing production servers with a secondary backup job. Bare Metal Recovery: the ability to create a custom bootable ISO that you can quickly recover a failed physical server or workstation. Ease of use: The console is consistent and very easy to use. From initial install to being fully configured takes just a few minutes. Read full review Cons More cloud-based storage options. Currently, only Azure is supported, which is excellent, but it would be good to have AWS and Google storage options too. It would be AWESOME if they could do a restore from Azure cloud direct to an Azure VM instance. Currently, you need to set up an Azure VM machine with nested Hyper-V, install Altaro on that, and then restore into a nested VM, this gets crazy expensive. Better notification of errors, or more around having a threshold, so if it misses one backup of a constant backup that happens every 5 minutes but recovers at the 10 minutes back, it is ok. Just think it needs to identify significant or long-running issues better than the occasional little issues. Read full review User interface on the servers do not have enough tools to better monitor the systems and finding information is difficult. User interface at portal is difficult to navigate and confusing Support documentation is too generic and rarely answers my questions. Licensing and acquisition. As a reseller and partner the licensing model is confusing and the portal interface to manage licensing should be scrapped and rebuilt. It is difficult to navigate and the available information is too vague. Recently, communication with new channel contact. My previous contact was articulate and answered my questions. Did I mention licensing? This is the most confusing and difficult process I've dealt with in 25 years. Makes Microsoft look simple. Read full review Likelihood to Renew It simply works and it is making our lives easier. The renewal process is also really good
Read full review Because of the product functions and possibilities: - it's easy to use through WEB browser - installation process is not complicated - Vembu BDR solution is reliable, and works properly. It does the job. This product could get extra points for the appliance that could be imported to virtual environment (no need for windows server license or some linux knowledge).
Read full review Usability A lot of people in the technical industry deliver what I would call snack crackle pop topics, where the software gets over complicated, and they drown people in all the "fancy" features. Altaro, from my point of view" has designed the software to be super usable, easy to implement, as well as support. It is really one of the best designs
Read full review As outlined in are parts of this review, I have various issues with the way their KB center is structured and how error codes aren't documented or KBs for a specific error provide steps for older versions of the software and aren't applicable to the current version because of a design layout change. "Go here and select Y" where the "here" has been removed and doesn't exist anymore. Or they release a new version without any supporting documentation even though they restructured a lot of the interface and updated the error messages.
Read full review Support Rating One of the most important benefits of the Altaro HyperV backup solution is the support. From the free edition, you're able to chat with the support that can assist you in a remote session an find a quick solution that solves the issue. It is always available. The email support is also.
Read full review It often takes a very long time to get an issue fixed. the support folks seem committed to getting it fixed but they often seem to be trying different things and hoping something works. I did not get the sense that they had a clear idea what was wrong.
Read full review Implementation Rating Altaro has really designed their product so well that you can honestly implement this within a couple of minutes
Read full review It wasn't difficult at all, it fact, it was mostly simple, implementation doesn't require much skills and knowledge, but the configuration part does require some skills to create the jobs and configure certain settings, overall, its an easy implementation, especially for experienced IT People
Read full review Alternatives Considered The only other competitor I am personally familiar with is Carbonite. I use that for file-level backups throughout my network and it works well but while it does offer backups for virtual machines, I have never found it to be a reliable option. Jobs failed for me regularly for no apparent reason. In the handful of times I have needed support, they were helpful and straight-forward.
Read full review I tested Vembu against Veeam and for the price, Vembu was the better option. I also had a great support experience as I had to contact Vembu twice after mistakes I made. While using Veeam the software was not as intuitive and support responses were not as swift and accurate.
Read full review Return on Investment Restoring our primary ERP VM has already saved many hours of rebuilding from data backups, so that in itself already gave us an excellent ROI for having Altaro running. The quick and easy setup also makes sense for a fast ROI as we didn't need to spend much time or effort in its set up. Lastly, any other restores we have done for retrieving files or testing backups were so simple and easy to do that the process didn't take long and saved us time and cost. Read full review For organizations that use different tools for Backup and recovery, this could be the single tool for Storage and Backup Administrators to automate and work effectively. Software cost is lesser thus the money can be invested for other tools/software procurement I don't think there is any negative impact as of now Read full review ScreenShots