Vembu BDR Suite Reviews

In my opinion, there is only one area to improve Vembu Backup and that's the license manager. A good metaphor would be, you can't see the forest through the trees.

Upgrading to new versions is relatively labor-intensive.

VMs to be backed up sometimes fail due to a lack of ability to create a snapshot. Vembu should find a way to work around this issue.

Supporting external storage (cloud) could be easier to configure, use, and integrate into the back-up processes.

Documentation.

Missing Linux file level recovery

Replicas section needs improvements (already debugging it with customer support) and new features: add of VM to existing replica and merge of two existing replicas.

The loss of the BDR VM itself means that in a total disaster scenario restore of the backupped VMs may be cumbersome or impossible: you should copy the strategy of veeam, which allows to import seamlessly an entire backup pool; this can be done, in my opinion, by also making a full postgres DB dump to the backup pool whenever a job completes.

Some parts of the web interface should be refined: e.g. the part for email notifications is not enough clear (difference for mails sent for every event and just unsuccessful ones); also, I required as a feature timestamps in 24H format (most of the world is NOT anglosaxon); some actions which are possible in the interface sort out NO EFFECT, like adding a VM to an existing replica, but are yet accepted by the interface; also backup pool section needs refinement, especially to add a new one and to manage existing ones.

It should be possible to instruct the software to take advantage of existing LACP network configurations, running parallel processes to speed up data transfer.

An improvement of speed of overall throughput would be greatly appreciated.

Possibility to backup/replicate BSD (e.g. OpenBSD, FreeBSD) and Solaris VMs

PROXMOX support is missing :(((((

Quicker install and setup of workstations if you could set default values.

Translation on local languages.

I would like image based backups for Linux and FreeBSD.

I would like the ability to directly restore an image backup to ESXI or more cross-platform restore options.

Managing storage by yourself (without support helping you out) can be tricky. I wish there were easier options to assign storage to users/backups, especially "after the fact."

Windows image-based backup needs to assign drive letters to partitions that don't usually have them (system reserved, etc.). There should be a way for the program to identify the drives by different means.

Changing to a different server name or IP address is a bit cumbersome but works.

Only improvement I can think of is, compatibility issues to older operating systems. Have to make sure when new updates come out if you have an older machine... Make sure it still supports it.

I am not aware of any short comings in the functionality of the Vembu BDR offering.

The Vembu BDR offering meets all our needs and more.

Logging: The Free version doesn't appear to provide any alternative to alerting/logging other than email. Syslog or something similar would be nice

Iscsi config: the process to use iscsi as a backup target requires configuration on the OS itself. Putting this and NFS configuration in the UI would be a plus

Self Signed Certs: the ability to create a CSR and load a certificate from an on-site CA using the UI.

There's no active directory support, so I can't authenticate with my AD user.

Vague failure messages make troubleshooting hard sometimes.

Mount image as volume is not working for Linux VMs, it would have been better with this feature working.

The web management console should be improved with detailed VM backup reports.

Cryptic error messages that can be hard to troubleshoot

Licensing requirements can be difficult to understand

More information on what is fixed in releases would be helpful

Reporting can be better, I liked StoreGrid for reporting and some of that functionality is missing in BDR360.

When on backup reports graph mode, you can see the number of missed or failed backups but after clicking on the graph nothing happens. I would like to see the problem machines coming up.

Missing delete options for customers.

The whole GUI interface needs a revamp. The reporting is terrible.

Push installation/adding clients to backup does not seem to effectively work.

I believe that there can be a lot of improvements done and they can base it out of existing backup softwares.

I wish I was given the option of phone support at the time I entered my ticket.

Easier to eliminate old storage locations

I think the platform is very comprehensive. If one possible improvement might be made, it is the process of creating a bare metal restore image/recovery cd.

Web based layout can be tricky

Licensing portal is cumbersome

Backup alerts can be obnoxious

Run on other OSes like centos.

Full tests before rolling out any newer versions.

Daily merges are not well explained. Very confusing.

Matching data on the BDR and offsite DR. Seems to be a disconnect from what I have worked with.

Stability. Our VMBackup product on Windows 2012 keeps crashing the Hyper-V Management Service and then failing.

Upgrade process. Going from 3.5 to 3.8 was paiiinful.

Support process. Getting support has often required many days of support personnel being continuous connected to our production server via TeamViewer.

Improve the process of restoring a backup. It is confusing to restore a VM the initial time.

Include skipped files in reports.