Overall Satisfaction with Vembu BDR Suite
We use the NetworkImage, ImageBackup, and VMBackup products associated with VembuBDR to backup our main production servers and Hyper-V hosts.
- Scheduling backups
- Backup pruning
- Integration with Hyper-v
- 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.
- When working and stable it is "set and forget" so that reduces time to maintain.
- Flexibility on number of backups to retain and additional full backups to make have allowed NAS storage management and avoided significant additional storage purchases.
- When the product is unstable, as our 2012 VM backup is, it costs us time monitoring and restarting services or servers and dealing with Vembu support who have directed us to Microsoft for VSS support although the product worked fine on the platform prior to upgrade, and no additional software has been installed since.
Reasonable price for a complete solution to Share, Drive, and VM backups. Relatively simple to use once installed, if it is stable. Relatively easy restores.
Yes, we backup physical drives, network shares, and Hyper-V virtual machines with the product.
I do not believe we were aware of this file system. I'm not sure how we would benefit from its use.
- windows backup and backupexec
Beats Windows backup hands down - but that's not hard. Beats BackupExec on ease of use.
BDRSuite Feature Ratings
Using Vembu BDR Suite
2 - IT Director, IT Manager
2 - The same people who use it, support it. We were a small IT department when we bought Vembu.
- Virtual Machines
- Local Drives
- Network Shares
- Nothing comes to mind
- Virtual machine cloning based on a "before recent update" need.
Evaluating Vembu BDR Suite and Competitors
- Price
- Product Features
- Prior Experience with the Product
A colleague had used the product an recommended it as a cost-effective solution.
I would seek out more 3rd part reviews. A single person's experience in a dissimilar environment wasn't really enough to go on.
Vembu BDR Suite Implementation
- Implemented in-house
Change management was minimal - Since we did not have an enterprise backup solution prior to implementing Vembu we did not need a lot of change control.
- No issues, really.
Vembu BDR Suite Support
Pros | Cons |
---|---|
Good followup Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Quick Initial Response | None |
No - Available support seems adequate. Not sure premium would be worth the money although I don't know what it would cost.
Yes - Several interface bugs were reported. Often the suggestion was "switch browser", "start in private browsing", or "clear cache." However, these did not fix the problem and just wasted time. Also, installing some driver component caused an immediate server reboot without warning - not cool in a production environment.
Not really. I sensed they were usually committed to finding a solution but it has often taken days.
Using Vembu BDR Suite
Pros | Cons |
---|---|
Consistent Quick to learn | Do not like to use Unnecessarily complex Feel nervous using |
- Set and forget backups, and deduplication (retention) are easy to configure.
- Determining backup failure reasons was not very easy
- Doing an immediate backup was difficult
- Changing backup options was challenging