Vembu: a good Linux option for Home labs or SOHO
April 09, 2019
Vembu: a good Linux option for Home labs or SOHO
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Vembu BDR Suite
Currently, I use VembuBDR in my home lab, due to the free option providing a greater feature set than other free option. I am running the Vembu BDR on a Linux VM, and am using it to back up a series of VMs from a vSphere cluster to an external NAS over iscsi. This back up process is scheduled to run every few days, and seems to run pretty quickly on 99% of the configured VMs.
- Linux installer and web UI: unlike some other options, a Linux installer can be acquired and provides an easy to use web UI.
- Quick Support: support has been quick and helpful when needed.
- Easy to configure: the backup process is easy to configure and can be done in 15 to 20 mins.
- 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.
- It was easy to set up backups of critical systems.
- Support has been timely and very helpful.
- The ISCSI configuration took some time to get 100% right.
For me, as a Home lab user, the biggest goal was to find something that was a) runnable on Linux, and b) free or reasonably priced for a single user. Compared to other Free or community versions, Vembu provides clear outlines of allowed features, a Linux compatible installer, web management, and the ability to run enterprise features on a small set of VM or Limited features on all VMs, allowing for the safeguarding of certain critical VMs.
Currently, I have only utilized the vSphere backup portion of the product to back up a small number of (6) VMs that I deem critical. For this purpose, VembuBDR works very well, and provides a way for me to protect against unintended changes or corruption of VMs in a somewhat unstable environment.
Currently the amount of storage i have available is fairly limited. Having built-in compression means that I can ensure that I don't sacrifice usable storage for the safeguarding of critical infrastructure, even in a testing environment
The reason for choosing Vembu was that the free version's limits were very reasonable, the installation could be performed on a Linux based operating system, and management could be done using a web UI.