{"id":1409,"date":"2016-10-06T18:09:34","date_gmt":"2016-10-06T17:09:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/read.virtualizeplanet.com\/?p=1409"},"modified":"2016-10-06T22:24:39","modified_gmt":"2016-10-06T21:24:39","slug":"product-review-vembu-vm-backup-and-dr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/read.virtualizeplanet.com\/?p=1409","title":{"rendered":"Product Review: Vembu VM Backup and DR"},"content":{"rendered":"

My Platinum Sponsor Vembu<\/a> asked me to review their VM Backup Product. So using my previously used format for reviewing backup products I tested each part of the product where possible and scored the test 1-to-5 5 being the highest score that test can receive. Some test where not scored but rather data used like speed or cost as a comparison. If you want to find out more about the Vembu<\/a> products before we get going read my previous article found >HERE<<\/a><\/p>\n

Before we get going, if you know me you know that regardless of whether they sponsor my site or not I am going to score them fairly but also record my opinions too.<\/p>\n

To set the stage, you need to understand that my lab which these tests were conducted on use a 1Gb network with SATA ISCSI so as per the other vendors I tested don\u2019t take the performance results as gospel.<\/p>\n

Task: Ease of prerequisites<\/strong><\/p>\n

Score<\/strong>: 4<\/p>\n

Comments:<\/strong> First step prebuild a Windows VM. Apart from having to restart the install after the C++ run time was downloaded and prerequisites were fairly painless effort to get going. But because I\u2019m lazy I would love to see the C++ runtime bundled into the install.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Task: Ease of Install<\/strong><\/p>\n

Score: 5<\/strong><\/p>\n

Comments:<\/strong> Very simple to install, hardly any effort. Gotta love next next next installs.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"3\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Task: <\/strong>Time to Deploy<\/strong><\/p>\n

Score: <\/strong>4<\/p>\n

Comments: <\/strong>Very quick deploy time<\/p>\n

Task: Ease of post install config<\/strong><\/p>\n

Score 4<\/strong><\/p>\n

Comments: <\/strong>Firstly you have to add your timezone. And then the usual tasks to add vSphere etc. Also you need to register the server with the Vembu<\/a> portal before your 30-day trial goes live. So yup I did this test using their 30-day trial.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"4\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"5\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"6\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Task: Ease to setup job<\/strong><\/p>\n

Score 3<\/strong><\/p>\n

Comments: <\/strong>It was intuitive, but a job was defined based on VM membership of an ESX server. I would prefer to just select the cluster. I\u2019m not sure if this is a non-issue or not because what was going through my mind was what happens if the VM moves and you want to restore. Would it expect to see the VM on the same server? However in hindsight that is something easily resolvable at restore time if needed. Vembu\u2019s word on this matter \u201cvMotion is supported. So, if a VM is migrated to another host, incremental backup will continue without fail. Also, selecting the entire vCenter Server will be included in our upcoming release\u201d<\/p>\n

To setup a backup job you find your vSphere deployment, and you will see a backup now icon as shown below. That opens a wizard to walk through to setup a backup job.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"7\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Task Backup Job Realisation<\/strong><\/p>\n

Score 4 <\/strong><\/p>\n

Comments: <\/strong>Worked straight away, now hassle no errors.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Task Backup Performance<\/strong><\/p>\n

Speed: 59 MB\/s in 7 Mins<\/strong><\/p>\n

Comments: <\/strong>Now if you compare that with other tests I have done for other vendors using the same lab that is super quick. This was not an incremental, this was a full backup of an Exchange server. Normally in my lab I\u2019d expect to see \u00bd those kinda speeds.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"8\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Task Integration with CBT\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong><\/p>\n

Score 4 <\/strong><\/p>\n

Comments:<\/strong> Must have CBT as incremental finished in 1 min. Without CBT it would be much longer due change scan. The only thing is I didn\u2019t see an option for this. Vembu did confirm that CBT is supported by default.<\/p>\n

Task Restore Job Realisation\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong><\/p>\n

Score 5 <\/strong><\/p>\n

Comments:<\/strong> Worked without issue and that is exactly what you need. A restore without fail.<\/p>\n

Task Restore Performance<\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Speed 20.3 MB\/s in 15mins\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong><\/p>\n

Comments: <\/strong>Still quicker than other products. Restore speed is limited by my lab network.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Task File-level-Restore <\/strong><\/p>\n

Score 3<\/strong><\/p>\n

Comments:<\/strong> No UI and FLR is done through mounting the vdisks to the local FS. This is very basic. I could have missed this feature, but that is how it seemed. Vembu have since confirmed that FLR embedded in the UI is scheduled in a coming release.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Task Item-level restore <\/strong><\/p>\n

Score 4 <\/strong><\/p>\n

Comments:<\/strong> Uses a separate app to mount the datastores of enterprise apps like Exchange and SQL. Would love to see this built into the main app but TBH most of the other vendors take this same approach. The only thing I don\u2019t like is you have to have Outlook and SQL installed. Probably to make use of an inbuilt API.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Task Space Optimisation\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong><\/p>\n

Score 3 <\/strong><\/p>\n

Comments<\/strong>: Compression but no Dedupe. The Vembu<\/a> guys feel that software-based dedupe poses too much of a resource penalty to be efficient. I don\u2019t 100% agree and I think it depends on if you are prepared to group VMs that have the same operating system in the same processing job. This way you will see great savings. Vembu<\/a>\u2019s position on this is use an appliance built for this purpose.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Task vStorage API Capable\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong><\/p>\n

Score 5 <\/strong><\/p>\n

Comments<\/strong>: Think so but they call it “vSphere Plugin”<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Task vCloud Director Capability <\/strong><\/p>\n

Score 1 <\/strong><\/p>\n

Comments:<\/strong> None. TBH I\u2019m going to remove this one in the future. The need for vCloud Director support is dwindling and limited to service providers.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Task Ability to Backup VSS Apps\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong><\/p>\n

Score 5 <\/strong><\/p>\n

Comments:<\/strong> What you\u2019d expect. Has truncation features etc..<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Task Support for physical server\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong><\/p>\n

Score 5<\/strong><\/p>\n

Comments:<\/strong> Happy this is out of the box. Whether we like it or not some orgs still have physical servers.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"9\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Task DR Capabilities\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong><\/p>\n

Score 4 <\/strong><\/p>\n

Comments:<\/strong> Standard Replication feature which is a bonus as some products don\u2019t have that.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Task Data Availability\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong><\/p>\n

Score 4 <\/strong><\/p>\n

Comments:<\/strong> Vembu<\/a> has an Instant VM recovery feature. This is part of the restore wizard. So you can choose to restore or fire up the VM directly<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"10\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Task API functionality<\/strong><\/p>\n

Score 3<\/strong><\/p>\n

Comments:<\/strong> Vembu<\/a> has a REST API. Not obvious though and only because I\u2019m selfish I would like to see a vRO plugin too.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Task Multi-hypervisor\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong><\/p>\n

Score 2 <\/strong><\/p>\n

Comments<\/strong>: Vmware and Hyper-V. It looks like I scored them quite low with a 2 but that is average compared to other products. However Vembu have said \u201cFor VMware and Hyper-V, we offer agentless backup with CBT incremental. For Oracle VirtualBox, KVM and Xen, we offer agents to backup VMs. Using the ImageBackup agent, the entire VM can be backed up.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Cost:<\/strong> The Vembu<\/a> backup product is $360 per CPU socket which is very very competitive.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Final Comment:<\/strong> Vembu<\/a> is a very simple, cheap but feature rich product. There were some things I\u2019d like to see done better but mostly that is personal preference. Remembering if someone asks me \u201cwhich is the best product on the market?\u201d I would answer \u201cdepends on your needs\u201d. If you don\u2019t need all the bells and whistle, then cost plays a big factor in your choice of product. I scored Vembu<\/a> on average 4 out of 5 which is awesome.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My Platinum Sponsor Vembu asked me to review their VM Backup Product. So using my previously used format for reviewing backup products I tested each part of the product where possible and scored the test 1-to-5 5 being the highest score that test can receive. Some test where not scored but rather data used like […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-downloads","category-vmware"],"aioseo_notices":[],"views":2793,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/read.virtualizeplanet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/read.virtualizeplanet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/read.virtualizeplanet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/read.virtualizeplanet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/read.virtualizeplanet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1409"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/read.virtualizeplanet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1409\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1424,"href":"http:\/\/read.virtualizeplanet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1409\/revisions\/1424"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/read.virtualizeplanet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/read.virtualizeplanet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/read.virtualizeplanet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}