Vembu VMBackup Deployment Scenarios

Vembu was founded in 2002 and has over 60,000 customers worldwide. One of their core products is the Vembu BDR Suite, which is an one stop solution to all your Backup and DR needs. I wrote a longer blog post about the Vembu BDR Suite.

One part of this suite is Vembu VMBackup, which is a data protection solution that is designed to backup VMware and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines secure and simple way. The offered features are compareable to Veeam Backup & Replication.

The core component of Vembu VMBackup is the Vembu BDR Backup server, which can be deployed in two ways:

• On-premises Deployment
• Hybrid Deployment

On-premises Deployment

In this deployment setup, customers deploy the product in their local environment. I think this is the most typical deployment type, where you install VMBackup on a physical server, in a VM or deployed as virtual appliance. Backup data is transferred  over LAN or SAN, and is written to the storage repositories. The Vembu BDR server acts as a centralized management point, where user can configure and manage backup and replication jobs.

In a simple deployment, the Vembu BDR Backup Server will act as backup proxy and management server instance. It is perfect for a small number of VMs with less simultaneous backup traffic and for VMBackup evaluation. The typical SMB environment.

If you seperate the management server from the backup proxy, the deployment changes to a distributed deployment. If necessary, multiple backup proxies can be deployed on physical hosts or in virtual machines. Customers can also deploy multiple BDR backups servers, which allows load balancing across a cluster of BDR backup servers. Pretty cool for bigger and/ or distributed environments. It allows customers to scale their backup solution over time.

Hybrid Deployment

Backup is good, but having a backup copy offsite is better. Vembu OffsiteDR allows customers to create a copy of their backup data and transfer it to a DR location over LAN/ WAN. OffsiteDR instantly transfers backup data from a BDR Backup Server to an OffsiteDR server. Customers can restore failed VMs or missing files and application data in their DR site, or they can rebuild a failed BDR Backup Server from an OffsiteDR server.

If customers don’t have a DR site, they can use Vembu CloudDR push a backup copy to the Vembu cloud. The data stored in the Vembu Cloud can easily be restored at anytime and to any location. Vembu uses AWS across all continents to asure the availability of their cloud services.

Customers have the choice

It is obvious that customers have the freedom of choice how they deploy Vembu VMBackup.I like the virtual appliance approach, which eliminates the need for additional Windows Server licenses. More and more vendors tend to offer appliances for their products, just think about VMware vCenter Server Appliance, vRealize Orchestrator etc. So why not offer a backup server appliance? I wish other vendors would adopt this…

Another nice feature is the scale-out capability of Vembu. Start small and grow over time. Perfect for SMBs that want to start small and grow over time.