Vembu BDR Suite Overview

Vembu BDR Suite is the #5 ranked solution in our list of top Cloud Backup tools. It is most often compared to Veeam Backup & Replication: Vembu BDR Suite vs Veeam Backup & Replication

What is Vembu BDR Suite?

Vembu BDR Suite is one of the most comprehensive, simple and affordable backup & disaster recovery solutions for the small & medium businesses. Vembu can backup VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Physical Servers, Workstations, Exchange Items, SharePoint Items, SQL Items, Office365, G Suite, etc. – and they can back that up on-site, off-site, or even to the cloud – not to mention that most of this are done within a single UI.

Vembu offers a wide variety of products such as a monitoring solution to centralize the monitoring of all of your backups as well as some which are absolutely free such as Desktop/Laptop Image Backup and the Vembu Universal Explorer for discovering application items within Microsoft apps. It is important to note that Vembu BDR Suite is offered as a single edition software for all businesses, unlike other backup vendors who provide editions with limitations based on the type of businesses.

Vembu has come up with its own free edition of Vembu BDR Suite by which users can backup unlimited VMs with minimal feature restrictions.

Vembu BDR Suite Buyer's Guide

Download the Vembu BDR Suite Buyer's Guide including reviews and more. Updated: March 2021

Vembu BDR Suite Customers

On-Ramp Indiana, DH International, Merrimac Solutions, Qsource Networks, TMI, help4IT, Tech North Solutions Inc. Learn more here.

Vembu BDR Suite Video

Pricing Advice

What users are saying about Vembu BDR Suite pricing:

"It has actually benefited my operation a fair bit. VMware requires a special hardware while Hyper-V runs on pretty much anything. It doesn't require any special hardware, so it saves a bit of money. Because Vembu does Hyper-V backup, there is no limit on how many VMs you can have. The newer version has a 100 VM limit on the single license, which has been greatly beneficial, because on one host a 100 VMs is a fair bit."
"The licensing model is quite complicated; it's not simple. An example: If you have a physical server, you have to pay more for that license than you do for a host. It could be running several VMs and that could be a server VM as well. Then, for web station machines, there is no license for those machines and they have no desktop OS - the free version has all this functionality. Their license model needs to be looked at and simplified."
"At the moment, I am doing Vembu for one host. My costs are about $25 USD a month for a single host up to 100 VMs."
"It's just the license per host with one CPU, but if I did choose offsite cloud replication, they do charge for the data. They charge per gigabyte, or something like that. They have plans."
"When they changed to the newest version (4.1), they have more VMs allowed on the free version. Before, there were only three VMs allowed on the free version, and if you needed to back up more than three VMs, you had to get the paid version. Now, you can have up to 10 VMs on the free version."

"It's more affordable than Veeam, so smaller companies can afford to have a solution like this in place, which is very nice."

"The pricing of Vembu could be better. They have a good product, and I know good products cost money, but they need to find a balance."

"The only thing with room for improvement, as everybody says, since I'm in a home lab, would be the price for the CPU; the cost... As far as competitors' prices go, Vembu was definitely better than all the competitors I found."

"The return of investment was very fast, within half a year."

"The best thing about the product is the license management. It is a true managed service provider solution. It has a good price. The licensing is quite flexible, which is one of the most important things for us."

Vembu BDR Suite Reviews

Assad Ali

Owner at Ali Network Solutions

Jan 26, 2020

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Reduces downtime when VMs drop off

What is our primary use case?

I've actively been using the Vembu product for backups. It is being used to back up the Hyper-V environment that I have. If the hypervisor has hardware problems, e.g., all the storage dies, you can run up a new Hyper-V server, then restore the VMs onto it. It doesn't take that long. So, you are up and running within several hours of restoring it. Also, you can restore individual files. Therefore, it's a full VM-based image backup as well as a file level backup, if you want to restore the files that way. There is also an option to restore AD users, computers, and contacts, in addition to… more »

Pros and Cons

"I am able to run Vembu on Windows NAS, which is beneficial. It does install on a Windows-based NAS. You can have the server running from the location where you are storing backups. You don't need a separate server for it in this case."

"There was one issue though with the hardware IDs. When I went to a different version of Hyper-V, the hardware IDs weren't restored and the machine got two new IDs. The preliminary unique IDs weren't restored, so I had to reactivate programs."

What other advice do I have?

I have learned just how important backups are. My advice would be try and implement it on virtual environments. Don't implement it on a physical environment because the licensing costs would be much higher. You will have less options for recovering VMs. It would be wise to have a cluster. Also, the BDR server should be well spec'd. You can run on the minimum spec, but it is recommended that it has some definite amounts of RAM on it. I am planning to use Vembu to work in VMware, but I have not done that yet. After I pick up some customers, I might try to push it out to them in their VMware…

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reviewer1386135

IT Consultant at a retailer with 11-50 employees

Sep 9, 2020

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Easy to work with, integrates, and works with different operating systems

What is our primary use case?

We use it primarily for backups and restoration of data, for disaster recovery purposes. We back up our file servers as well as our access control servers. We use it for standard, physical Windows 2016 servers, at this stage. The key things we use in this solution thus far are only the backup portion, the recovery, and the reports. We will try to make use of it more extensively, but for now it's working for us. It's on-prem at this stage, but we would love at a later stage to go to the cloud.

Pros and Cons

"When you're looking at your dashboard, you can see all your active jobs. You can see exactly if they're successful or failed and you can actually drill down and see what caused the problem. The fact you can see that right away is nice."

"What I would love to see on the dashboard are graphs, per backup job. I want to see the month and the days in it... If a job has failed, when did it actually fail and what percentage of it failed? Did it fail completely, 75 percent or 100 percent or did it only fail partially?"

What other advice do I have?

When I look at a product like this there are a couple of basic things it must do: * I must be able to access it easily, deploy it easily * It must be secure. * If I want to make changes, updates must be easy as well. * It must be integratable, compatible with different operating systems. Vembu ticked all the boxes. Do you know when a business starts to appreciate a backup solution? When it loses information and needs to recover it. If your senior management is not very risk-minded or they tend to see these things as a waste of money, the moment they lose information and you can restore it…

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Free Report: Vembu BDR Suite Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about Vembu BDR Suite. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: March 2021.

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Chukwu Austine

Team Lead IT Infrastructure & Support at Africa Prudential Plc

Oct 12, 2020

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I schedule the backups the way I want them and I don't have to worry about them

What is our primary use case?

We use it for replication to our disaster recovery sites for the storage we have on-prem. We needed our critical infrastructure and our critical applications backed up. We needed to have something we can restore from when we have an issue. Our environment is hybrid. We have some of our servers on-prem, some on Azure, and some on AWS.

Pros and Cons

"The main difference I see between Vembu and the other solutions we've tried is that with Vembu, you don't need anybody to tell you what to do. Once you have done the installation you just look at the user interface — it's very friendly — and you can do things yourself without resorting to help from anybody."

What other advice do I have?

It gives me peace of mind. If your infrastructure backup is up and running and trusted, it gives you peace of mind. I have recommended it to a number of people. It's important to note that most backup solutions will tell you that you can download and use their solution for free. But the truth is that that is not the case for almost all of them. After some time, you will have to pay for a license to backup critical sources.

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Reviewer93746

Owner at a consultancy with 1-10 employees

Feb 3, 2020

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Having the ability to back up and restore, without having to remember all the options I had installed, gives me peace of mind

What is our primary use case?

I'm using the backup from Vembu for my home lab where I have ESXi. I'm backing up VMware servers. That's all I use it for. I have Oracle Databases running in these VM machines and I do testing, patches, upgrades, etc. I want to be able to back them up and, if need be, restore them so that I don't have to rebuild them. I'm running it in a Windows Server in a VM machine. I have ESXi 6.7 running on a Dell PowerEdge R720 and I have a Windows 10 VM running in that. And in that I have the Vembu BDR running as my backup server.

Pros and Cons

"It helps me with restores. I can repeat a test multiple times: Do the test, the restore, and then test again. It saves me time because I don't have to rebuild the VMs every time."

What other advice do I have?

Make sure you plan out your backup server for the long-term. When I did this I moved my backup server. When I moved it from one machine to another machine and the IP address changed, there were some headaches. I had to get the knowledge documents and I had to get tech support involved to help me outside of the knowledge document. So try to plan out, for as long as you can plan out, that this is the server, it isn't changing, etc. It has worked as expected. It's straightforward for backing up and it's straightforward for doing the restores. Other than the navigation and what buttons to push…

See Entire Vembu BDR Suite Review (1254 Words) »

Gabor Virag

Systems Engineer at GVir Informationsmanagement

Jun 27, 2019

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The encryption feature is important for us because of the very strict data protection rules in Europe

What is our primary use case?

We back up all our customers' files. We back up only files, and maybe some databases. However, primarily, we are backing up files on our own server. We are currently using the updated version of this product.

Pros and Cons

"The initial setup is easy and very nice."
"The network solution is the most important feature, because we have our own backup server and are doing file backups for our customers."

"We have not been able to move our backups from one drive to another one. We can only create a storage pool. However, if we want to change a drive, it is not possible to delete one drive as long there is data on it. For this, we have to call the support. While they can solve this, it is not out-of-the-box."

What other advice do I have?

I would recommend the product. I already recommend it to our partners. It is a really good solution. I like the product. It has good support. For small companies, it's the perfect solution. We do not use virtual environments. We have done this in the past, but we do not implement virtual clients anymore since we have only small customers and virtual appliances are now on cloud spaces. So, we do not have virtual servers at our customers. We have used Hyper-V, but it was not beneficial.

See Entire Vembu BDR Suite Review (1165 Words) »

reviewer1488360

President at DirectNetworks, Inc.

Jan 20, 2021

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Flexible, has an intuitive interface, and allows for restoring directly to an ESXi host or vCenter appliance

What is our primary use case?

We manage 100s of backups at any given time. This includes virtual machines, both VMware and Hyper-V, physical machines running Windows, and file-level backups. We have backups that are 100% cloud-based as well as ones that retain both a local backup and a cloud backup copy. The data replicated to the cloud must be contained within a data center that is owned/managed by our organization. Our recovery processes primarily include being able to restore directly to an ESXi host/vCenter appliance. This must be able to be completed in the shortest amount of time possible.

Pros and Cons

"The Vembu BDR product is very intuitive and easy to use."

"Vembu BDR currently supports backups of O365, although it does not currently have an email archiving function to the O365 backups."

What other advice do I have?

Any organization that is looking to deploy a backup solution in their environment with minimal time commitment and the highest level of confidence in being able to restore their data should be seriously considering one of the Vembu Technologies backup solutions. In summary, the Vembu BDR solution currently fulfills all of the functions that we need it to at this time.

See Entire Vembu BDR Suite Review (1157 Words) »

reviewer1336773

Manager Infrastructure and Applications at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Apr 26, 2020

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The compression, encryption, and deduplication features are fabulous

What is our primary use case?

The primary intended target for it was VMware backup and utilizing it in a VMware environment. It is a production, Active Directory, file server type of environment. I am using the current version.

Pros and Cons

"The compression, encryption and deduplication features are fabulous and great stuff."

"There were issues with the implementation because of incompatibilities between the tool implementation and our current VMware installation. So, it was an implementation issue that doesn't allow me to use it for VMware backup in the manner in which we would want to use it. That wasn't clear from the evaluation stage nor was it clear from the first utilization of it because it worked in the environment that it was being evaluated in. Based on that, we went ahead and made the purchase of the full implementation. At that point, it became clear that there would be limitations in that implementation that could not be overcome without doing upgrades to the production environment."

What other advice do I have?

You should never evaluate in your production environment, but make sure your evaluation is done as close as possible to your target. We are not using it with Hyper-V. I would rate this product in the high eights or nine (out of 10).

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reviewer1329195

IT Consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Apr 16, 2020

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Saves time by deduplicating a machine automatically. The explanation for the licensing needs improvement in the documentation.

What is our primary use case?

The primary use case is to be able to back up data outside of on-premise with the ability to restore as fast as possible. We also use Vembu NetworkBackup to selectively back up files on the file share along with our virtual machines. It gives us more control over what we can backup and restore, especially in the files.

Pros and Cons

"If we do a backup of a machine at some point and the server crashes, then we can restore this machine to a different server with the same settings and setup. We will just have to tweak one or two things, like the IP. Then, it is ready to go."

"One thing that I reported with the backups: When there are accentuated characters in a path, then we can't restore documents into a folder. There is a bug with the restoration and restoring files with accentuated characters in the path. Hopefully, they have repaired this because otherwise we will restore files and find out that they are not there."

What other advice do I have?

Make sure you have a clear view of your architecture and how you will be implementing it. Decide upfront which site will receive the backup and which site will do the deduplication of the backup's redundancy. As mentioned, I started to do some backups on the second office site and wanted to move the backups on to third site for disaster recovery, but I figured out that it would be better to install the backup server on the third site and the deduplication on the second site. However, just exchanging their roles was not that easy because I was missing licensing and backups were already running…

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