BDRShield Reviews

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.

It hasn't improved the way our company functions from an operational standpoint.

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

What would have been most valuable for me, would have been the convenience and ease of doing the VMware backups along with the ability to provide a low-level, file level, restore all capability without having to structure the detailed Windows Backups association. So, an ease of setup with a granularity of a restore all capability without having to use a standard Windows Backup. I would need to upgrade my VM environment for this to work currently.

I investigated Vembu probably for the first time a couple of years back. I evaluated it in just a quick and dirty manner without any real followup on it. Subsequent to that, I have been more actively utilizing it for about a year.

It seems to be stable. No concerns about that.

Two people are required for deployment and maintenance of this solution.

My impression of the scalability is good. My scalability requirement isn't what some others might be, but the solution appears to be fully scalable.

It is being used in probably 80 percent of our environment. It's not a large environment. We probably won't scale out to the remainder. Eventually, the environment will be drawn in to the point where it's probably 100 percent of the environment that will be covered under Vembu, then that environment will be relatively stable. It won't change past that.

There are just a couple of us actually utilizing it. We're relatively small, so there are really just a couple of users for admin in there. It's a support environment.

From both the sales and technical support standpoint, they have been great. They have helped out to the extent that they can, but it hasn't been enough. There are things that they can't do and it's going to have to happen on my side (in my production environment). It was not clear from the evaluation level, when we ran through evaluation on it, that this was going to be an issue when we got to production.

Previously, it was a bit different because our environment had been a hosted environment. There was a different tool being utilized by the hosted provider. Our implementation of Vembu was a standup as we brought something in-house.

The initial setup was straightforward.

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.

The evaluation and deployment took a couple of months.

To get through the evaluation did require support from from them. They were supportive and did provide that support.

There was an implementation strategy with some specific needs that were fulfilled by Vembu. It was an implementation strategy that included a consolidation and transition at the same time. It was a bit of a complex strategy and Vembu fulfilled it. Vembu was the tool of choice because of its ability to do that and because of the features in the suite. What was disconcerting was that it was able to do that part of it, but then when we went to put it into full production, then we encountered these other difficulties that hadn't been planned for or counted on.

To continue to do backups, we fell back to Windows Backup mode. We are still using the tool, but not in the manner in which we would have wanted. The tool purchase doesn't cover all options of the tool, e.g., if I go in and buy it, I have to buy it licensed for VMware Backups, not Windows Backups. At this point, what had to happen was they had to allow it to operate in Windows Backup so I could continue to back up the VMs, but in a trial mode. The trial mode has been extended once, and now we're reaching the limit of that extension again. Because I still haven't been able to update the production VMware environment such that the tool will operate in it in the manner in which I want it to operate, I'm stuck having to go back again to say, "Sorry, I need to extend this trial on it again." Even though I've paid, I'm still only able to operate in a trial mode. So, it's been difficult for us. 

I've purchased and been licensed for one aspect of it, which is my preferred method, but the pricing and licensing will not work for the short-term and I can't draw back.

Yes, we did survey others. We didn't match up evaluations. We just didn't have a lot of resources for it. There was a desktop environment to a test evaluation.

We primarily went with Vembu for its flexibility and features.

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).

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.

We use this solution to back up our virtual environments. 

All the features are valuable for different reasons. 

The restoring of virtual machines and deduplication features are good. We save time by recreating or deduplicating a machine, as it done automatically. With one or two clicks, we can get something done. We are then pretty sure it is the same as it was before; it is a real duplicate. The deduplication features are useful for accelerating the transfers and when we have more than one version of a virtual machine or backup without taking up X time or space.

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. This is not quite high availability. However, if we use the replication feature to make an exact copy of the machine, then we can tweak them to work together as active-active or active-passive. This can help us to save time because the deduplication is done automatically without errors and we have minimal changes to do.

I like also the feature where you back up a virtual machine, then it will run a startup and you can take a screenshot of the first few seconds of the bootup. This way, at a quick glance, we can determine the backup is bootable and whether the backup of the virtual machine will be functional or not. Sometimes testing the backup is something that we don't always do on a regular basis until we find out that something is broken. Then, we didn't know until it's too late. So, this feature is appreciated.

With the configuration of backups, there are a few things I would change with the UI. 

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.

A little over a year.

It is pretty stable.

I have just two physical machines with five or six VMs each. It is not that big of a setup. From a scalability perspective, I don't know if it will be good or not, but I believe it will be.

There are three users of the solution: a VP of operations, someone who is a jack-of-all-trades, and myself. There is no one with a specific skill set for this. It is really easy to figure out.

The technical support has been good. They have been dedicated to resolving issues.

Vembu was the first solution of this type. This solution was recommended to us.

The initial setup was straightforward. It was easy to install. There are not too many options and it was ready to go almost out-of-the-box. We have a really simple setup so the deployment took an hour or two. 

We have seen ROI based on confidence and time saved. We save a few hundred dollars a year.

We have the enterprise version with two server licenses.

Take a look at the pricing and licensing closely. When we installed the BDR disaster recovery server, which is the duplication of the backup data on one server onto a second one where the backup data resides, it was not clear that this DR server needed two other licenses. These licenses were to back up the copy of the first backup server that had two licenses for the two physical host that it was backing up in the first place. Moving files around to a second DR server, why would I need an extra two licenses? I don't know if it's to make money, but it was not very obvious and I had to abort the project from there because I didn't plan to pay for extra licenses to copy data of the first two physical servers. I also didn't understand why it was needed. Hopefully, they will improve the explanation in the documentation for this.

I compared different vendors' functionalities, our requirements, and price. We chose this solution because it was cheaper and easier to use than Veeam and other solutions of this type. Though they are not easy to compare as they all have different licensing models.

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. I would recommend to ask questions, figure out the licensing model, what needs to be installed where, and their best practices. For example, if I have to do things again, I would do things differently.

I would give the product a seven (out of 10).

We use it to back up ESXi clients, so mainly Linux based or Unix based servers on our ESXi host.

We use the solution to back up our virtual environments (VMware). It has been good for our organization so far.

It makes it possible for us to back up our Unix machines without installing a host, client, or any client software. It gives us some peace of mind in regards to those servers getting backed up.

The number one feature is that we can back up our servers without having to install a client. It is the only reason why I have this product.

The user interface isn't that good. I don't think that the product is user-friendly. Comparing it side by side to Acronis, I would say to Vembu, "Hey, you could make your user interface a little easier."

Vembu will tell you the next scheduled backup, but it doesn't show you the last successful backup. I would have them include a column under "List of Backup Jobs" and have two other columns which say, "Last Successful Backup" and "Next Scheduled Backup", because you don't know now if it's backed up successfully. It just says, "The next scheduled time is this." You don't know from looking at that pane of glass when the last time it actually happened without digging further into reports.

Two years or more.

It is stable. I haven't had it crash or break on me.

I don't think we've actually had a reason to restore a machine as it's never failed. We've never had a server fail. The only thing that it has done for us is give us peace of mind that our server is backed up.

Everybody is impacted if one of these servers failed. The only way we could get it back up and running was to restore it from a Vembu Backup. It would impact everybody if the servers went down, so approximately 3,000 users would be impacted if the backup wasn't successfully happening and we needed to use it.

We haven't had reason to scale it up to back up anything else. We aren't really using the product to its fullest capabilities. I think it has a lot more that it can do.

I am the only user using it, as we only use it for backing up our servers.

I do have plans to increase usage.

Every time I have called, I've had good tech support.

I didn't use a previous solution. I selected this solution because it was the only one I could find for the cost that did what I needed it to do.

It was pretty easy to set up. The initial setup was probably only 15 minutes.

Our implementation strategy was to make it so we could back up our VMware clients. That was the whole purpose of the software. We don't use it for our Windows Servers. For that, we use a different product. However, we couldn't use the other product on the Linux and Unix space machines because the other software requires that a client be installed.

We bought it directly from Vembu and installed it ourselves.

This solution helps us deliver an enterprise level data protection solution and reduces budgets. We are saving $6,000 every three years versus having another product.

Backups are an insurance thing. This is a life insurance policy to make it so if our servers failed, we would have something to get them back. Since we haven't had a server fail, it is just like life insurance. While it has cost us money, it has given us peace of mind that if we needed it, then it would be there.

The pricing is very good.

Our license is about to expire on it.

We did evaluate some other products before choosing this one. 

We also use Acronis Backup Advanced. The way that Vembu backs up to a backup drive, it uses a pool of drives to back up. Whereas, Acronis backs up to just a single file. You can see that individual file on its own. You can browse to it and see that the file that has been saved. It also says the last successful backup it did. 

Vembu's user interface isn't as easy to use compared to Acronis Backup Advanced, which has a better interface for me to be able to see what's happening.

I haven't found a competitor who does as good a job for the money.

This is a good product to choose if you are in the same situation as we are in.

It does do compression and that works fine.

We don't use Hyper-V.

I would give it a five out of 10, because I think that it could use some polishing on the interface for the client.

We use it for backing up VMs.

We are using it with VMware and the benefit is that we have reliable backups.

It's pretty basic backup stuff. I set it up and it just runs.

The compression, encryption, and deduplication features all work fine.

The system died twice and it was apparently the result of corrupted disk sectors. I tried to work with tech support to fix it, but they essentially gave up. So twice, I had to rebuild our server. I don't know why that happened and tech support didn't seem particularly concerned about figuring it out. That's my only complaint.

We've been using Vembu BDR Suite for about a year.

It did completely die twice and couldn't be revived. If that happens again, we're probably going to look at another product. My only concern is the stability.

We're not likely to be adding too many more VMs anytime soon. So I don't have any way of judging the scalability. We might deploy it on another site. We'll see about that.

Technical support is good but the problem I have is that I often can't understand the technicians because they have extremely heavy accents, and that makes communication kind of difficult.

We were using VDP, which is a free application from ESX. But it's not very good, in fact it's awful, and it's no longer supported. We replaced it with Vembu and we're quite happy.

The initial setup is simple. It didn't take more than a day or so, including testing. I got a trial version and decided it did what we want it to do and then I just set it up.

The solution provides us with enterprise-level data protection.

The pricing is quite reasonable.

If you can't afford Veeam, which is very expensive, I would recommend Vembu.

Vembu is used by me and another system administrator. That's it. We manage it, but it only requires one person for deployment and maintenance. 

Our end-users don't know it's there.

We use it to backup VMware virtual machines, so I'm backing up my VMware environment. My product is for Windows Server Backup.

We are a small business. We don't use the enterprise version of the solution.

It has improved our business continuity.

We have used this solution to recover from a few incidences. 

The firewall backup is the most valuable feature. We need it sometimes when we recover a single file.

The compression is the most useful feature for me.

The product's stability needs some improvements. 

The support is a bit slow in resolving an issue. It takes a long time to recover.

One year.

The solution is 90 percent stable. It is running well. The availability is good.

Two or three employees are needed for deployment and maintenance of the solution.

I only have two servers. I don't test other servers.

We don't count our users for this solution as it is a backup service.

I would rate the technical support as eight or nine (out of 10). I would like them to improve their response rate.

This was our first product.

The initial setup was neither simple nor complex; it was intermediate. It took four hours to set up/deploy. We implemented it into a very simple environment (Windows Server Backup).

We deployed it ourselves.

We have seen ROI with Vembu. The solution is worth it based on the few times that we used it for recovery.

We tested three products. One of the other products that we evaluated was Altaro.

We chose Vembu because the compatibility was better.

I would definitely recommend Vembu. We have been mostly satisfied with the solution. We plan to keep using it.

Overall, I would rate the product as a nine (out of 10).

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.

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; rather, I just do a restore. I would estimate it's saving me four to eight hours every time I have to do a restore.

I also had a disk crash and the restore was important because I didn't have to rebuild it. So it helps with data recovery as well.

It gives me peace of mind because I don't have to do the rebuilds. In a home lab, documentation is not usually at the forefront of your thoughts. You are just trying to get it built and tested. Having the ability to back it up and restore without having to remember all the options were that you had installed and what was the data like before, it gives me peace of mind that I have the restore.

The two features that I use are the backup and the restore.

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. If I were to add another CPU, I would start to get into an expense where I would question, "Do I really want to continue backing this stuff up?" But from what I could tell, this was definitely the least expensive option to go with.

I have been using it for about eight months. I bought my first license in April and then I had to buy another one because I added another ESXi server. I have two licenses and they're both for five years. My intention is to be using it for five years and I won't be switching out.

I'm on the most recent version because I just upgraded when it came out.

It has been very stable. There haven't been any issues.

I have it licensed on two CPUs, one CPU in each machine, and it has not had a problem with the 40 VMs that I have.

The only way I would be increasing usage would be if the cost would allow me to add it to another machine. The other machine I'd like to add it to has two CPUs in it, so I would be doubling my license cost. Right now, that's not an option.

For the issues that I've had, the tech support has been very good. I've had no complaints and they've been very responsive. I've only had three or four issues, and they have all been resolved. That has been a very good experience.

The last reason I had to contact support was for a restore that I needed to do. I also moved ESXi servers, so I had to have some assistance because the backup was done on one ESXi server and then I moved it to another ESXi server. I needed to do the restore and tech support assisted with that.

There has never been a situation where I had tiered tech support, where the first person I got didn't know and handed me off to the next person who handed me off to the next person.

Veeam was what I was using before I went to Vembu. 

The wording, when you start Googling this stuff, gets kind of questionable because it says "unlimited free VMs." That really isn't true. You can only do a couple before you can't do anything with it. Veeam was the one I was using first. But when I hit my third VM, it wasn't working anymore. You could only actually do three and you would have to roll out one before you could roll in one. 

The initial set up was very easy. It was just like installing anything on Windows 10. It took about 15 minutes.

The first time around I did it myself. I did move it from one VM machine to another VM machine and I had assistance with that from Vembu, and that assistance was very helpful. That was part of standard tech support.

As far as competitors' prices go, Vembu was definitely better than all the competitors I found.

I would guess it has saved me 30 to 50 percent. The problem is that I'm a single-person home lab, so I have no idea what kind of licensing things happen for a corporation which is looking to buy 500 CPUs. If you were to do that and you were to look at the cost per CPU versus my cost per CPU, theirs might be 50 percent less than what I'm paying.

Veeam was one of the solutions within a list of solutions I evaluated. Cost was definitely one of the big differences, but I didn't use Veeam long enough to go down that path. When I hit the third VM, which was within the day that I started using it, I stopped using it.

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, there's really no learning curve here.

I'm not using the encryption. If the deduplication is in use, it must be so by default because I have not done anything with it.

For what I need it to do, and compared to the other products that are out there, this is the most cost-efficient and best solution for my needs.

I use it as a backup solution for our VMware system.

I get my backups done. If I don't get my backups done and something goes wrong, I lose my job. The benefit of using it is that I keep my job.

Vembu helps me deliver an enterprise-level data protection solution and reduce budgets.

The cost is one of the most valuable features.

The problem that I had getting this up and running was that when I put in a backup plan, and wanted to run that backup plan, that plan had to go onto the server that it's going to do the backup on, and it had to pass on credentials. It would be nice, when you create the credentials for logging on to the server, if it would immediately verify that those credentials work. What ended up happening is I'd have to wait until nighttime to really figure out whether those credentials were valid or not. That prompted me to call support.

We've been using Vembu, as a company, for about three months.

The stability has been okay.

The scalability is fine.

I'm the only one in our organization who uses the solution and I'm responsible for its maintenance.

The problem that I really had — and it was not the product — is that when I called in, the phone system is a negative five on a scale from one to ten, where one is the worst. They wanted me to leave a message. When there is a problem with the product and you call in, you want to talk to somebody or wait to talk to somebody, not leave a message. If our system is down and someone says to me, "What's going on? Our system is down. Our company's not running. What are you doing?" the conversation would go something like this:

"I'm waiting for a phone call back." 

"You're waiting for a what? A phone call back? You get on that phone and get those guys on the line." 

And he would use some other choice words before the word "phone."

Their response was quick, but I'd rather wait on hold. I'll listen to music. In that same scenario where someone asks me what is happening and I say, "Oh, I'm on hold. I'm waiting for support to respond to me," they would say, "Oh, okay. That's good. You've got it under control." It's all perception. Have you ever run a program and it just sits there and sits there and you have no idea how long it's going to take for the update to finish? A minute becomes an hour. It was like that. Their phone system is horrible, terrible.

The support itself was good. The technician was good. However, they all seem to be from India and language could be a problem, although I have not found that to be an issue so far. I would like to see more support from the U.S. I'd rather speak to someone from the U.S. than someone from another country. That's just a preference: "Made in the USA."

The initial setup was pretty easy. I'm going to reconfigure it to be loaded onto the actual VMware machine, but I just don't want to do that at this time. Right now it's running as a software product. I want to run it closer to the VM machine itself, as a fixture associated with it.

The deployment took about an hour. Our implementation strategy was simply to get it to work. We needed the backup.

I did it myself.

It does what it's supposed to do.

The pricing is fair.

I did some research and I looked at some reviews.

I bought it for doing a backup using VMware vSphere and just started with VMware. But I use another product with our legacy system, a product called Acronis. If I were to compare Vembu with Acronis Backup I would say it's comparable, but it's more cost-effective.

If you need phone support, don't buy the product.

I would rate Vembu, overall, as a five out of ten. It would be a ten if they fixed the phone system. I have to hammer that in.

We use it for our file server and database backups.

It hasn't improved the way our company functions that much because we were using a backup which is about the same as Vembu.

The restore feature is the most valuable. It's easy to restore.

We've been using Vembu for less than a year.

It's not that stable yet. Every two weeks, my backup will stop and I have to check it. Sometimes it can be fixed by a restart and sometimes I need support to make it work.

It's scalable. It is being used extensively in our environment, but there are no plans to increase usage. During the season, we're around 200 employees and we back up about 4 TBs.

Support is very important. But sometimes they respond to me four hours after I contact them, maybe more. I would like them to improve their response time. Also, their time zone is different from US/Canada.

Overall, support is very good, but their reaction takes a while.

We were using Zenith ARCA. We switched to Vembu because of the licensing cost. Vembu is cheaper.

The initial setup was straightforward. It's just "click" and "okay."

The deployment took an hour or two. The installation plan was to store things locally. We have an online license for the offsite service, but we don't have the proper device installed yet. It requires a more sophisticated machine.

Initially, I worked on it myself. But, due to some errors, I asked support to reinstall it, to fix it. They were good.

We have seen a return on investment from going with Vembu.

The pricing is pretty normal. It's not too hard to license a server. It's pretty straightforward. If you need four servers, you just acquire four.

We evaluated Ipirius. We went with Vembu because of its features. It's similar to what we were using previously.

If you're looking for a not-too-expensive solution, use the Vembu BDR Suite.

There are three people on our team who can access the server, who can actually operate it: an IT associate, supervisor, and system admin. In terms of maintenance, I ask their support to do it.

Overall, I would rate Vembu at seven out of 10. It's not perfect yet. It doesn't give me confidence that it will run 24/7.