Vembu BDR Suite : Backing up VMware workload

Vembu BRD Suite provides a 360° solution that can help customers backup, recover and also protect their VMware workload in case of disaster events. In my previous posts, I have covered the overview and also the initial setup and configuration of the BDR Suite.

While the suite offers backup and recovery of multiple virtualization technologies including vSphere, Hyper-V, and KVM, I will be showing the steps involved in configuring it for the VMware environment.

The tool offers a tight integration with the vSphere platform and offers support for VMware vSphere v6.5 which includes VMware Virtual Volumes and Virtual SAN. It also uses Vembu CBT Driver for high-performance incremental backups.

This blog article assumes that you have already added the vSphere environment which needs to be backed up using the BDR Suite. If you have missed it, you can do that by going to Backup > Add VMware vSphere Server and provide the required details.

Once this is performed, go to the main page of the suite and click on “Backup” against the added vSphere environment.

The backup configuration is a 5 step process as shown in the right pane. The first step is to select the servers that will be backed up. Once selected, click “Next”

For those VMs that need “application aware” backups, provide the guest credentials.

The next step is to input the schedule for the backup. You can run it multiple times in a day across the days in the week or just choose to run it once per day or once per week. Also, choose the window when the backup will take place.

We now configure retention. It is disabled by default, but there are two types available if enabled. Basic and Advanced.

When you select Basic, you get to choose the number of copies.

When you choose Advanced, You get more options to do a daily merge, weekly merge or a monthly merge.

Next, we configure the storage repository where the backup copies are stored. This can be a SAN datastore, a share or a windows partition where the BDR suite is installed

For this particular backup, we’ll keep choose the basic settings and proceed further.

Now the settings are all keyed in and the last step is to provide a name for the backup job and review the settings.

Once the review is done and you click “Save this backup”, and the backup job schedule is configured.

You can see that the backup job now appears in the dashboard and is ready to execute.

Once the job is completed, the details of the backup will be available under “View report”

The best part of the tool is that you can schedule email reports for the successful backup jobs so that you are tracking the jobs that run daily against the environment. Provide the email id where you’d like to receive the report and the filter of the report (Success, failure etc).

Go ahead and run the job if you have scheduled it for a later point just to make sure it runs without any issues.

You can monitor the progress of the job in the dashboard under “Active Jobs”

Once complete, you will receive a mail on the details of the backup that was performed.

Give it a try.

Leave a Reply