Last month, Vembu kicked off a Webinar to provide an advanced look at its upcoming version of BDR Suite, version 4.0. And there were quite a few highlights announced, creating much anticipation for the new release.

Vembu BDR Suite, you might remember, is a comprehensive solution, designed to protect critical data across hybrid IT environments.  The backup and replication suite can protect physical servers and workstations, supporting critical workloads for your organization.  In addition to physical, it also handles Virtual (VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V workloads) and Cloud (SaaS applications).

Vembu has more than a decade of experience in the backup world, and they've always been known for providing backup and disaster recovery software with enterprise-level features at an affordable price to all types of businesses.  And 4.0 continues that journey.

This week, Vembu has announced the GA of Vembu BDR Suite v4.0, a release that is all about maintaining business continuity and ensuring high availability.  Apart from new features, this release features significant enhancements and bug fixes that are geared towards performance improvement.

Some of the key highlights from version 4.0 include:

• Hyper-V Failover Cluster Support for Backup & Recovery - This version provides Backup and Recovery for the VMs residing in Hyper-V Failover Cluster.  Even if the VMs running on Hyper-V cluster move from one host to another, the backups will continue to run without any interruption.
• Shared VHDX Backup - Initially limited to SMB storage, Vembu now extends its backup support to shared VHDX of Hyper-V.
• Hyper-V Checksum Based Incremental - Vembu leverages CBT for performing incremental backups.  With v4.0, Vembu brings in Checksum based incremental method to ensure that you have a seamless backup experience, even if the CBT happens to fail in some rare cases.
• Credential Manager - The all-new credential manager eases the management of hosts, VMs and physical machines.  You don’t have to enter the credentials every time you need to backup a machine.
• New Design for User Interface - With BDR v4.0, the user interface has been updated but maintains its "simple and easy-to-use interface."  The UI improvements continue to make backups, recovery, and backup data management hassle-free.

Other Enhancements:

• Handling New Disk Addition for VMware & Hyper-V - Previously, after the initial full backup, the newly added disk of the VM was backed up only on the next additional full backup.  With v4.0, the newly added disk will be backed up in the next successive incremental.
• Reconnection for VMware and Hyper-V jobs - If the backup jobs get interrupted due to momentary network failures, a reconnection attempt will be made to resume data transfer.
• Live Recovery to VMware - With v4.0, you can now configure the specification of the Virtual Hardware during the live recovery like the socket and core counts, memory, hard disk provision type, and network adapter, allowing you to configure the new VM settings.
• Live Recovery to Hyper-V - Previously, the backed up Hyper-V VMs were recovered using the shared path of the target host.  With v4.0, a separate agent is pushed to the target machine for performing advanced recovery use cases during full VM recovery.
• App-Aware processing for Hyper-V backups - With v4.0, the application-aware process is no longer enabled by default for all the Hyper-V VMs, instead, you can individually select the VM to which you want to enable Application Aware processing.
• OffsiteDR server options - You can now abort the replication job and activate/deactivate a particular BDR server connected to an OffsiteDR Server.
• Quick VM Recovery Report - With v4.0, you get a report for Quick VM recovery process with details like VM Name, Recovery point, Start and End time, target hypervisor and the status of the recovery.
• API for VM list with Storage utilization report - The new set of APIs released give a detailed report on storage utilization like the size of the VM, storage space utilized by a backup job, compression rate, etc.

This is certainly the best Vembu BDR Suite to date and provides a host of new features with its new UI design and a key addition of backing up Hyper-V Clusters.  The Vembu team has made some amazing strides over the last few years, with 4.0 bringing everything they have learned together into one powerful update.  Be sure to check out Vembu BDR Suite v4.0.

View the release notes for more information.  And you can try Vembu BDR Suite with a 30-day free trial.