What’s New – Vembu BDR Suite

I have been using Vembu BDR for almost a year now and must say that there has been a lot of enhancements made to the product with every release, I have already dedicated couple of articles covering the various features and functionalities  here are the quick reference link Vembu BDR Suite Paid vs Free Edition , 10 Things we need to know about Vembu Cloud

Dedicated this article to talk about various enhancements that has been made to Vembu BDR in couple of months be it the super saver Perpetual Licensing Model or the GDPR compliance enablement in Vembu BDR suite being offered.

Vembu’ s perpetual licensing

Launching the latest perpetual licensing, Vembu look forward to provide more flexibility with the pricing. The Vembu BDR Suite which was available earlier at the subscription pricing model is now available at perpetual licensing, thereby helping IT environments fulfill their requirements that would cost less over time.

Perpetual License entitles the end user to use the software indefinitely with one year of Technical support and Product Updates included in the Perpetual license. Even after the expiry of the one-year maintenance period, the product continues to work but to receive further Technical Support and Software updates, the end user need to purchase the Annual Support and Upgrade plan. To experience the Support and Updates, the customer is charged the Annual Maintenance Cost (AMC) which is 20% of the original license price. The Customer can either choose to continue with the same version of the software or can pay the AMC and switch to the new update of the software. The best part is that there are no penalties if there is a lapse for a while to pay the AMC for getting Updates and Support since it is end user choice to go with or without the new updates.

Since the purchase of Vembu’s Perpetual License is a Long-term investment by end users, Vembu continually increase their value in an unprecedented way. Thus, the end user’s customers can now opt for Perpetual License by paying the initial cost and can use the software endlessly plus paying the AMC will allow them to entitle all the updates and support from Vembu.

https://www.vembu.com/blog/vembu-provides-pricing-flexibility-unveiling-perpetual-licensing-option/

What’s In it for Service Providers

In the aim of setting firm footprints across the globe by catering one of the most comprehensive backup and disaster recovery solution at an affordable pricing, Vembu unfolds its New Service Provider Program that would provide service providers a great scope for huge benefits and discounts with the Vembu BDR Suite v3.8.0.

If you are a Cloud Service Provider (CSP), Managed Service Provider (MSP) or anyone involved in IT Solution Delivery and offering Backup as a Service (BaaS) and Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) to your customers without compromising the business continuity of your customers, the Vembu BDR Suite has been created just for you.

https://www.vembu.com/blog/vembu-announces-new-and-customer-centric-service-provider-program/

Vembu complying with the EU GDPR

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (Regulation (EU) 2016/679) is a regulation by which the European Parliament, the Council of the European Union and the European Commission intend to strengthen and unify data protection for all individuals within the European Union (EU). It also addresses the export of personal data outside the EU. The GDPR aims primarily to give control back to citizens and residents over their personal data and to simplify the regulatory environment for international business by unifying the regulation within the EU When the GDPR takes effect, it will replace the data protection directive (officially Directive 95/46/EC) of 1995.

Addressing customers’ concern have always been Vembu’ s top priority. The Vembu BDR Suite does comply with the new regulation and will make the users the real data owner. Complying with industry standards and policies has always been one of Vembu BDR Suite’s core attributes and the GDPR is no exception as well.

The laying of this GDPR is crucial and inevitable norm. But what is to be known is, there is not one software that would uphold all the principles of it. One of the most important fact about security compliances are the stringent measures to be followed by organizations to protect the critical customer data. Vembu uses patented and in-house file system to store the data in chunk files thus making it unreadable unless it is restored by the administrator as per process. Vembu also uses federally acclaimed AES 256-bit algorithm to encrypt the data while transfer and at-rest while data is compressed, deduped to make suit the storage needs of a business.

https://www.vembu.com/eu-general-data-protection-regulation-gdpr/

Back to Basics – Part 17 VMware vSphere Authentication Proxy Service

In our last blog posts related to Back to Basics Series we discussed about Virtual MachineFiles (Part1), Standard Switches (Part2), vCenter Server (Part 3),Templates (Part4) vApp (Part 5), Migration (Part 6),Cloning (Part 7), Host Profiles (Part 8), Virtual Volumes AKA VVOL's (Part 9) Fault Tolerance (Part10) ,DistributedSwitches (Part 11) and Distributed Resource Scheduler Part 12, vCenter Server High Availability (Part 13),Back to Basics (Part -14) Creating Reports in VROPS,Back to Basics- Part 15 Understanding VMware App Volumes and Back to Basics- Part 16 Understanding VMware vSphere ESXi Shell and SSH Timeouts we also discussed about the various tasks related to building Home Lab Part1, Part 2, Part 3,Part 4 Part 5.

Dedicated this article to talk about VMware vSphere Authentication Proxy Service which helps us to add ESXi hosts to Active Directory Domain, instead of adding the host explicitly to the AD domain a trust chain can exists between the vSphere Authentication Proxy and the host which allows the authentication proxy to join the host to AD domain.

The vSphere Authentication Proxy service is available on VMware vCenter Server systems by default however is not running, to use the vSphere Authentication service we need to start the same manually through command line or vSphere Web Client.

VMware vSphere Authentication Proxy Service is useful when working with Auto Deploy where we can setup a reference host pointing towards Authentication Proxy Service and configuring a rule that applies this reference host profile to all other ESXi hosts provisioned using Auto Deploy. Using the service we can enhanced the security of ESXi hosts provisioned through Auto Deploy by removing the dependency to store AD credentials in Host Configuration.

When we use the vSphere Authentication Proxy, we do not need to transmit Active Directory credentials to the host. We can provide the domain name of the Active Directory server and the IP address of the authentication proxy server while adding the ESXi host to a domain.

Back to Basics- Part 16 Understanding VMware vSphere ESXi Shell and SSH Timeouts

In our last blog posts related to Back to Basics Series we discussed about Virtual Machine Files (Part1), Standard Switches (Part2), vCenter Server (Part 3),Templates (Part4) vApp (Part 5), Migration (Part 6),Cloning (Part 7), Host Profiles (Part 8), Virtual Volumes AKA VVOL's (Part 9) Fault Tolerance (Part10) ,Distributed Switches (Part 11) and Distributed Resource Scheduler Part 12, vCenter Server High Availability (Part 13) ,Back to Basics (Part -14) Creating Reports in VROPS and 

Back to Basics- Part 15 Understanding VMware App Volumes

we also discussed about the various tasks related to building Home Lab Part1, Part 2, Part 3,Part 4 Part 5.

Dedicated this article to talk about Shell and SSH Availability and Idle timeout values available to configure using VMware vSphere web client and DCUI and how these values are different from one another.

Availability timeout values talks about how long the SSH and ESXi shell remains enabled, the default value for both SSH and ESXi Shell is 0 means both SSH and Shell remains enabled until Disabled Manually, however any value i.e 1 or Higher Indicates how many seconds in web client and how many minutes in DCUI the service remains enabled before being automatically disabled.

Idle timeout settings talks about the local and remote user connections wherein they get automatically logged out if their session remains idle for the defined time period, the default value for Idle timeout remains 0 which means users are not automatically logged out, however any value i.e 1 or higher indicates how and idle session remains active before being automatically logged out, If the idle timeout value is configured through DCUI it's measured in Minutes otherwise seconds when configured through web client.

Note : Point worth noticing here is the difference in the values i.e minutes from DCUI and seconds from web client one should not get confused about the same.