Are you looking for robust backup software to protect AWS EC2 instances? I have been searching for a simple backup solution to protect my EC2 instances automatically with a pre-defined schedule. Recently came across “BDRSuite” from LinkedIn and thought of giving it a try. This tool is a really simple one with a clean web GUI console and powerful enough to protect VMware, Hyper-V, Windows, Linux, O365, Google Workspace, SQL, Sharepoint, etc. BDRSuite5.1 is available with all the features for 30 days trial and the free version is available with limited features. Since I have explored the AWS EC2 backup and recovery, I will just cover the AWS part. To know more about BDRSuite, check out their product page.
Here are the Key Features of BDRSuite Backup for AWS. AWS backup is one of the modules of Vembu BDR Suite v5.1.
- It’s agentless Cloud-Native backup solution – It leverages Amazon APIs to manage snapshots
- Automatic Backup Scheduling in few clicks
- Application-aware processing and pre/post scripts is useful to achive data consistent snapshot
- Instance and volume level recovery at near-zero recovery time objective (RTO).
Vembu BDR supports EC2 backup on the same region for quick recovery, stores snapshot on secondary site for DR, and also supports storing the backup on other public clouds like Azure or GCP to avoid vendor lock-in.
Backup AWS EC2 – BDRSuite 5.1
Let’s see how can we protect AWS EC2 instances using the vembu BDR suite.
1. Download and install the vembu BDR suite v5.1 on the supported operating systems. It supports the majority of windows servers like Windows Server 2022, 2019, 2016, 2012 R2 and supports Windows 10 as well. If your organization is using Linux, you can install it on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS as well.
2. Login to vembu BDR console and navigate to AWS section. Click on “Add AWS Account”
3. Enter the AWS account name and add the AWS access key and secret for the account for which you need to configure the backup.
4. Once the account is successfully added, you can see the newly added account like below.
5. From the backup menu, click configure backup. Select the newly added account and choose the region where the AWS EC2 instances are running. Once you click on “List instances”, you will all the EC2 instances which are running on that specific region.
6. Select the instance and click on configure. You will get a screen like the below to provide the job name, schedule, and backup retention. After updating all those information, click on “Save Backup and Run Now”.
It will prompt to confirm again to trigger the job.
7. Once you click on “Run Now”, You can see that job has been triggered.
8. Job will get completed in a few seconds. vembu BDR triggered the AWS API call to create the snapshot of the instance.
9. To know what happened in the backend, Login to the AWS console and navigate to E2 – > Snapshot section. Search snapshot with – “VCP-Snapshot”
Here you can see that vembu BDR created the snapshot. We will quickly look at how to recover the instance using the snapshot.
AWS EC2 Recovery – Vembu BDRSuite 5.1
1. On the vembu BDR console, navigate to recovery and click on Backup Job. Click on “Restore”
2. Choose the instance that you would like to recover and click on “Restore Instance”
It will prompt to confirm the restore action.
3. Restore will take a few minutes based on the OS volume size. You can see the sequence of actions in the restore job logs. Restore will not overwrite the existing instance and it creates a new instance.
4. You can log in back to the AWS console and see that BDR has created the new instance using the snapshot. It automatically updates the original instance id in the tag name section.
We have successfully recovered EC2 instance using vembu BDR.
Vembu BDR also has email notifications capabilities to notify you of a certain action.
Reporting features are very good to know the job status in a single click.
Conclusion:
Overall vembu BDRSuite 5.1 is a robust backup and DR software for both ONPREM and Cloud environments. To bootstrap, this backup environment hardly took 30 to 45 minutes and the installer does everything for you. The user interface is simple and lightweight. I don’t see any latency while accessing the console and the user experience is great so far. I would recommend giving it a try if you are looking for reliable backup and disaster recovery software.
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