How do you guys like Unitrends?

ericharris · 2012-11-08T17:11:21.000Z

I have a demo scheduled for next Monday.

I need a real backup solution for my increasing VM environment.

I have three Vmware 4.x ESXi hosts, with free licenses. I just bought a pack of Essentials licenses, so each Vmware host will be upgraded to 5.1 ESXi and have Essentials.

All VM hosts are local storage (Dell R510), no SAN or anything fancy.

I need to backup an Exchange 2007 Std server and be able to do email/mailbox restores, along with full server backup. I also want the same for a Windows 2003 file server I have virtualized…

Right now I’m occasionally manually backing up my VMs via snapshot and doing mailstore/file backups daily through Windows Backup (don’t laugh, it works hehe). I need to get everything down to one single backup where I can restore the VM it to another host if my ESXi servers die, along with single file restorations.

I also have three physical Windows2003/SQL2000 servers that I want a better backup solution for. Right now just doing full backups daily and incrementals every 30 mins to a file server.

I want to be able to copy my backups to an external 2TB drive and take off site weekly.

I think it’s going to be between Veeam and Unitrends at this point.

Just wondering if you guys have similar environment as me and if Unitrends works well for you. I don’t need offsite replication, I have bigger problems to worry about if all of my servers get destroyed.

@Dell_Technologies @Spanning

justin.davison · 2012-11-08T17:16:53.000Z

I’ve been trying to get Unitrends in at my company. I liked the product from what I saw in demos, but what really sells it for me is all of the people I have interacted with. They give me confidence that if there are issues I will have a solid support network.

spence · 2012-11-08T17:17:12.000Z

Love it - support is great the product is easy to use (both virtual and physical) it’s light weight on the network, backups are fast, did I mention the support is GREAT!

I think they are pretty solid I just made the switch 2 months ago and have been thrilled management of backups has gone down drastically!

jaguar · 2012-11-08T17:18:27.000Z

5.1 is not supported yet. FYI. I love Unitrends.

neilhauser3772 · 2012-11-08T17:33:21.000Z

Unitrends rocks. The tech support is fast, smart, polite, and patient, even when I call in totally clueless (not that that ever happens).

ericharris · 2012-11-08T17:35:13.000Z

Not good news about 5.1 support. Hoping to upgrade to 5.1 in the next couple of weeks to work with my licensing.

Good to hear about the support is good! I’ll be calling daily for a while! lol

jaguar · 2012-11-08T17:42:42.000Z

PokerMunkee:

Not good news about 5.1 support. Hoping to upgrade to 5.1 in the next couple of weeks to work with my licensing.

I’ve heard 5.1 has all sorts of issues still. Stick with 5.0.

spence · 2012-11-08T17:47:49.000Z

unirtrends is worth waiting to upgrade to 5.1

ericharris · 2012-11-08T17:54:08.000Z

Looks like they support it in 6.4.1.-2?

http://www.unitrends.com/documents/release-notes.pdf

Posted on another thread Oct 18th.

jaguar · 2012-11-08T17:58:34.000Z

I stand corrected.

katie-unitrends · 2012-11-08T18:21:01.000Z

PokerMunkee - Thank you for considering Unitrends! Please let me know if there’s anything I can help you with as you move forward.

And to all of our existing customers who’ve already responded - thanks so much! I’m glad that we continue to delight you!

stefuk · 2012-11-08T18:25:39.000Z

Love it, flexible,reliable,good support and some amazing new features coming along that will make some big vendors really enviouse …
Feel free to drop me a pm of you

andrewrosenau8513 · 2012-11-08T18:34:11.000Z

5.1 is supported with the latest Unitrends release. Unitrends is awesome, it is one of those things that just plain works. Also what is nice with virtual machines is depending on the appliance you can actually run a vm machine from a backup directly on the Unitrends appliance, I have never tried it yet, but it seems to me a great way to test the backups. The vaulting also works slick, we have an offsite vault, and I know every night our backups are being sent offsite and protected.

langleygray · 2012-11-08T20:58:03.000Z

We have a similar environment with ESXi (local storage) and a few physical servers but no Exchange. Been running Unitrends for just over a year now and I would have no hesitation in recommending it. When one of our physical machines failed we had a virtual instance up and running within about 10 minutes using the instant recovery feature. Tech support has always been excellent even though we are on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

The only issue we’ve had is that dissimilar bare metal restores are not supported for XP

ericharris · 2012-11-08T21:36:13.000Z

Thanks all!

lg8314: Do you have their appliance? How would you recover a ESXi server that died? Do you have a spare server ready to come online you can restore the VMs to?

Interesting about the physical machine failing and 10 minute recover time. My physical SQL boxes are my mission critical servers, not ready to virtualize them for another couple years since the hardware is only 1.5 years old.

langleygray · 2012-11-09T09:45:14.000Z

We have the 713 appliance. Yes, we have a spare server in case an ESX host dies so we can quickly restore the VMs.

The instant recovery feature allowed us run a virtual instance while the physical machine was off line being repaired. Once the repairs were completed the virtual instance was shut down and the physical brought back on line. The process isn’t automatic, the appliance has to be initially configured to run the virtual recovery and resources allocated for this. However, once this is done it is very easy to test and bring up a virtual instance if necessary. Backups of the original servers are constantly applied to the virtual instance on the appliance so the virtual client is always up to date. I also get a daily report emailed to me with a screen shot of each virtual client.

You will need the Essentials license to back up the ESXi guests. We’re still running 4.x so I would check with Unitrends regarding 5.1 support.

garthwoods · 2012-11-09T14:10:03.000Z

We also have the 713 and love it. Great solution from a great company.

maria-unitrends · 2012-11-09T16:04:10.000Z

Just confirming as PokerMonkee states - we do support vSphere 5.1 with our 6.4.1-2 release. Thanks all!!

ericharris · 2012-11-13T00:04:23.000Z

Anyone use it for desktop backups?

I have about 20 machines in our casino cages and accounting office that I would like to be able to restore very quickly on a new hard drive or even new hardware with minimal work. Right now it can take 2-5 hours to have one of these backup if a drive dies due to all of the software needing to be installed and configured. Using Windows XP SP3 on a variety of Dell hardware. User files are on network file server but I’d probably do a backup of the desktop every 2 or 4 weeks.

Looking at the 813 or 822 appliance. Pricey but I look at it as buying cheap insurance.

katie-unitrends · 2012-11-13T13:28:11.000Z

We do have a number of customers that use Unitrends to backup their servers and desktops, including some organizations that have a requirement for frequent (every 2 years) hardware updates for all desktops that use our dissimilar BareMetal restore feature for easy migration.

Normally, the costs of hardware, software, agents, and updates needed for other solutions by far outweighs the cost for Unitrends over the lifespan of the appliance, especially when you consider that we offer next day hardware replacement as necessary and all of our software updates are free.