Unitrends Free - Review: Part 2

In Part 1 of this review, I walked through the deployment and initial configuration of the Unitrends Free backup appliance.

I'm now going to touch briefly on some of the other features of the product before summarising my thoughts.

Recovery

There's no point taking backups if they don't work, right? Well there are a few options available here. The first of them is a file level recovery. This mounts a VM's backed up disks as file shares on the backup appliance. To test it, I created a couple of test VMs to backup and selected to restore from one.

A file level recovery “job” is started and a share is created using the backup job number.

It's pretty easy to browse to the share and the required files could be recovered from there.

Another restore option is an Instant Recovery. This creates a new virtual machine from the stored backups for a VM. Again, I tried it out on my test VM. The first step is to select the backup that you want to restore from.

Next up are the recovery options. I've selected “Audit Mode”. This creates a virtual machine that runs from a disk image located on the backup appliance. The intention is that it allows you to test if a recovery is possible without putting the VM back in to your virtual datacenter. The VM in Audit Mode will have no network connectivity.

It took a few minutes to create and boot up but it worked. Note that the VM has no network connectivity.

And here is the VM that got created in vCenter during the restore:

Some minor issues

There were a couple of little annoyances that cropped up during my testing. They may already have been fixed and none of them are major. Firstly, when trying to configure SMTP settings, each time the configuration dialog is opened, a new email recipient row is added – even if that's not what I opened it for. And you can't close the window until you remove the row (or add an email address).

Quite a few of my VM backups failed several times to begin with so I checked to see if there were any software updates via the update feature. Lucky me, there were.

But after closing the dialog and reopening it, they were gone. I had to reboot the appliance to get them to show up again. After applying the updates my backups were more reliable (although one of my Active Directory servers still refused to backup).

Do you recall the NTP settings that I made when first configuring the appliance? If not, here's a reminder:

I used my own, local NTP server. It's open and reachable from the network that I installed the Unitrends appliance to. But, when I viewed the appliance options… not there.

I noticed this due to the discrepancy between the times that I thought I had configured backup jobs to run and the time that they were running. Fortunately, changing the options via this dialog worked.

The initial installation and configuration only allows you to specify a primary DNS server. Personally, I'd prefer it if I could specify a secondary DNS server at installation time. You can add one later though.

Finally, it'd be nice if the backup jobs could clean up after themselves. When there is a backup failure, vCenter gets littered with lots of messages like this:

It's easy to fix manually of course, by annoying. I might see if I can schedule a vRO workflow to take care of it.

My Thoughts

It's not perfect (what software ever is). Aside from the issues I had above, the only other thing that bothers me a little is the installer. It's delivered as a single .EXE file that is 2.2Gb in size. The process, once the file is open, is fine but it can take a while to open a file that big. Possibly, given who is likely to use Unitrends Free, it might be the simplest option. It's just not the quickest.

As far as features go, the important ones are there. VMs can be backed up and restored. Individual files on a VM can be easily recovered as well. If you have a small Virtual Infrastructure, the sizing limitations aren't likely to be an issue. And if you get bigger, it's not unreasonable to pay for more features and capabilities.

On the whole, kicking the tyres on Unitrends Free has been a pleasurable experience. It was fairly easy to setup and use without having to read the manual.