VM Explorer - Part 1

VM Explorer - Part 1

HPE recently bought Trilead and acquired VM Explorer their backup product. You can find all the marketing stuff on the website but I wanted to try it and see how it operates, not having used it before. I'm a strong promoter of Veeam so I was interested in how it stacked up.

The current version of VM Explorer 6.1.005 can be downloaded as a trial version and it's only 36.5MB in size!! It is configured via a web browser post install so is light and lean. After using it I've found it to be good enough, like Hyper-V vs VMware. VMware is far more capable, but Hyper-V is good enough in it's current incarnation for most customers. The extra cost is what you have to consider. Once you go above 3 hosts and no longer fit the SMB model and can use Essentials or educational bundles you are going to pay full whack.

Veeam is a fantastic product and even though it's Enterprise Plus license isn't cheap, you get what you pay for. What's the price of not having good backups or the ability to drill into a VM backup to pull out an an email, sql table or AD object? A lot of wasted time or being forced to deploy a more complicated backup model. Still, when people have larger environments and we are bidding on a contract, price matters. VM explorer is a hell of a lot cheaper, seriously so. For that reason alone it can't be quickly discounted. It does a nice enough job of backing up VMs but has no fancy features. It doesn't currently integrate strongly with HPE products yet but that will change as the product matures and HPE invests in it. I was contacted after downloading the demo to see how I getting on which was a surprise so they are particularly interested in how it's being used and ensuring they receive clear feedback.

So, onto the product. Most of the install screens are the usual type next, next etc so here is the post install screen - you get a new icon, click on it and you get an option to launch the web interface:

 Now you can set a password. Note the damn administrator username is "admin" not administrator!

 You might find you normal password is not accepted, check out the policy below:

 Now, remember to write it down as I forgot and had to reinstall!!

 Click OK

 Set a Language and Click Save

 Login using "admin" and you get welcomed to the start screen:

Next Select your Hypervisor, I'm selecting vCenter

 Enter a Display Name

 Enter the vCenter Hostname and credentials - best use a scoped account in Production though

 Leave the default HTTPS port

 Wait for the test connections to finish

 Click Save

One thing I don't like is the fact that you've to now configure each ESXi host one by one?! What's up with that? If you had 40 hosts wouldn't that be fun?!!

So, let's add the Hosts, glad I've not a big lab!! Right Click and choose Edit Server:

 You've to give it root access:

 Accept the Default Ports:

 So on the next screens I tried using the VM Explorer Agent WITHOUT SSH but it requires it:

 This is with SSH option enabled:

 The VD service sounded interesting....

 I downloaded the zip file, browsed to it and initialised the service:

 Almost there:

 Next:

 Here we go:

 Now, let's use this VD service:

 Oh Dear, like the scheduler, this won't run in free mode:

 The test connection also fails as a result:

 Backtrack and remove the use VD service option and we get further:

 It asks about target Datastores which is odd, I guess this is more for replication:

 Done!

 Now we have the scheduler page, this is disabled without a full license:

 And we can set a default backup location here, but make sure you click the "save" button, if you can find it....!!

So, I've requested a trial license key and once I get hold of that I can hopefully do a little more. The option to install software onto each ESXi host instead of using their API is a little worrisome to me. The API works for everyone else. Also SSH isn't something I'd leave on, I'd recommend a firewall rule around it to ensure the VM Explorer server can use SSH but the rest of your Production network can't? 

There is a feedback form for requesting new features:

https://trilead.uservoice.com/forums/206865-vm-explorer-features

One thing that was asked for was if new VMs are created, they are added automatically to a backup job, seriously, it doesn't do that right now?! Not that mature. Now I know the price is far cheaper but seriously?!!!