Vinchin provides BSRU with data protection for hundreds of VMware VMs

With Vinchin Backup & Recovery installed in our VMware VM, we ensure that critical data and applications for teaching by all teachers and students are always available, while reducing workload and saving costs. Due to its high performance and ease of use, one year after purchasing the Vinchin Standard version with 8 sockets license, we chose to extend the license to another 8 ESXi hosts, so we upgraded to Vinchin Enterprise version with more advanced features.

Ivan Hearn, Network Administrator

BSRU

Business Challenge

Bansomdejchaopraya Rajabhat University (BSRU) was established in 1896 as a non-profit public higher education institution located in the metropolis of Bangkok (population over 5 million).  And it is officially accredited and recognized by the Ministry of Higher Education, Science, Research and Innovation of Thailand. BSRU offers courses and programs leading to officially recognized higher education degrees in several areas of study.

In 2018, 50% of their IT environment was virtualized on VMware vSphere. These roughly 40 VMware VMs host a part of systems including document management systems, file servers. “If there is no reliable data protection strategy, any type of incident could lead to data loss that can significantly affect our students, faculty, and staff. Meanwhile the supervisors required that our IT services must be available 24/7. So our goal was to find a VM backup solution with high performance and ease of use available on the market that we could ultimately afford within a limited budget. At that moment we chose Vinchin standard version.” Says Ivan.

“Within one year after purchase, we has continued to expand and the amount of data we manage is growing faster and faster. Almost 85% of our IT environment has been virtualized on VMware vSphere, the domain controllers, print servers and other dedicated servers and applications also have been moved into VMs. The former Vinchin standard version was no longer enough to protect all our VMware VMs.” Says Ivan.

Vinchin Solution

After having an effective communication with BSRU in time, we recommend them directly upgrade to Vinchin Enterprise version which is very suitable for their current environmental scale. “We have a good experience while using Vinchin standard version, no error occurs, the service was also excellent. So we were happy to upgrade to Vinchin Enterprise version. Of course the result did not disappoint us. By directly replacing the standard license with enterprise one, now we can deploy multiple backup nodes to distribute and backup all of our VM clusters to different storage at a time, and these backup nodes can be centrally managed by one Vinchin web console, which has greatly improved our backup performance and reduced our IT staff’s management time.” Says Ivan.

“After deploying Vinchin Backup & Recovery, we don’t feel unprepared if any disaster occurs to our software or hardware, as we have disaster recovery procedures in place. Vinchin Backup & Recovery allows us to copy VM backups to our second DR Vmware pool at any time. Once our onsite production environment fails, the copied backups in offsite storage can be directly recovered in our DR VMware pool, it’s a great DR solution to minimize the break-off time of our critical business. Vinchin Backup & Recovery has helped us a lot!” Says Ivan.

Result

Since BSRU no longer needs to rely on agents with Vinchin Backup & Recovery, their VM backup performance has been improved and the time required to manage their backup solution has also been reduced. “Overall, with the help of Instant Recovery, Multi-user Management, Backup Copy, Backup Nodes of Vinchin Enterprise edition, managing hundreds of VMware VMs is just an easy thing for our IT team!” Says Ivan.