Rapid Recovery 6.3 - User Guide

Rapid Recovery is a backup, replication, and recovery solution that offers near-zero recovery time objectives and recovery point objectives. Rapid Recovery offers data protection, disaster recovery, data migration and data management. You have the flexibility of performing bare-metal restore (to similar or dissimilar hardware), and you can restore backups to physical or virtual machines (VMs), regardless of origin. Rapid Recovery lets you create backup archives to a wide range of supported systems including archiving to the cloud. With Rapid Recovery, you can replicate to one or more targets for added redundancy and security.

Rapid Recovery offers:

Flexibility. You can perform universal recovery to multiple platforms, including restoring from physical to virtual, virtual to physical, virtual to virtual, and physical to physical.
Cloud integration. You can export a VM, archive and replicate to the cloud, and perform bare metal restore from archives in the cloud. Compatible cloud services include Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), any OpenStack-based provider (including Rackspace), and Google Cloud. US government-specific platforms include AWS GovCloud (US) and Azure Government.
Intelligent deduplication. You can reduce storage requirements by storing data once, and referencing it thereafter (once per repository or encryption domain).
Live Recovery. With our Live Recovery feature, you have instant access to critical data first, while remaining restore operations complete in parallel. You can use Live Recovery to restore data from a recovery point of any non-system volume of a Windows machine, physical or virtual. The machine must be protected by Rapid Recovery Agent. Live Recovery is not supported for agentlessly protected machines, Linux machines, or cluster-shared volumes.
File-level recovery. You can recover data at the file level on-premises, from a remote location, or from the cloud.
File-level search. Using criteria you specify, you can search a range of recovery points for one or more files. From the search results, you can then select and restore the files you want to the local Core machine directly from the Rapid Recovery Core Console.
Virtual machine export. Rapid Recovery supports one-time virtual export, letting you generate a VM from a recovery point; and virtual standby, in which the VM you generate is continually updated after each backup. Compatible VM hypervisors include vCenter/ESXi, VMware Workstation, Hyper-V, VirtualBox, and Azure. You can even perform virtual export to Microsoft Hyper-V cluster-shared volumes.
Rapid Snap for Virtual support. Enhanced support for virtualization includes agentless protection for vCenter/ESXi VMs and for Hyper-V VMs. Rapid Snap for Virtual includes protection and autodiscovery for VMware ESXi 5.5 and higher with no software agent installed. Host-based protection supports installing Rapid Recovery Agenton a Microsoft Hyper-V host only, letting you agentlessly protect all its guest VMs.
Application support. Rapid Recovery is built with application support. When you protect SQL Server or Microsoft Exchange machines (whether using Rapid Recovery Agent or agentless protection), the backup snapshots captured are automatically application-aware; open transactions and rolling transaction logs are completed and caches are flushed to disk before creating snapshots. Specific application features are supported, including SQL attachability checks (for SQL Server) and database checksum and mountability checks (for Exchange Server). If you protect Oracle 12c servers with Rapid Recovery Agent, you can also perform DBVERIFY database integrity checks.

See the following resources for more information about Rapid Recovery.

The Rapid Recovery product support website at https://support.quest.com/rapid-recovery/.
The documentation website at https://support.quest.com/rapid-recovery/technical-documents/.

The Core Console

Core Console

The Rapid Recovery Core Console is a web-based user interface (UI) that lets you fully manage your Rapid Recovery Core, including its protected machines and clusters, replicated machines, and so on.

This section describes the different elements of the Rapid Recovery Core Console UI.

NOTE: For more detailed information about the Core Console, see Core Console references.

Topics include:

Accessing the Rapid Recovery Core Console

Understanding the Quick Start Guide

Navigating the Rapid Recovery Core Console

Viewing the Protected Machines menu

Viewing replicated machines from the navigation menu

Viewing the Recovery Points Only menu

Viewing the Custom Groups menu

Using the Error dialog box

Accessing the Rapid Recovery Core Console

The Core Console > Accessing the Rapid Recovery Core Console

To access the Rapid Recovery Core Console, perform one of the following actions:

Log in locally to your Rapid Recovery Core server, and then double click the Core Console icon on your desktop.
Or, type the following URL in your web browser...
- https://<yourCoreServerName>:<port/>/apprecovery/admin/ or
- https://<yourCoreServerIPaddress>:<port/>/apprecovery/admin/
  ... where you replace the server name or IP address with yours, and insert the appropriate port number for the Rapid Recovery service.
  
  For example, if your company domain name is companyabc.com, and you use the default port of 8006, the appropriate URL to access your Core is https://companyabc.com:8006/apprecovery/admin.
NOTE: Since the Rapid Recovery Core Console UI depends on JavaScript, the web browser you use to access the Core Console must have JavaScript enabled.

Understanding the Quick Start Guide

The Core Console > Understanding the Quick Start Guide

The Quick Start Guide is a feature that provides you with a guided flow of suggested tasks for configuring and using Rapid Recovery Core. As you navigate through the guide, animated pages identify where in the Rapid Recovery Core Console you can perform important tasks. You are not required to perform the steps suggested by the guide. You can simply view the suggested tasks, navigating through them using the Skip Step and Back options.

The Quick Start Guide appears automatically the first time you upgrade or install the Rapid Recovery Core software and navigate to the Core Console. When it first appears, the Quick Start Guide begins with the Welcome page. From the Welcome page, click Start Guide to run through the guide to get an understanding of key tasks you can perform. Once started, navigate through the guide to see the various suggested configuration tasks. When you have seen the last suggested task, click Finish to close the guide.

Optionally, if you don't want to view this feature now, you can click Close from the Welcome page to exit the guide. You can also click Exit Guide from any page in the guide to close this feature.

The Quick Start Guide, with the Welcome page showing, reappears each time you return to the Home page until you do any one of the following:

Navigate through at least one page of the guide.
Select Don't show again on the Welcome page.

Thereafter, the Welcome page no longer appears. However, you can launch the Quick Start Guide again at any time by selecting [Quick Start Guide]

Quick Start Guide from the Help menu in the Core Console.

If you choose to perform any configuration tasks suggested by the Quick Start Guide, follow the prompts indicated in any step of the guide, and the appropriate wizard or relevant area in the user interface appears. Procedures to complete each task suggested by the guide are described in this document, as indicated in the table below.

NOTE: Not all configuration tasks suggested by the Quick Start Guide are required for all users. You must understand which tasks you want to accomplish for your specific needs.

The Quick Start Guide addresses the following configuration tasks:

Table 1: Quick Start Guide configuration tasks
Function	Short Description	Result of Selecting Task, Link to Procedure
Protection or Deployment	Protecting a single machine, protecting a server cluster, or protecting multiple machines simultaneously. You can also deploy Rapid Recovery Agent to one or more machines on your network.	Click Protect or select Protect Machine from the button bar drop-down menu to open the Protect Machine Wizard. For information about completing the Protect Machine Wizard, see Protecting a machine. Select Protect Cluster from the button bar drop-down menu to open the Protect Cluster Wizard. For more information about protecting a cluster, see Protecting a cluster. Select Protect Multiple Machines from the button bar drop-down menu to open the Protect Multiple Machines Wizard. For information about completing the Protect Multiple Machines Wizard, see About protecting multiple machines. Select Deploy Agent Software from the button bar drop-down menu to deploy the latest available version of Rapid Recovery Agent to machines on your network, active directory domain, hypervisor host or cluster. Unless the machine is already protected in your Core, deployment only makes the software available to that machine; you must still explicitly add it to protection on your Core.
Replication	Setting up replication from a primary (source) Core to a secondary (target) Core	Click Replication from the icon bar to open the Replication page. Prompts you to add a target Core using the Replication Wizard. For information about using the Replication Wizard to set up replication on a self-managed Core, see Replicating to a self-managed target Core. For general information about replication, see Configuring replication.
Virtual Export	Performing a one-time export or establishing continual export from a protected machine to a virtual machine	Click VM Export from the Restore button bar drop-down menu to perform an export of data from your protected machine to a virtual machine. You can either perform a one-time export, or set up virtual standby for continual export to a VM. For information about virtual exports, see Exporting to virtual machines using Rapid Recovery.
Manage and Configure	Allows you to set up additional configuration for the Rapid Recovery Core	Click More from the icon bar to display a drop-down menu of additional functions you can manage or configure. Functions include seeing system information or virtual environment data; managing archives; mounts; boot CDs; repositories; encryption keys; cloud accounts; file search; retention policies; the credentials vault; notifications; mail restore settings; available downloads; reports; and log files.
Configure Encryption	Adding or importing encryption keys that you can use for one or more protected machines	Select Encryption keys from the (More) drop-down menu to manage security for protected data by adding or importing encryption keys. You can apply encryption keys to one or more protected machines. Encryption is described in the topic Encryption.
Configure Notifications	Setting up notifications for events, warnings and alerts	Select Notifications from the (More) drop-down menu to specify notification groups for events, warnings, and alerts. To send these by email, you must also establish SMTP server settings. For more information about managing events, see the topic Events, including the topics Configuring notification groups and Configuring an email server.
Manage Retention	Viewing or changing the default retention policy for the Core	Select Retention Policy from the (More) drop-down menu to open the Retention Policy page for the Core. From here you can define how long to keep a recovery point before rolling it up. For conceptual information about retention policies, see the topic Managing aging data. For procedural information, see Managing retention policies.
Restore	Restoring data from a recovery point on the Core	Click Restore from the button bar to open the Restore Machine Wizard. For information about restoring data, see the topic About restoring volumes from a recovery point.