vRanger 7.8 - Integration Guide for DR Series Disk Backup Appliance

What is vRanger?

vRanger is the leading VMware® data protection solution that also backs up and recovers Windows® physical servers and files with blazing speed and minimal storage requirements. With vRanger, you get comprehensive protection for both virtual and physical environments that you can manage from one intuitive interface.

vRanger has historically supported the Quest DR Series systems as repositories, but required that the Quest DR Series system was configured as an NFS share. vRanger extends this functionality to support the more advanced functionality offered by the DR Series, and allow direct configuration of Quest RDA repositories.

vRanger licensing

For virtual machine (VM) backup, a license for vRanger controls the number of source CPUs that you can configure for backup. For licensing purposes, a multi-core processor is counted as a single CPU. For physical backup, each server protected consumes one physical backup license.

Every VMware® ESXi™ host for which vRanger is expected to provide protection must be properly licensed, both by VMware and in the vRanger Host Licensing tab.

 

IMPORTANT: A Quest vRanger license is required for integration with the Quest DR Series. vRanger Standard Edition (SE) and vReplicator are not supported by Quest DR Series. This topic uses “vRanger” for simplicity, but only vRanger Backup & Replication is supported for use with Quest DR Series.

Quest DR Series overview

The DR Series system is a high-performance, disk-based backup and recovery appliance that is simple to deploy and manage, and offers unsurpassed Total Cost of Ownership benefits. Features such as innovative firmware and an all-inclusive licensing model ensure optimal functionality and the assurance of no hidden costs for desired future features.

Using Quest deduplication and compression algorithm technology, this system can achieve data reduction levels averaging 15:1. This reduction in data results in less incremental storage needs and a smaller backup footprint. By removing redundant data, the system provides deduplication and compression that delivers:

•	Fast, reliable backup and restore functionality.

•	Reduces media usage and power and cooling requirements.

•	Improves overall data protection and retention costs.

•	Reduces overall network traffic — as only unique data is transmitted.

•	Allows for increased scalability through the addition of more RDA capable devices.

The benefits of data deduplication can be extended across the enterprise — through the deduplicated replication function — to provide a complete backup solution for multi-site environments.

Shorter Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and more attainable Recovery Point Objectives (RPO) can be assured as critical backup data remains on disk and online longer. Capital and administrative costs are diminished at the same time as internal service-level agreements (SLAs) are more easily met.

The DR Series includes the following:

•	Advanced data protection and disaster recovery.

•	Simple management interface — using the system GUI.

•	Wide variety of data backup installations and environments.

The Quest DR Series contains data backup and management software preinstalled on a Quest hardware appliance, which provides you with a robust disk-based data backup capability installed on a deduplication-enabled appliance.

The system supports two interface types, and the system software manages the storage containers using the following interfaces:

•	A command line interface (CLI)

•	A graphical user interface (GUI)

 

Understanding the Quest DR Series

 

IMPORTANT: The information presented in this topic is a summary of the full documentation. For more information, see the vRanger and Quest DR Series documentation.

Available DR Series configurations

The Quest DR Series system is a solution designed to reduce your backup data footprint using several comprehensive backup and deduplication operations that optimize storage savings.

The DR Series system consists of the following components:

•	Software: The system software supports record linkage and context-based lossless data compression methods.

•	Hardware/VM: Following are the hardware and virtual appliance (VA) types that support the DR Series:

▪	DR2000v system: A VM template in various capacities for VMware® ESXi™ and Hyper-V® that can be deployed on our existing VM infrastructure.

▪	DR Series appliance: A rack-based appliance available in various configurations.

▪	Expansion shelf: The hardware system appliance supports the addition of external Quest PowerVault MD1200 data storage expansion shelf enclosures.