Rapid Recovery 6.8 - Installation and Upgrade Guide

Consider whether to protect machines in your Core using Rapid Recovery Agent, agentlessly using Rapid Snap for Virtual, or using dual protection. See the subsection Choosing Rapid Recovery Agent, agentless, or dual protection.

Determine which machines to protect in your Core using each method. See the subsection Install Rapid Recovery Agent on the following machines.

Review the methods to obtain the Rapid Recovery Agent software and determine which method you will use. Then obtain the software, and install on the machines you want to protect on the Rapid Recovery Core. See Obtaining Rapid Recovery software.

NOTE: Quest recommends retaining the binary installer file for any currently installed Rapid Recovery software product. You can use this file in the future to reinstall, repair, or remove the software.

Finally, add the machines to protection on your Core using the appropriate Protect Machine wizard. For more information, see "Protecting machines" in the Rapid Recovery User Guide.

Choosing Rapid Recovery Agent, agentless, or dual protection

Agentless protection offers several advantages to Agent-based protection, and some restrictions. These are described in the Rapid Recovery User Guide topic "Understanding Rapid Snap for Virtual." If interested in reducing the amount of licenses consumed, see the topic "Choosing Agent-based or agentless VM protection" in the same document. For instructions on protecting VMs agentlessly, see "About protecting multiple machines" and its subtopics, also in the User Guide.

Rapid Recovery Agent offers several unique features not available for machines strictly protected using Rapid Snap for Virtual. These features include:

• Using Live Recovery on Windows-based machines
• Performing a SQL attachability check from a protected SQL Server machine
• Protecting dynamic volumes (for example, spanned, striped, mirrored, or RAID volumes) at the volume level (agentless is restricted to the disk level)
• File-level restore of dynamic volumes (agentless requires BMR which restores all data)
• Gathering metadata on a protected Oracle 12c server
• Displaying the actual amount of space used on a VM with a thick provision eager zeroed disk type
• Truncating Exchange Server and SQL Server logs separately on a server with both installed
• Capturing application-consistent backups of protected SQL Server, Exchange Server, and Oracle servers (also available for agentless protection of SQL Server and Exchange only if you specifically enable application support)
• Restoring Hyper-V VMs on CIFS using VHD format l
• Restoring files in a Hyper-V guest VHD (.vhd) format l or a Hyper-Vguest VHD Set (.vhds) format

If you need any of these features, use Rapid Recovery Agent to protect your physical or virtual machines.

NOTE: As of release 6.2, unless using capacity-based licensing, a Rapid Recovery software license is consumed from your Enterprise license pool for each installation of Rapid Recovery Agent installed and protected on your Core.

You can use dual protection of Hyper-V or vSphere ESXi guest VMs—protecting the VM using Rapid Snap for Virtual and also installing Rapid Recovery Agent. This lets you take advantage of Agent-specific features.

NOTE: If protecting virtual machines on ESXi and Hyper-V hosts, and the hypervisor hosts are added to your Core, Quest recommends associating the VM with its parent host in machine settings. This ensures an additional license is not consumed from your Enterprise license pool.

For more information about linking the protected VM with its hypervisor host, see the User Guide topic "Viewing and modifying protected machine settings" (specifically the Hypervisor setting in step 3). Also see Protected hypervisor hosts and license consumption in this document for information about the differences between protecting a hypervisor host and a VM, and relevant license consumption concepts.

For Agent-based protection, install the Rapid Recovery Agent software on machines that you want to protect with Rapid Recovery Core using the criteria specified below.

For information about obtaining Rapid Recovery software, see Obtaining Rapid Recovery software.

Install Rapid Recovery Agent on the following machines

Install the Rapid Recovery Agent software on machines that you want to protect in your Rapid Recovery Core for:

• Every physical machine that you want to protect using the Agent software.
• Every supported virtual machine that you want to protect using the Agent software. 
• Every VM (node) hosted on a Hyper-V cluster that you want to protect using the Agent software.
• Every Hyper-V host you want to protect in your Core, and on every Hyper-V host for which you want to use Rapid Snap for Virtual agentless protection.

If you want to use Rapid Snap for Virtual agentless protection for Hyper-V and ESXi guest VMs, run the Protect Multiple Machines wizard. For Hyper-V server, the Protection Options page lets you deploy the Rapid Recovery Agent software to the Hyper-V host.

NOTE: There is no need to install Rapid Recovery Agent on the vSphere ESXi host. Rapid Recovery Core uses VMware APIs to connect to ESXi VMs directly.

For more information about protecting a hypervisor host, see Protected hypervisor hosts and license consumption. For information about supported hypervisors and versions, see "Hypervisor requirements" in the Rapid Recovery System Requirements Guide.