Rapid Recovery 6.4 - Installation and Upgrade 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. Using the Live Recovery feature of Rapid Recovery Agent, 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. 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 VMware vCenter/ESXi, VMware Workstation, Microsoft Hyper-V, Oracle VM VirtualBox, and Microsoft Azure. You can even perform virtual export to 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 6.0 and higher with no software agent installed. Host-based protection supports installing Rapid Recovery Agent on 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 or 18c 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/.

For every software release, Quest reviews and updates the system requirements for Rapid Recovery software and related components. This information is exclusively available in the release-specific Rapid Recovery System Requirements Guide. Use that document as your single authoritative source for system requirements for each release.

You can find system requirements and all other documentation at the technical documentation website at https://support.quest.com/rapid-recovery/technical-documents/.

Install software as a user with administrative privileges. This recommendation applies to all Rapid Recovery software and may not be repeated.

Before you install Rapid Recovery, consider which components are necessary for your implementation, as not all components are required for every user. For more information about these components, see Understanding Rapid Recovery components and related products.

Minimum software requirements

At minimum, plan to install the following for your Rapid Recovery environment:

• Rapid Recovery Core. You must install Core on a dedicated Windows server that is properly sized for your environment. The server can be a physical or virtual machine. For guidance on sizing your hardware, software, memory, storage, and network requirements, see knowledge base article 185962, “Sizing Rapid Recovery Deployments".
• Hypervisor tools. If your environment includes virtual machines (VMs) hosted on VMware vCenter/ESXi or Hyper-V hypervisors, you can protect VM guests agentlessly using the Rapid Snap for Virtual feature. In such cases, Quest strongly recommends installing VMware Tools or Hyper-V Integration Services utilities on VMs you want to protect. If you want application-consistent agentless backups, this step is required. Otherwise, your backups on VMs running SQL Server or Exchange Server will be crash-consistent only. For more information about the difference between these two states, see "Understanding crash-consistent and application-consistent backups" in the Rapid Recovery 6.4 User Guide.
• Rapid Recovery Agent. You must install the Rapid Recovery Agent software on each physical machine you want to protect in your Core. To protect Hyper-V guests agentlessly, install the Rapid Recovery Agent software on the Hyper-V host. To protect nodes in a Hyper-V cluster, install the Agent software on each node. Finally, install Agent on all vSphere/ESXi VMs you want to protect using standard protection instead of Rapid Snap for Virtual agentless protection.
• Microsoft .NET Framework and ASP .NET role or feature. Windows operating systems running Rapid Recovery Core or Agent release 6.4 require the Microsoft .NET Framework version 4.6.2 (or higher). For Core, some operating systems require the corresponding ASP .NET 4.6.2. role or feature . When installing or upgrading Rapid Recovery, the installer checks the system for required .NET components; if needed, the user is prompted to install or activate the .NET 4.6.2 components, which requires a reboot of the machine.

Other components may be required for additional functionality.

General installation approach

The steps you must follow to install Rapid Recovery are as follows:

• Step 1: Obtain a software license for Rapid Recovery Core. Some users start with a trial version of Rapid Recovery Core, which includes an embedded temporary license. To continue using the Core after the initial trial period, or to use non-trial versions of the Core, a software license is required. If using a trial version and you want to purchase a software license, complete the form at https://www.quest.com/register/95291/ to be contacted by a Quest Sales representative.
• Step 2: Ensure you have an account on the Rapid Recovery License Portal. This portal is used to register and manage software licenses and license groups. Existing AppAssure or Rapid Recovery customers can continue to use their existing license portal accounts. New customers must register on the Rapid Recovery License Portal at https://licenseportal.com, activate their software licenses, download the license files from the license portal, and from the Rapid Recovery Core Console, upload license files to the Core. For detailed steps, see the Rapid Recovery 6.4 Release Notes topic "Product licensing." For information about managing licenses from the Rapid Recovery Core, including uploading license files to associate them with the Core, see the topic Managing Rapid Recovery licenses. For information about managing license subscriptions and license groups on the license portal, see the Rapid Recovery License Portal User Guide .
• Step 3: Review and ensure that the system requirements have been met for the servers and machines on which you plan to install Rapid Recovery components. For more information, see the Rapid Recovery 6.4 System Requirements Guide.
• Step 4: Install the Rapid Recovery Core software on each Windows machine you plan to use as a Core. For more information, see Installing the Rapid Recovery Core.
• Step 5: The Rapid Recovery Core stores backup data in a repository. Before you use the Core to protect machines, if not yet defined, you must specify a storage location and configure a primary repository. You can create a DVM repository as a separate process. You can also create a DVM repository as part of the workflow when using the Protect Machine or Protect Multiple Machines wizards. For detailed information, see “Understanding repositories” in the Rapid Recovery 6.4 User Guide.
• Step 6: Install the Rapid Recovery Agent software on the machines on which you want to use Agent-based protection. For more information, see the section Install Rapid Recovery Agent on the following machines.
• Step 7: If using Rapid Snap for Virtual to provide agentless protection, consider license consumption. For more information, see Protected hypervisor hosts and license consumption. Also install the appropriate hypervisor tool on each VM. For more information, see the topic "Understanding Rapid Snap for Virtual" and subtopics "Benefits of installing hypervisor tools for agentless protection" and "Understanding crash-consistent and application-consistent backups" in the Rapid Recovery 6.4 User Guide.
• Step 8: Consider using the QorePortal. If you have a current Quest Data Protection Support maintenance agreement, you are entitled to use the QorePortal. This portal is automatically integrated with Rapid Recovery, and replaced the Rapid Recovery Central Management Console. The QorePortal lets you manage multiple Cores; access the dashboard to monitor tasks and events, view repository status, and check system health; generate reports; download software; and perform a growing list of other functions from a single web-based user interface.

  NOTE: If you choose not to share personally identifiable information with Quest, you must request a non-phone home license, which will disable connection with the QorePortal and disable auto update for Core software. For more information about this portal, see About the QorePortal. For information on managing privacy from the Rapid Recovery Core Console, see the topic "Managing privacy" in the Rapid Recovery 6.4 User Guide.

  NOTE: Due to GDPR compliance changes, if upgrading from versions prior to release 6.2, you will not be notified of new versions using Automatic Update until you manually upgrade to Rapid Recovery Core 6.2 or later and consent to the limited use of personal information by Quest. Thereafter, the Automatic Update feature will again function as designed. For more information, see knowledge base article 226119, "Rapid Recovery Core does not notify of available version updates."

Optionally, you may want to perform other configuration tasks, such as setting encryption keys, configuring event notification, or replicating recovery points from a source Core to a target Core. Each of these configuration tasks is included in the Quick Start Guide feature of Rapid Recovery Core. You can read more information about the Quick Start Guide or performing these tasks independently in the Rapid Recovery 6.4 User Guide. That document also contains information about tasks such as configuring an SMTP server for notification messages, changing the data retention policy, or configuring SQL attachability.

To learn about using scripts or sending commands to manage your Core from the command line, see the latest edition of the Rapid Recovery Commands and Scripting Reference Guide. . If you want to use other Rapid Recovery components such as Mailbox Restore for Exchange or DocRetriever for SharePoint, see the latest edition of the Rapid Recovery Mailbox Restore for Exchange User Guide or Rapid Recovery DocRetriever for SharePoint User Guide, respectively. If you want to set up a Rapid Recovery Core in the Azure cloud to run as a primary backup Core or as a replication target for your on-premises Core, see the Rapid Recovery Azure Setup Guide.