Rapid Recovery 6.3 - 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.

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 6.3 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 6.3 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.

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.

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.

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 6.3 System Requirements Guide.

When you add a Hyper-V or vSphere ESXi hypervisor host to protection on your Core, we refer to this as "protecting the host." This protection is differentiated from typical protection because the data and OS on a protected hypervisor host server itself are not backed up by the Rapid Recovery Core. Instead, you enable the Rapid Snap for Virtual feature of Rapid Recovery for the host. You can then agentlessly protect any of the guests VMs on the protected host.

The host is depicted in the protected machines menu with a specific icon, as shown in the following table. Protected VMs on any hypervisor host are listed as children of the host in the machines menu. Unless it is linked with its parent hypervisor host, an agentlessly protected machine uses a different icon than machines protected using Rapid Recovery Agent.

Table 1: Icons for hypervisor hosts and agentless machines

Icon	Description
	Protected ESXi host
	Protected ESXi VM
	Protected Hyper-V host
	Protected Hyper-V VM
	Standard protected machine or linked agentlessly protected machine

Protected hypervisor hosts are added to the Rapid Recovery License Portal, and licenses are deducted from your pool accordingly.

License consumption is calculated to be advantageous for users of agentless protection. For example, when using Agent-based protection, any machine (physical or virtual) protected in your Core with Rapid Recovery Agent consumes one license from your Enterprise pool. This is true even for application servers (such as Exchange Server, SQL Server, or Oracle Database 12c) with multiple CPU sockets.

Hyper-V or vCenter/ESXi hypervisor hosts protected in the Rapid Recovery Core consume one license from the pool for each processor socket. If your hypervisor host has six CPU sockets, 6 licenses are consumed from the Enterprise pool. Additional licenses are not consumed when more VMs on the protected host are protected agentlessly.

However, you are not penalized if not protecting many VMs. In the same example, if you protect a hypervisor host with six CPU sockets and protect only two virtual machines on that host, only two licenses (one license per VM) are consumed.

If you previously protected specific machines on a hypervisor host using Rapid Recovery Agent, and you subsequently protect the host, you can avoid the double consumption of licenses by ensuring each guest VM is associated in the Rapid Recovery Core with its protected parent hypervisor host.

When establishing protection rules in the Protect Multiple Machines Wizard, you can choose Protect machine agentlessly if it is already protected with Rapid Recovery Agent. This option typically establishes the link between the VM and its host, causing one fewer license to be deducted from your pool for each protected VM (with Agent installed) on the same protected host.

At any time, in General settings (at the protected machine level), you can explicitly associate a VM with its protected hypervisor host. The process of linking the guest VM with its parent hypervisor host is described in the topic "Viewing and modifying protected machine settings" in the Rapid Recovery 6.3 User Guide.